Can designing for behavior improve your digital products' success?
Most designers aren't aware of how to incorporate Behavior Change Techniques or psychological needs in digital products and services.
They build apps in Health and well-being, Finance, or even internal products for employee engagement and productivity and miss the mark.
It's not that we as designers, PM's, or innovators don't understand how to design - quite the opposite, we make amazing-looking digital products, so it's not an aesthetics or even an interaction issue.
It usually comes down to not really understanding the jobs that people have (and no, I don't mean you writing a job story at the end to explain a feature) - and the behaviors and motivation quality.
To go deeper and increase your chance of getting better outcomes, you should understand what the behaviors are (and aren't) that people are there to do in your product, and what levers you can use to help them.
Once that is complete, then you can start moving toward the tactics you can use.
Big disclaimer - most teams focus on only a handful of behavior change techniques, which means they are leaving lots of opportunities on the table.
So why are teams doing this?
Well, based on my experience in both knowingly using and not using Behavior strategies on products and services and evidence reviews - most probably teams don't know that there are other techniques they leverage to change behavior.
Remember, If you are only copying features, then you are not in control, since you have no clue if that feature you copied is going to actually work for your customers and their context.
I've been developing a design system with components on Figma for teams to use that has different layers and combines among other things:
1) Basic Psychological Needs: (Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness)
2) Behavior Change Techniques: (there are 93)
And which is meant to tie back into both levers and behaviors.
Important!!! --> What I am making here is the end of what you should deliver, and show you examples of how this can be done in different contexts - Health, Finance, etc... in an easy-to-understand format.
By no means, can you use this if you don't understand how you got here, and how these connect, which means it will require you to know the right levers and behaviors- and follow a logic model. (how would you build this backward from feature to outcome?)
Just remember, the majority of today's apps, in their pursuit of user-centricity, often overlook the depth and variety of Behavior change.
Instead, they focus on a few, perhaps superficial, techniques that might not be grounded in thorough behavioral principles.
Your goal is to get better outcomes for your customer, employees and your organization.