Last week I spent a couple days with BJ Fogg, taking part in his Persuasion Boot Camp.
It was an amazing experience. BJ has a knack for communicating simple, concise, and useful information for anyone shaping behavior with technology.
The world of innovation is changing. With developer tools like Ruby on Rails and distribution channels like Facebook and the App Store, the biggest challenge in building a consumer-facing product is often not how to build, but rather what to build. Thus effective design can be more important than engineering resources. The proof is the tiny teams that built amazing products like Gmail, Reddit, and Instagram: all less than 5 engineers. Wow!
BJ teaches product design grounded in his experience as a behavioral psychologist, understanding what makes humans tick. If you are trained as an engineer (like me), it can be really difficult to put yourself in the shoes of a normal user. Here’s how:
B = mat: Behavior equals motivation, ability and a trigger (at the same time)
Don’t over-focus on motivation…people already want to lose weight, save money, and get work done. Instead make things easy to do, decreasing the ability required. Realize that your users will need a hot trigger – something in their path, that clearly directs them – or else the desired behavior won’t happen.
(reprinted with permission from BJ Fogg)
Baby Steps Don’t try to move mountains at the beginning. Instead, try out and validate simple behaviors, quickly. Don’t be afraid of seeming silly…for example, get your mom to understand how to use your app before you worry about what the perfect logo is. This is actually the normal engineering approach of breaking a big problem into manageable pieces, except the elements you are building with – human behaviors interacting with machines – are inherently fuzzier than material or mathematical properties. Because of that, more validation is required.
Iterate Build on successes. Understanding failures is really hard, because so many things can go wrong. Instead, focus on what’s working. This includes understanding the competition.
These take-aways are simple…like consumer facing products should be.