March 17, 2009

B = f (P, E) : Guiding the user experience

I’m usually not a big fan of pseudo-science when it tries to masquerade as the real thing. So, when I heard about the following formula, I was incredulous.

Behavior = f(Person, Environment)

Essentially, what this is saying is that behavior is a function of both people and the environment they work within. Despite the formulaic approach, I appreciate the intent and “succinctness” it brings.

People.
People have instrinsic and extrinsic motivations. These may be supported by your product. The challenge is to marry their goals with your own. Human nature is hard to change; in many ways, you have little or no control over this factor.

Environment.
Environment is your site and the actions it provides. Think of it as the rails on which your users ride. You have control over this through the features you expose and what you allow people to do. These need to match up with the peoples’ motivations.

Behavior.
Behavior is the net result of your work. It’s what you want people to do on the site. You can only indirectly address this, through the environment.

To use an example, Flickr’s environment is one of photo publishing and sharing. The behavior they want to elicit is photo sharing. They guide the behavior by building out an array of things you can do with your images. You can group them by tag, by collection, by set. You can send them to a group, search by location, explore by “interestingness.” Flickr demotes the importance of messaging friends, fiddling with your profile and other actions not focused on photo sharing. By directly focusing on a limited set behaviors and supporting only those with robust features, they keep the purpose of the site from becoming dilute.

Takeaway
The takeaway is that encouraging users to behave in a certain way requires acknowledging motivations and selectively building out features to suport. This is common sense to most of us, but sometimes we lose sight of this. Think about this the next time you feel like your site needs to be social, needs a blog, should use Twitter, or whatever the latest techno-fad is.