How do user actions convey a strong meaning for your product?

In my last article, I spoke about various triggers that products use to bring you back on their platform and do their core action. Now, what does action exactly mean for us? And, what exactly are the core action(s) for them and their product?

Let’s talk about this in detail in this article on how the action(s) that we as a user of these products perform weighs a strong meaning for these product-based companies.

Triggers (Internal and External) are an essential part when it comes to performing actions because triggers are the thing that signals you to come back to the product and perform some action. But as we all know that humans are the laziest creatures on this planet. Things need to be easy and not too complicated for us humans to do it. Actions should always be easier to perform rather than thinking about them because if more physical or mental effort is required to perform the action then the chances become slim of that action being performed by the people. First, we’ll discuss something about how action and inaction can either deter or push you to perform the desired action(s) for these product(s).

Action v/s Inaction

A vital pre-requisite for habit formation is ACTION. If action is so important, then how can the product designers design the products in such a way that it influences the users to act?

There are many theories around this part but the most effective and rational that I personally find is the theory stated by Dr. B. J. Fogg (Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University). Dr. Fogg states that there are three elements that are necessary to initiate any sort of behaviour:

1. User must have sufficient motivation to perform the action (M = Motivation)
2. User must have the ability or must be able to complete the desired action(s)
   (A = Ability)
3. A trigger must be present to activate or initiate that behaviour (T = Trigger)

This theory is known by the name of Fogg Behaviour Model and is represented by the formula.

Formula says that a given behaviour will occur when motivation, ability and a trigger are present at the same time and in sufficient degrees. If any one of these three components lacks the adequate degree then the user will not perform the desired action(s) and eventually, the desired behaviour will never occur.

Pertaining to the above Fogg’s theory about behaviour, let’s walk through a real-life example. Suppose your phone is ringing continuously and you are not able to find it because it is somewhere deep inside your backpack and therefore you were not able to reach it. In this case, your inability to find your phone and answer the call hindered your ability to perform the desired action. In this case, your ability was limited.

Let’s assume another case, your phone was ringing continuously and you pulled your phone out from your pocket and found that some telemarketing personnel is calling you and you didn’t want to speak to them. In this case, your lack of motivation prompted you to ignore the call.

Last, your phone was ringing continuously and the call was important and well within your reach but your phone was on silent mode at that particular time of the day then despite having motivation and ability both, you were unable to answer the call because a sufficient degree of the trigger was not present. In this case, lack of trigger hindered your ability to perform the desired action. Going ahead, let’s dive deeper into Fogg’s Behaviour Model and try to unearth the two components other than Triggers i.e., Motivation and Ability.

Motivation

Dr. Edward Deci (Professor of Psychology at the University of Rochester) defines motivation as follows

Motivation is the energy required to perform the desired action

Dr. Edward Deci

Although, motivation and its nature is a very vast topic in the domain of psychology. But Dr. Fogg states that there are three core motivators that drive our desire to act. He stated that all the humans are motivated:

1. To seek pleasure and avoid pain
2. To seek hope and avoid fear
3. Finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection

All this theory will make you sleepy :p
So let’s jump right in and see some examples related to the same.

A classic example of motivation comes from the Ad Campaign that Burger King had run in the past. The Ad Campaign was related to an old saying “Sex sells”. Pictures of females portraying lust, pictured in lingerie, images of buff, images of slightly clad bodies of females were used to spurt everyone’s attention to brands like Victoria’s Secret to domain name giant GoDaddy and fast food giants like Burger King too had entered this race.

Burger King Ad Campaign

Naturally, if you see this strategy will only appeal to a particular sex or those who see sex as a significant motivator, maybe in this case teenage boys. What motivates some might not motivate all and that’s why you need to do a thorough market and user research to accurately find out who is your target audience.

On the contrary, negative emotions such as fear can also prove to be powerful motivators. The image below shows how obesity can lead you to a dreadful disease like cancer.

