Human behavior is a complex topic, and Fogg’s model is a great way to understand it. It’s simple yet powerful. It can help you design for behavior change and debug when users don’t
I was the first PM on Waze Carpool. It was all about behavior change, as 80% of people commute alone. I read a ton of research on behavior change, persuasion, etc.
The more I researched the topic, the more I wanted to learn directly from BJ Fogg. I attended his workshop and had a blast. Let me share the one model that I keep coming back to:
Motivation - person’s level of desire to do a behavior.
Ability - person’s level of Ability (or lack of) to do a behavior.
Prompt - No behavior happens without a prompt. It can be external or internal. An email with a call to action or your stomach telling you it’s time to eat.
Motivation and Ability work together and have compensatory relationships. The more challenging something to do (=lower Ability), the more Motivation you need to do it and vice versa. Tax filing is painful (no thanks, intuit), but 95% of US households jump through the hoops because we are highly motivated to avoid IRS penalties.
Motivation is flaky. Many make New Year’s resolutions; however, 80% drop them by the second week of February. From my experience - most product experiments that target ways to increase motivation, make modest gains, or fail.
Instead, utilize times when motivation is high to ask users to do hard things that will prompt and make future actions easy. For example, if a user just fully watched a video and liked it, ask them to enable notifications (=Prompt) for that creator to learn about new videos. If you are motivated at night to exercise tomorrow morning, set the alarm clock (=Prompt) & and get your gym clothes ready by your bed (=Ability).
Start small, ask users for little. Reduce friction wherever possible. Save them time and money.
Removing required sign-up before checkout increased sales by $300M /year for this e-commerce website- “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.”
Think how Robinhood made it free to trade stocks on mobile, then reduced friction even further by letting them buy fractional shares.
Don't forget messaging. We tested messaging that emphasized the ‘easiness of the process (i.e., set carpool easily in 2 clicks) vs. messaging to increase motivation, and the ‘easier’ messaging won every time.
Try the model yourself to understand any behavior. Sign up for BJ’s free tiny habits course to learn firsthand about behavior design. Use the model, and let me know how it goes!