Written by: Vel Prakhantree, Rally Pagulayan, Seiko Itakura, Yalu Ye

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User Experience (UX) in its simplest form is how someone experiences a specific moment, service, product, place, etc. Understanding these experiences is then how UX becomes a principle of design and development – changing the product to fit the person. While this ideology of what UX is, is starting to become more commonplace (see several of our other posts), one area that hasn’t been discussed as much is UX as a behavior change catalyst – changing the person to fit the product.

This field encompasses everything from understanding the basic intentions driving human behavior to determining how much motivation users require in order to change their behavior. By understanding experiences, you can (sometimes) start influencing how individuals interact with certain technologies, interfaces, places, etc., ultimately changing how people act or understand parts of the world around them. While it sounds like a superpower, it’s much harder to utilize effectively and for the betterment of the user than it sounds.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into what this really means.

The last time you travelled on an airplane, did you check a bag? Probably not. In 2008, American Airlines broke the original mold of “bags fly free,” and started charging for checked luggage. While initially this didn’t change how people travelled, six years later our behavior is now conditioned to only bring a carry-on, when absolutely possible. Airlines have made it difficult and complicated to check bags, ultimately to lessen the amount of weight on planes, and that has transformed the way we as individuals prepare for a trip. The same goes for where and how you might check in for a flight. Or what you think of as a ticket. You now use your mobile app as both a check-in point and your ticket. Or, you may check in at home on your computer and print out a ticket on an 8×11 piece of paper. Ten years ago, everyone waited in line to check in at a desk and receive a long thin ticket. Airlines have conditioned us to do more of the things we used to do at the airport at home instead – they’ve changed our collective behaviors.

While a great example in illustrating exactly what UX as a behavior change catalyst means, the airline business is unique and has much more control over how we interact with it than most industries have.

Looking towards more nuanced attempts to change how we think about things, let’s turn to the Google vs. Bing discussion. In 2009, when Bing came to market, Google had already established itself as the search powerhouse. People were used to its interface and how it arranged queries. Bing tried to provide a more visual approach to the search engine and ever so slightly altered the way people see results. But, the reality is, there is little difference in what you get as a user. While Bing has had some user adoption, a little change in interface wasn’t going to motivate most people to change their habits. To take people away from something they already know how to use and understand, you have to go a lot bigger. It takes a long time to get people away from what works. You can bring a better product or better experience, but unless it’s a fundamental change that makes the experience exponentially different or better, breaking into a market that already has established offerings is quite the challenge.

To really utilize UX as a path to changing behavior, you have to truly understand what your users’ motivations are and provide enough of a nudge for them to try, and stick to, a new action.

A common way to do this is through competition. The majority of people respond to an innate desire to be the best or to compare themselves against others. This creates an emotional response and feeling towards a certain action – the way you design certain products can help fuel this desire further. This is how the concept of gamification was developed. Gamifying things – whether it be on the sales floor where the person that sells the most product gets a bonus or a Fitbit where you can compare yourself to other users, this sense of “winning” or being rewarded is a huge motivator for people to alter what they do.

You also have to build a habit that users can’t get out of. For software-as-a-service models, this is where designing the payment process seamlessly is of the utmost importance. The idea of having to pay for something over and over again inherently helps make a habit, but you can easily lose users if the payment process is a pain. That’s where companies like Uber have really excelled when it comes to changing how we think. Uber has almost single-handedly changed expectations of what we want in a car service.

But, at the root of all of this is the underlying desire and motivation to do something. Experiences, actions and user expectations continuously build on top of each other. The handheld camera led to an iPhone that can take pictures, which led to sharing pictures instantly on Facebook.

It’s hard to truly set out to create purposeful change. Changing an experience is usually not comprised of just one thing, but so many incremental things coming together that can cause people to alter their actions. So, while UX designers may not have magical superpowers to instantly change people’s behaviors, good design paired with the right motivators can and will eventually change how we think about things.