How do we design for the realities of human behavior?

That seemed to be the driving theme in BJ Fogg’s Designing for Behavior Change: Human Nature, Hot Triggers and New Habits workshop in Day 3 at UX Week in San Francisco.

The premise was clear: much of first generation of digital design (websites, applications, and related tools) has focused on providing as much information as possible to audiences in order to encourage them to take action. This is commonly referred to as the information (action) fallacy. And it’s been proven to not work. A lot of evidence shows people don’t consume vast amounts of  information in the way that typical information systems present it.

Another reality advertisers are coming to terms with: most research shows attitudinal change in people doesn’t correlate to changing behavior. People generally say one thing, and then do another. In addition, a lot of advertising focuses on enforcing ambient/passive awareness of messages and brands in traditional channels of communication. These also have been proven to not be terribly efficient or effective, either.

So, what really works?

In digital experiences, we need to rethink our context. We need to learn how to trigger able, motivated people to take action while in the normal flow and environment of their habitual lives. To understand this landscape of behavior change in people is to master this guiding principle of designing systems and tools for user experience:

Put “Hot Triggers” in the the path of (able) motivated people.

Let’s start with the “motivated” person. For instance, it’s easier to place carrots or “triggers” in the paths of able, motivated people than it is to go after unmotivated people first, and persuade them to do something differently.

•    Example: To encourage bicycle commuting, experience designers hand out easy-to-access bike trail maps to people who own bikes (bike owners are “able”) and want to bike to work (they are also “motivated”), but don’t know the best or most effective routes, or simply need that extra incentive or reason to take action. The activity of the hand out, of course, occurs at the right time–when people are considering their biking routine, for example.

Let’s now talk “Hot Triggers.” Hot triggers are devices that entice, instigate or catalyze action or inaction at the appropriate time (my definition). For example, digital tactics used in the correct context, like email and texting, have proven to be effective in this regard. Mostly because the penetration and adoption of these two channels of communication are so ubiquitous (many of our audiences are ABLE to use these channels). Sometimes these very simple tools are overlooked when trying to engage online audiences. Examples:

•    Facebook has mastered email triggers to drive traffic back into the social experience to enhance engagement and encourage ongoing interaction.
•    Facebook also uses simple behavioral devices (the ‘Like’ button) to tip users’ affinities in the direction of digital communities they associate with.
•    Ebay encourages honest online behavior by incorporating rating systems for buyers to comment on and rank sellers.

Apparently simple stuff, right?

There are a lot more dimensions to this concept that I simply cannot cover in one blog post. So I’ll end by asking some questions that, if answered correctly, can put you on the track to designing better, more productive human behavior in any user experience:

•    What behavior do you want to change, or trigger, for your audience?
•    What is the simplest behavior that matters to your audience?
•    How do you trigger the simplest action for them?
•    How do increase your audience’s ability to do something?
•    How do you reward or promise to reward your audience?
•    How can the little touch points over time create shifts in value exchange for your audiences? For you?

Example of Ben Fry's Interactive visualization of "The Cost Of Getting Sick"

In the world of digital performance marketing, three things matter most: (1) measuring customer activity; (2) analyzing the measured activity and (3) activating sound strategies that better serve customers in their own desires to seek out products, services and solutions for themselves.

As an evolving practice at Bolin, our insights team is constantly seeking new methods and tools to help understand the data that’s collected from customer activity. One way to aid understanding of data is to visualize it.

In day 2 of UX Week here in San Francisco a select few of us worked with Ben Fry, computational information design expert and key developer of the open source Processing language. Processing has evolved as a straightforward visualization language that’s been used by information designers and programmers to communicate complex data relationships. Fry’s work on visualizations like the cost of getting sick and the health visualizer are just two examples demonstrating the power of visualized data to help people understand complex relationships and make better policy, business or other decisions. (you can find more of Ben’s work here, including his fascinating albeit extremely complex work on visualizing the human genetic code).

The power of visualized data in decision making has enormous potential. Humans by their very nature are visual people. So, as marketers and user experience practitioners, how can visualization take information and make it more meaningful, more actionable for us? For our clients? For our clients’ customers?

Nicole Lazzaro speaking on game play and the future of UX

I have the fortunate opportunity to converge with 474 other user experience (“UX”) professionals from around the globe for the Adaptive Path 2010 UX Week Conference here in San Francisco.

As this conference gathers some of the best and brightest minds in user experience thinking and practice, I wanted to share some of the latest ideas being tossed about in the UX community and give a little insight into how we at Bolin Marketing think about operationalizing user experience strategy, planning and execution for our clients, based on our ever-active approach to learning and applying new ideas.

While I won’t go into detail about the first day’s schedule of events, the most important themes were obvious: (1) UX practitioners need to design interactive experiences that account for human emotion-based decision making (not just rational thinking); and (2) incorporating game play in these experiences enhances adoption and engagement of user audiences.

