Designing for Behavior Change

Foreword

On the first day of class at Stanford, I never know which of my students will change the world.

When student Mike Krieger turned in his first few projects, I saw his potential. He masterfully applied concepts learned in class to his designs. A few years later Mike drew from a class project called “Send the Sunshine” to create a global phenomenon called Instagram.

The success of Instagram wasn’t an accident. Mike had the skills to follow a winning formula: He tapped existing motivation, and he kept things simple. This is the same formula that students in my Facebook course used to engage over 24 million people with their class projects.

Many thousands of people can write code. But only a relative few can get the psychology right. And when it comes to behavior change, the right psychology makes all the difference.

If you’re confused about how human behavior works, I say there’s a reason. The problem is not you. The problem comes from traditional theories and models about human psychology. We’ve inherited some approaches that rarely help design for behavior change in the real world.

Even our language about behavior can mislead. For example, you don’t “break” a habit. That’s the wrong verb. It implies you exert sudden force and the habit goes away. A better verb would be “untangle” because it sets the right expectations of how to get rid of such behaviors. It requires persistence.

Because I saw how often traditional approaches led to failure, at one point I decided to ignore what ...