Nailing the Feedback Loop
Technology problems are relatively easy to solve. The problems that get most of our attention (and the problems that derail tech project success) are often people problems. How do we drive the behavior we want to drive, whether it’s getting people to enter data accurately, buy more, sell more, engage more or follow through on commitments?
Successful behavior modification requires a couple of components:
We must provide a winning motivator.
We must apply it in a way that firmly attaches the value of the motivator to the behavior we are trying to drive.
Designing Winning Motivators
To design a motivator that will work to actually drive behavior (and do it in a way that feels good to the user) we need to keep in mind a few principles.
We will first seek to understand the existing motivator(s).
Our efforts do not exist in a vacuum. Whatever the current behavior we are trying to change, it is being motivated by something. The motivator we choose must be able to beat out the existing motivator(s) in order to succeed. The first step in that is to learn about what motivates the current behavior. It is dangerous to guess here. It is common to hear remarks in meetings like “{Certain segment of audience} just refuses to follow the procedure!” or “Nothing we do works!” as if this is a willful act of subversion. Most often, this is not the case (though occasionally it is, and that’s evidence of a deeper cultural issue).
Rather than intentionally throwing a stick in the spokes by not following the path the architects of the process would prefer, most users are simply trying to get by in one way or another. Maybe they forget, or are too busy. Maybe it takes too long. Maybe the intended path gives inconsistent results, or is plagued by mysterious inefficiencies or roadblocks. Maybe they’re making an honest effort, but are confused. Maybe they fumbled through a certain way once and have continued to follow that process. The potential reasons are endless, which is why we do not guess but take the time to gather evidence to understand the motivations we are up against. This doesn’t have to add a lot of calendar time - often simply using available data or asking a small sample of the audience in a live conversation is enough to draw useful conclusions.
Whenever possible, we will harness the existing motivator to win.
Whatever the existing motivation, it had the demonstrated power to our audience to drive a behavior. For example, if our audience is skipping a step we’d like them to not skip because they want to save time, we know that saving time is a powerful motivator to our audience in this situation. The knee-jerk reaction might be to make that step required, and not allow skipping it. That may accomplish the stated objective of getting the step completed, but it won’t feel very good to the user: we’ve just forced them into something that goes against their motivations.
How much more engaging is it if we can take that motivator and use it? This might mean redesigning the flow to break it up into smaller chunks where steps occur just in time. It might mean figuring out if we can pre-fill common options to make it easier. It might involve using generative AI to help the user quickly arrive at an optimal solution. The key is that the most powerful solution will harness the motivators that already speak to the audience.
When introducing a new motivator, we will offer a clear prioritization with existing motivators.
You are likely familiar with some variation on a puzzle where you have various parties that need to cross a river and one boat, and some of the parties can’t be together - how do you get all across the river? These are considered brainteasers, and most people have to put some effort into figuring them out, because they involve competing and sometimes conflicting motivators.
In the real world, this may look like one motivator where the user feels “I want to get this done quickly” and a conflicting motivator where the organization wants people to take their time and get it right.
When we create conflicting motivators in our software processes, we get unpredictable results in terms of user behavior. Unless we are producing a mental agility game, our audience likely doesn’t want a brain teaser thrown at them in the middle of their use of our app. When confronted with the brainteaser of conflicting motivations, they may give up and pick something, often the most familiar path. And given that our job is often to drive change, this doesn’t work out very well.
What do we do about it? We already established that where possible, we will find a way to use the existing motivator. However, if we can’t harness the existing motivator, we may need to get it out of the way so it’s not competing with the motivators we are introducing and therefore creating indecision. Indecision is our enemy – it annoys users and stifles behavioral change.
A moment ago, we discussed the scenario of an existing motivator the user has to get things done quickly, and a competing motivator we want to introduce to take the time to do it well. These are in direct conflict, and we need to solve that conflict to be able to drive change effectively without getting mixed results. Sometimes we can solve it directly, by making the whole process faster. Sometimes we can nullify it, by for example, making the process feel smoother by perhaps bringing in questions one at a time and showing a progress bar, if we can’t directly speed things up. As a last resort, we can try to clearly bring our motivator to the top of the stack by emphasizing how important it is - maybe showing graphically how much better results are when things are fully filled out.