Thinkers like BJ Fogg and Nicole Lazzaro have done significant work in helping software designers understand that (1) people not only need to interact with things that are natural by habit but (2) people often can be motivated to immerse themselves in experiences that are fun, exciting or even challenging (in a good way). If they don’t, boredom, annoyance, frustration and abandonment quickly ensue.

Some examples here beg questioning, but have been proven to tap into this type of behavior:

• Why do you want to learn about what your favorite brand is saying (Facebook fan page)?
• What compels you to want to know what your friends are doing, or share what you are doing at 10:47pm on a Tuesday night (Twitter news feed)?
• What motivates you to strive for the next level or achieve the highest score (Xbox, Wii, Playstation)?

So, how do we as UX designers motivate our audiences to continue on a journey that is meaningful and valuable to our customers’ lives as well as our clients’ business?

These are the questions that drive us as designers to go beyond mere design of a website or marketing campaign. As marketers in the new world, we have to spend time understanding better ways to appeal to basic human needs and wants, especially over time. Simply put, maybe that means creating more “fun” for everyone.

As a public service here’s Wikipedia’s definition for ROI:  In finance, rate of return (ROR), also known as return on investment (ROI), rate of profit or sometimes just return, is the ratio of money gained or lost (whether realized or unrealized) on an investment relative to the amount of money invested.

Here’s how ROI measurement worked in the pre-digital marketing world.  With traditional advertising if you ran a price sensitive ad in the daily newspaper you could measure the impact (and ROI) almost immediately for the items in the ad based on the “ringing of the cash register.”  The simple ROI metrics were sales minus expenses.  If your campaign was based on raising awareness you have a different set of research metrics that measured selected criteria like aided and unaided recall of the pre and post campaign, consumer engagement, believability, response to an 800 phone number and maybe, maybe even a simple measurement like a lift in sales.

Now with the advent of digital analytics there has never been a better environment in the history of marketing and advertising to measure and track ROI investment.

According to the 2010 CMO Council, State of Marketing Outlook report and survey, CMO’s identified the top measures and metrics for quantifying the effectiveness of online marketing or advertising campaigns to include:

•    Web site page views and registrations (64 percent)
•    Volume and origin of site traffic (60 percent)
•    Acquisition of new accounts or opportunities (48 percent)
•    Search prominence and site preference (46 percent)
•    Incidence of content downloads (37 percent)
•    Transactions and/or subscriptions (37 percent)

Social media measurement metrics have the ability to go even broader.  You’re looking to measure conversations and trying to find out where interactions are taking place and what content you’re putting out that spurs those interactions. Criteria might include conversation velocity, conversation share of voice and conversation sentiment towards your product category/brand.

At Bolin, we’ve conducted a number of social media audits for our clients as one form of online measurement.  From these audits we’ve been able to recommend strategies to our clients that can drive objectives such as awareness and/or trial.  The resulting behavior changes and/or sales form the basis for further ROI analysis.

The answer to the original question of how $1 in spending results in $2 of sales may still be elusive but here’s what’s not.  It’s a chaotic marketplace.  Even with all of the measurement analytics listed above it’s still a “young” test and learn environment.  In order to turn the journey into a destination, clients and their marketing agencies need to collaborate up front to determine what success measures are important to their campaigns.

Once you agree on success measures and objectives you can structure social media campaigns to deliver instantaneous results, longer term brand awareness or both.  If you do the things you’ve always done, align your marketing objectives with the right strategies and tactics you’ll be able to find an ROI in the new digital world.

Sometimes doing nothing is the right ROI but not doing anything because the ROI is not totally transparent means $1 may never become $2 or $3 or $4.  What are your online success metrics?

With respect to pricing, the dilemma is easy to see. Price it too high and it’s not affordable at retail. Price it too low and there’s no money left to invest in marketing support. At Bolin, we manage several brands that fall squarely in this trap. We tend to side on pricing the product as low as is aggressively possible because of what we call the “multiplier effect”. Every penny of additional FOB cost tends to be reflected in two cents or more at retail in the country of destination. The issue becomes a matter of what happens to costs and pricing once the finished product has left the factory floor. Whether it’s a margin or a percentage markup, there are several unavoidable costs in the value chain:  the manufacturer’s margin, transportation (usually a fixed amount), duties and taxes (usually a percentage), marketing and sales costs (usually managed by distributors and calculated as a margin), the ever voracious and consolidating trade (which usually works on a margin as well) and General Sales Tax (the so-called GST is usually a percentage).  In addition, there are some markets with additional layers such as wholesalers –each layer taking another markup.

The “multiplier effect” of all of these intermediate steps plays havoc on your ultimate retail price. Add in the risk of currency fluctuation and it’s easy to understand why smaller companies can’t or won’t focus on developing international sales.

It’s important to realize, however, the need to balance the multiplier effect with the need for companies (and their overseas distributors) to invest in brand building. Thus, we also argue for manufacturer margins that permit brand investment while maintaining competitive shelf pricing.

