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 and persuasion.
The more I researched, the more I wanted to learn directly from BJ Fogg. I attended his workshop and had a blast. Let me share the one model I keep coming back to:
B = MAP
For a behavior to occur, three conditions must meet at the same time:
- 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 (an email) or internal (your stomach telling you it's time to eat)
Motivation and Ability have compensatory relationships. The more challenging something is (lower Ability), the more Motivation you need. Tax filing is painful, but 95% of US households jump through the hoops because we're highly motivated to avoid IRS penalties.
Motivation is hard to count on
Motivation is flaky. 80% of people drop New Year's resolutions by the second week of February. Most product experiments that target 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. If a user just watched and liked a video, ask them to enable notifications (Prompt) for that creator.
Make the behavior easier
Start small. Reduce friction. Save them time and money.
Removing required sign-up before checkout increased sales by $300M/year for one e-commerce site. Think how Robinhood made it free to trade stocks, then reduced friction further with fractional shares.
We tested messaging that emphasized easiness ("set carpool in 2 clicks") vs. messaging to increase motivation, and the "easier" messaging won every time.
Sign up for BJ's free tiny habits course to learn firsthand about behavior design.