As a Product Designer you have to have a basic understanding on how the human mind works. You need to know how people think, their motivations, how memory works, how to grab the user attention (cognitive psychology) in order to influence, and sometimes even change their behavior (behavioral psychology).
How to turn a bad situation into a good one
Recently, I missed a payment on my credit card. It’s not that I couldn’t pay it off, it’s just… I am a procrastinator, so missing payments is nothing strange to me.
Normally, in these kinds of situations, we get an email reminder to pay off the credit card, or we just get charged with a late payment fee. My bank didn’t do any of those.
When I opened my email box, I found an email from my bank with the title: “Get a $30 statement credit in minutes”. The sense of urgency wasn’t missing: “Hurry, time is running out”. They provoke my curiosity — why the bank suddenly wants to give me $30?
The next click I did took me to a page that explains how easy would be for me to make 30 bucks — all I had to do to get the credit statement was to spend a few minutes taking a money management course, and to make a payment on my credit card (Oops! here is where I realized that I missed the payment). Because this was the most exciting thing that I encountered that day, and I had a few minutes to spare (plus I had to pay off that bloody card anyway), I made the decision — I’ll do it! I would complete the course.
For any behavior to happen (The Fogg Behavior Model — FBM) we need three things: motivation, ability, and triggers.
In this case the motivation was $30 credit, the ability was the time that I had and the low effort that this course required, and the trigger was the email that I received.
Stop! We need your attention
At the beginning of the course there was a hint that there was a test at the end of the course. Knowing that I will have to know the answers at the end, I didn’t want to waste my time and repeat the course.
Ok coach, you have my attention…
The first step in learning is attention. With focus it’s more likely that the new information will be stored and remembered.
The course consisted of several easy steps. It started with a video on how to manage your money, how to set up a goal, what are the strategies to achieve that goal, what’s the difference between an unrealistic and a realistic goal, and so on. Nothing too exciting there.
But wait, there’s more…
“Don’t make me think”
The tutorial was presented in video format for easy user consumption (the ‘relax and watch, don’t make any effort’ type of thing). The first section was about long term, mid-term, and short-term goals. After that, I got the first set of questions. The questions involved a visualization tool where I was asked to drag the right photo to the right section. Easy, ha?
It was. As I was dragging a sofa to a short term goal, a car to a mid-term goal, and retirement funds to a long-term goal, I realized that this activity was forcing me to keep the images in my head.
Visualization technique is our way to mentally rehearse an action and it’s giving us higher chances of converting something from what “could be” into “it is”.
Commitment, please
The next section included a talk about how to create a plan. In order for you to be able to achieve any goal, you need to have an idea about what the goal is so you can focus.
Putting any goal in writing is a strong motivator. It increases your chances to achieve the goal.
The exercise in this section asked me to create a plan. I needed to choose what I wanted to achieve, and then I had to create a timeframe together with the amount that I wanted to save. The UI consisted of a few form fields, but if you really write down a realistic goal that you want to achieve, it is more likely that you will actually do it.
Make your point
The test ended with a series of questions that were presented as problems. All examples were related to something that any of us can relate to, such as: let’s say that you are buying a house in 5 years, you are earning X and you want to save Y amount, or you want to pay off your student loan, or let’s say you want to save for a vacation…
The specific situations and problems are helping users to relate to logic, character, and emotion. They are illustrating the point more effectively.
Create UX design principles
We can pull design principles from this experience and use those principles to solve other problems, and to modify the user’s behavior.
Design Principles:
- Turn negative into positive
(missing payment didn’t result in punishment) - Grab the user’s attention if you want to shape learning
(inform the user that the information needs to be remembered) - Be mindful to user’s time and investment
(be upfront about how much time it takes) - Content consumption should be easy
(listening, watching, or doing vs reading) - Ask for commitment
(by writing goals down) - Construct a visualization exercise for mental rehearsal
(create a mental image of a future event) - Have something that the user can relate to
(use real world examples)
Final Thoughts
This is an example of a good user experience. My bank identified a pain point in the user journey. Instead of sending a threatening email “You must pay your credit card now!”, they did something nice to ease the pain. They offered a credit (instead of charging an extra fee) and a course to teach users how to manage money better in order to change user behavior.
And this course might actually even help me manage my money better.
We’ll see…