Pricing is a balancing act that requires constant attention. The multiplier effect is the gravity that pulls manufacturers’ pricing down while marketing support is the energy that helps the brand grow and become more valuable. There’s no “right answer”, but if you possess an understanding of the multiplier effects that take place in the value chain, you can start to balance the trade off with the ultimate goal: profitable international growth in both sales and the value of the brand. It’s a beautiful thing when it happens.

The research results were markedly decisive – the images drove consumer preference for a specific positioning; not our meticulous wording of benefits or taglines, not even the brand name choices.   I shouldn’t have been surprised – a picture’s worth 1000 words and all that, but I admit to being disappointed.

I’ll be straight with you – I like words.  As a foreign language major, I loved crossing the “frontera” into a new culture that command of the language allowed.  Nothing beats a well-written work of fiction for immersion into fantasy.   I even kvetch about tonality in emails.

However, at the risk of being the word dinosaur, I turned to my daughter Beatrice for counsel; I figured a sharp millennial can teach a boomer the new tricks of the trade, possibly giving some insight into this documented dominance of imagery.

Beatrice reports, “Millennials respond to pieces of information that convey the most meaning in the least amount of words.  Marketing tools such as Twitter and Facebook represent one way; information can be clearly presented and require no effort by the reader.  If I see an ad with large blocks of print or confusing lines, I am either going to focus on the image or I’ll disregard the ad entirely. The images need to both get my initial attention and hold it.”

Dios Mio!  Are we destined for new-age hieroglyphics as our primary marketing communication? Would you want to still use words in your advertising? Do you think this is a trend specific to the Millennial generation or will we still get this feedback in subsequent generations?

When a retailer is determining its shelf set, they are looking for what is new and different. They want to provide customers excitement (and, preferably, charge a premium for it). However, some manufacturers shy away from innovation because of the perceived difficulties (research & development, consumer testing, etc.) and risks. Full disclosure: developing an innovative product is riskier, but the rewards are higher. An innovative product may secure wider distribution more easily and may command a higher profit margin than a simple flavor extension; or its retail acceptance may be incremental rather than replacing last year’s flavor.

One way to minimize risk and still innovate (pragmatically) especially in the CPG world is to step out of your category and look at what is happening in others, e.g., delivery systems, ingredients, etc. Look for things that would be useful for you in your category. You don’t have to invent the wheel to be innovative – you just have to come up with a new use for it. For example, foaming action gel is a staple in the shaving category but it was unknown in the toothpaste category until recently. GlaxoSmithKline created a line of foaming action toothpastes (under their AquaFresh and Sensodyne brands) that claim to help clean between teeth in ways that other toothpastes can’t. It’s a simple concept with believability that manages to bring something new to its category.

There is (and likely always will be) a place for simple line extensions, but if a manufacturer wants to be a category leader; they need to innovate or be prepared to be left behind.

At the beginning of my very first business meeting in Japan, I was greeted by over a dozen staff from the client – all properly lined up in order of seniority, each anxious to present their business card to me and to receive mine.  Yes, I said ‘present’ as the exchange of business cards in Japan is similar to a ceremonial ritual.  In Japan, business cards are called meishi and Japanese give and receive meishi with both hands.   Ideally yours should be printed in both English on one side and Japanese on the other.  And of course, present your card with the Japanese language side up.  A business card is viewed as a representative of the person and should be handled with special care.  I learned this during that first meeting when – in order to help remember each individual- I jotted a little note on each card.  I looked up to see all of my new associates staring at me in disbelief as – I later found out – one does not write on a business card, nor stick it in your pocket or wallet, as these actions are viewed as defacing or disrespecting the business card and therefore showing disrespect to the owner of the card.  I of course apologized later that evening at dinner where I learned that new employees at the client go through a 5 hour orientation on proper business card and greeting etiquette!

Here are a few other notable cultural considerations in Japan:
•    The customary greeting is the bow (and yes, they go through training on this as well).  However, some Japanese who are used to doing business with ‘westerners’ may greet you with a handshake – albeit a weak one.  However, do not assume a weak handshake is an indication of character as we would in our culture.
•    They do not like to deliver bad news and so prefer not to use the word ‘no’.  If you ask a question they may respond with ‘perhaps’ or ‘we will see’ or even simply respond with a ‘yes’ – all the while actually meaning ‘no’. Understanding this is critical in the negotiation process.
•    And then there is the whole concept of gift giving in the Asian business world.  It demonstrates friendship, respect and admiration.  However, there are key things to remember.  Don’t give lavish gifts; never 4 of anything (signifies death); try to give something that represents your home area (Minnesota Twins baseball caps, wild rice and Bob Dylan CDs are some that I have used to represent Minneapolis/St. Paul) and always properly wrap them.  And wrapping is a whole other area of customs and etiquette as colors have different meanings and some most definitely should be avoided.  Most business hotels in Asia have staff to assist in gift selection and wrapping and I have learned to take full advantage of their services.

Those are just a few of the cultural issues that one needs to be aware of in Japan.  Each country’s local customs and cultures need to be respected and generally understood as they are vitally important to creating successful business relationships.

Have you experienced any cultural issues in your business dealings?