We will not discount the value of making it fun.
Human beings, even we boring creatures known as adults, like to have fun. We like it so much we play games for hours, send questionable memes, spend money on tickets to concerts and sports events and movies, and dress our pets up in costumes. None of these acts can be explained with logic, yet we do them over and over again, consuming hours of our lives and a good share of our disposable income – because they’re fun.
This tends to be thought of as a fluffy nice-to-have in driving behavior, something you do if you really want to show off, but not part of a serious discussion on driving change among this audience. And yet just down the street, that same audience we’re trying to reach waits in line for concert tickets or spends money on a movie, sending gifs on their phone while they wait.
There are very few audiences who don’t respond to some form of appropriate fun. We’ll go further into how to dole out those dopamine hits in an appropriate scale and form for your platform in a later post, but for now it’s useful to remember that this is often best served in small doses: an animation here, a badge there. It doesn’t mean you need to gamify your whole experience. But it does mean some well-chosen sugar can make the medicine go down a lot easier.
Applying motivators effectively
For a motivator to be effective, we must firmly attach it to the behavior we are trying to drive. It’s best not to be too cute or too subtle about this. People are in a hurry, they don’t want to meditate on the value proposition - they want to have it laid out in front of them clearly.
We will time feedback as close as possible to the action.
You want the feedback containing the motivator to appear as close as possible to the action taken.
As an example, social media companies want you to post frequently – that’s a behavior they want to drive. They could notify you once a day of how many likes you got, but that would delay the connection between the act (posting) and the delivery of the feedback (receiving a like). So, they notify you repeatedly, every time you receive a like, to really drive home the connection between that behavior and the positive motivator.
We will foreshadow feedback whenever possible.
Humans are good at recognizing patterns, but it may take some time and involve some error. How often have you heard someone describe a pattern they think they’ve discovered, that you know not to be true? We’d rather not depend on the unpredictability of people discovering their own patterns.
One technique to prevent this is to foreshadow the feedback. This is a way of priming the user to receive the feedback and interpret it correctly. We might show something to the user while in the act of taking an action such as “Job posts with a salary listed get 50% higher interaction!” This is motivating the user to take the action we want (listing a salary) and also priming them to make a connection that might otherwise be difficult to discern - that at least some of the engagement they’re receiving is because they listed the salary.
We will apply feedback consistently and in a way that remains relevant even when repeated.
Technology solutions have a distinct advantage over manual solutions, because they can apply feedback consistently every time. Like any kind of training, applying feedback consistently makes it a lot easier for the association to be formed with the behavior.
That’s the good news, and it’s largely a huge advantage over manual solutions. However, we must also take care that the repetition doesn’t cross the line to lose the power of the motivator, or become annoying. If we’ve invested in fun, we must take particular care to not let it fall victim to this problem.
One solution can be to inject something timely or personal each time. The aforementioned social media Like notification doesn’t feel fake or repetitive, because it’s a new person liking the post each time and that feels good. In fact, this is a great illustration of the fact that a notification involving something that’s timely, such as data, a real-time event, or news, is much less likely to get stale because it’s interesting each time.
Another technique is to provide variety by making a piece of the feedback user-generated. We value the opinions of other people and are, as a rule, very curious about what they think. Using benchmarking data, user trends or even providing quick ways for users to give each other feedback helps keep the motivator fresh and interesting each time.
Summary
The feedback loop’s ability to harness motivation is the most critical element of driving change. We can plan a release perfectly, communicate well, and execute flawlessly and if there’s no motivation strategy, it will still fall flat. We humans, despite our ties to technology, still have wills of our own. It is by carefully applying feedback that we’re able to entice our audience to use their wills to enact the change we are seeking.
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