How to Design for Long-Term Behavior Change—Part 1: New Habit Formation

Hello RomanRackwitz,

Thanks again for the comment here.

I sincerely apologize that I couldn’t reply earlier, because it’s a great question you raised, and it’s probably one that many have been wondering about. My travel has just been pretty crazy and I simply don’t have the ability (i.e. time) to get to this, despite that I’m totally motivated to address your question. Part of the reason, as you can see from the length of my reply, is that there are some subtleties that require more detail explanation. But I hope the wait is worth it.

Alright, let me get into this…

First, when I talk about the ineffectiveness of motivation in this post, I meant most of the extrinsic motivations that people, companies, and gamification tools apply externally. Remember, if the reason a person wants to do a certain activity is not inherent to the activity itself, they are extrinsically motivated (see my earlier post on this subject). If a person is intrinsically motivated to do a certain activity (e.g. singing, reading, solving math puzzles, etc.), these motivation can sustain over long term. But this person will probably be doing those activity already. The fact that they are not already doing the active you want to drive means they are probably not intrinsically motivated in the first place. Hence, the need for motivation to get them to do it.

Second, the notion design of baby steps doesn’t meant that you don’t make the activity more challenging over time. You just need to START with a very simple baby step that doesn’t require any motivation for people to perform it. As people start doing the behavior, you do want to design the next step a little bit more challenging. Hence the “steps” (i.e. levels, progression, etc.) in the design of baby steps. You do want to give people the intrinsic motivation of mastery—that they can get better. And starting with a baby step give more people the ability and opportunity to get better over time.

If you remember my talk at this year’s GSummit, I briefly talked about how to design the baby step strategy. It doesn’t mean that every step is a baby step. It just means that every step is a baby step relative to the skill they’ve acquired from taking all the previous steps. The “relative to the skill they’ve acquire is the crucial point.” If we look at any one step, that step can be huge and seem very challenging (e.g. Angry Bird level 100). But if the person have completely level 1—99, the skills they’ve acquired would make level 100 look like a baby step. It is still a new next step, so it would still look challenging, but once they’ve gone through level 1—99, then all of a sudden level 100 seem much more achievable.

In terms of designing the behavior for habit formation. You do want to start as far right as possible. But you just want to make sure that the people with more ability can move quickly up the ladder of baby steps, eventually they will slow down somewhere on the ladder b/c the steps do get bigger and more challenging. If there is a user who just zip through all the steps, then we are not designing it right.

I can understand the confusion here, because a habit is really a different behavior than the one-time behavior. What I meant is that the habit of flossing—the behavior of flossing every night—is not the same as flossing one-time. So if you want to create habit, you do want to start with something so simple that people almost feel bored when doing it once. But remember, we are not trying to get people to do it once, we are trying to get people do it regularly, which is really a different behavior. Once they get into the habit of doing it REGULARLY, then we can slowly increase the difficulty through the baby step design I describe above—increase the step size, but still a baby step relative to the skill they’ve acquired.

Alright, I hope this help clarify the confusion.

Thank you again for commenting and always asking great and challenging questions. It shows who's thinking about this seriously.  ;-)

See you again next time.