Behavioral science in the wild – reflections from a 4-week “interactive text experience”.
Behavioral science shows us that it’s not just what is communicated, but it’s how, when, who, how frequently — in short, context matters. If you’re looking to change behaviors, the design of the interaction must be carefully considered. After learning about the HealthyNudge, I decided to sign-up, and used the opportunity to conduct a very light behavioral audit.
Taking what we know about human behavior into consideration, the following are four initial recommendations to the HealthyNudge team, organized by select behavioral biases:
Habit formation
We know that it takes about 66 days to for humans to form a new habit. Although the text reminders provided me with new information, the texts were infrequent and over a short duration – too short of a duration to transform these new behaviors into habits.
Recommendation: Shift text reminders to a user-identified moment, each day, over a 2.5-month period.
Cognitive overload
We’re more likely to act on a desired behavior if we aren’t overwhelmed with choices. I learned information from the homework, and I was excited to adopt a healthy behavior; however I oftentimes forgot what I wanted to do or exactly what I was supposed to be doing the day after I read the text.
Recommendation: Concentrate on one target behavior.
Intention-action gap
We have the best intentions but realizing these intentions is hard. The text messages provided information to create an intention but didn’t make it easier for me to act on this intention. Commitment devices are one method to help us humans overcome this intention-action gap.
Recommendation: Design a commitment device to increase the likelihood that each user follows-through with their target behavior.
Motivation
Accomplishing our goals are hard. The text messages had a friendly tone but did not provide incentive for me to realize my goals. Seeing and feeling progress toward meeting my goal is one method to maintain motivation and ultimately meet my goal.
Recommendation: Display user progress toward meeting their target behavior.