Gamification and Behavior
The last article went over motivation. This article looks at behaviors.
The last post looked at motivation, an important aspect of generating behavior. However, motivation alone isn’t enough to induce a new behavior in most cases.
Fogg’s behavioral model
BJ Fogg, a social scientist, and pioneer of behavioral design, came up with a model that explains behavior known as Fogg’s behavioral model. According to the model, three components are needed to invoke a behavior: motivation, ability, and prompt.
Motivation
Fogg’s model names six key motivators broken up into three different categories:
- Sensation-Pain/Pleasure
- Anticipation- Hope/Fear
- Belonging- Social Acceptance/Social Rejection
Compared to other frameworks, such as Octalysis, this is a very straightforward explanation of motivation. Fogg’s model concentrates more on the ability and adding a prompt to get the desired behavior.
Ability
The ability refers to the person’s capability to perform the behavior. High ability usually comes from simplicity in the design, so focusing on simplicity in a design will increase the ability. In order to achieve simplicity, the usage of six resources must be at as minimal usage as possible:
- Time, as the more time-consuming something, is the longer it takes to do
- Money, as the more expensive something, is, the higher the chance the person cannot afford it
- Physical effort, as something requiring more energy, strength, stamina, etc will be more difficult
- Cognitive effort, as something that requires more mental energy, causes more cognitive overload.
- Social deviance, as the more something strays from the social norm, the less willing the person will be to do it,
- Non-routine, as the less something is already ingrained into someone’s behavior, the less likely they are to remember it.
Prompt
The prompt is basically a trigger or call to action. There are both external and internal prompts. External would be something like a notification or a buzz whereas internal would be a feeling or emotion such as hunger or anger. When designing to influence behavior, it’s important to understand the user’s current ability and motivation to determine the correct external prompt type. There are 3 different kinds of external prompts:
- facilitator-high motivation, low ability
When a user has high motivation lacks the ability behavior, the facilitator makes the behavior easier. Examples include a set of instructions or a one-step checkout.
Amazon uses a 1-click purchase as a facilitator which bypasses the lengthy and time-consuming checkout process, cutting back on the u
- spark-low motivation, high ability
When the user is able to do something but not motivated enough a spark is used to boost motivation. Examples include persuasion techniques (offering a discount on today's purchase) as well as ads and commercials.
The countdown timer used by BestBuy as well as the indication of ‘Limited Qualities’ are both sparks that make use of the scarcity tactic to motivate the user to make the purchase.
- signal-high motivation, high ability
When the user is both able and motivated to do something they will need a signal to remind or indicate what to do. Examples include notifications and calendar reminders.
A text message notification is a signal to someone to check their message. It's an incredibly easy task and the user is motivated, for the most part by belonging. However, without the notification, the user would not know they received the message and therefore not check.
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