Shaping user behaviour is better than changing them
Guest Contribution
Changing behaviour is hard. We experience that everyday?—?New Year resolutions fall through, stomach ambulance gym memberships remain unused, price and well-intentioned plans to eat less, or save more, never come to fruition.
This article talks about such big fishes in their domains who faced problems because of the resistance of the users to change their behaviour.
The eBay story
If you faintly remember, eBay once had a website, which had yellow as its background colour. This visual might remind you of it.
So suddenly as the brand was revamping, they changed the yellow to white. What happened next was not expected! There were thousands and thousands of mails hitting the mailbox about why the company changed the background colour! Now it seems so obvious that white is the better choice, but back then, it was a change for the users, a change that they weren’t ready to accept!
So here’s what eBay did. They reverted the background colour to yellow, and with every passing day they changed the colour shade by 1 level! In an year’s time, the eBay website had white background, and the users had no complains! Every time I narrate this story, I have a smile on my face?—?the patience of the team at eBay.
The idea of narrating this event is that user’s are never welcoming to change, they have to be shaped into change.
The Reddit-Digg story
Are you familiar with a platform named “Digg”? Here’s the logo, this might help you recall the company..
So if you couldn’t spot the platform or logo, Digg was the reddit before reddit! Digg which was re-founded in 2012, delivers most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet. Digg and Reddit co-existed for quite some time.. But, Digg was by far, wayyyyy wayyyy more popular than Reddit is today! Between Digg and Reddit, people preferred Digg.
And then, something happened that may be, should not have happened.
“Digg updated their UI all at once (Digg 3.0)!” As it turned out in the upcoming days, the users were so upset with the new update, the design changes and the process change, that there was a MASSIVE shift to Reddit. And that was literally the week Reddit was born!
Shaping user behaviour
These were two big examples of how brutal users can become if UIs suddenly change and they can’t adapt to it. But does that mean, the creativity should die? Well, No. But then you need to onboard users in such a smart way that they don’t feel strange to the UI.
What is required is?—?shaping the user behaviour. By shaping, I mean the process used to establish a behaviour that is not presently prevalent. Shaping user behaviour is a very slow process. It is performed in steps, just as eBay did.
Here are the steps one should follow for shaping the user behaviour –
- Define the target behaviour you are aiming at
- Decide if shaping is really essential
- Identify the starting user behaviour
- Choose the increment you want. Each step takes you closer from starting behaviour to the target behaviour
In such a condition, what is most important is testing the user behaviour. Each step takes you on a progressive trajectory. Moving ahead without confirming if you are on the right track, can prove to be quite dangerous. Keeping such use cases in mind, CanvasFlip is designed such that you can conduct remote user testings easy and fast.
Testing innovative designs before they are live for the users is an absolute necessity. It highlights the areas where user is facing friction. As a designer, you are smart enough to pick it up from there and make the design intuitive.
Shaping user behaviour is better than changing them was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