Having a look at the above examples, we should first understand how, why and when users will need our product and then set the triggers accordingly. However, sometimes even if you have the right trigger enabled and the motivation is running high, product designers often find that users don’t behave in the way that they want them to. Then the question arises, what is the thing that is missing in this equation? Usability of the product or the ability of the user to perform the action easily using the product.

Ability

When we attempt to deconstruct the process of innovation into its most fundamental steps then first we need to see that Do people really need the product or service that I am going to develop? If yes, then in the next step lay out the steps that the user will undergo to get the job done. Finally, when the series of tasks from idea to outcome is understood, then simply start removing the steps until you reach the simplest possible process. Consequently, any technology or product that makes its users’ lives easier by significantly reducing the number of steps required to reach the goal will enjoy a high adoption rate.

The only motive behind stating all this was to throw light on how simplicity is directly proportional to the ability of the users to adopt and use your product. Here again, Dr. Fogg has described six elements of simplicity or the factors that influence a task’s difficulty are as follows:

• Time: How long it takes to complete an action.
• Money: What is the overall cost of taking an action.
• Physical Effort: What is the amount of labour involved in taking the action.
• Brain Cycles: What will be the level of mental effort and focus required to take an action.
• Social Deviance: How well accepted is the behaviour by others.
• Non-routine (According to Dr. Fogg): How much the action matches or disrupts the current routine.

To increase the likelihood that a behaviour will occur, Dr. Fogg instructs designers to focus on simplicity being the function of the scarcest resource that a user has at that moment. Let’s see how some companies made use of these principles to boost their adoption rates by making users able to use their products.

Logging In with Facebook, Google, Apple…

Traditionally, if you wanted to create a new account or register yourself on some website or an app you had to go through a series of steps. You had to enter your email address, create a password and submit other information such as name, phone number, etc. This burden introduces a good amount of friction that restricts users from getting onboarded. Mobile devices also come with their own set of challenges like smaller screens, slower typing speeds, etc.

However, today this is not the case, times have changed and so have the companies who build these products. Today, you might hardly see any website or an app that will ask you your email address, password, mobile number, name and other things to get you registered. Nowadays, you’ll see pages like the ones shown below

Login with Google, Apple, Facebook and much more speed up the registration process, provided the user has his/her account in any of these services. While these types of login/account creation mechanisms save users’ time but for some people, this doesn’t seem to be true. For example, recently there have been numerous speculations around how these companies are utilising our personal data and thus such options are also creating new levels of anxiety in users about whether they should opt-in for these login mechanisms or not. Again, these things become a new set of roadblocks for the users. There is not a single solution that is of the kind of “One Size Fits All”, so the need of the hour for designers is to understand the list of challenges faced by the users.

Searching with Google

For your information, Google was not the first company to enter the market in the domain of search engines. Google had to compete with humungous companies like Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista, etc. Amongst such giants, how did google establish a monopoly in this market and become a multibillion-dollar industry?

PAGE RANK ALGORITHM!
Google’s Page Rank Algorithm proved to be a much more effective way of indexing the web. By ranking pages on how frequently other sites linked to them, Google improved search relevancy. When compared with directory-based search tools like Yahoo!, Google proved to be a massive time saver. Google incorporated simplicity at its epicentre and developed its products around it. That is the reason why Google had a clean and simple UI for its homepage and search results page which was far less cluttered and more readable as compared to its competitors.

Google reduced the time and effort required by the user to find what he/she was looking for. Google still relentlessly works on ways to improve its search engine by finding new ways to enhance the experience and readability of the page. Google’s efforts are to make searching easier so that the users keep coming back and the monopoly of the search engine remains with them.

Now, that the users have passed through the first two stages of the Hooked Model it’s time to reward them handsomely. But what exactly do users want from the product? What will ignite a habit-forming capability in them? Will discuss all these things in the next article on REWARDS.

Thank you for taking out time and reading the article!

Links to previous articles