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Some products, services, or experiences are intended to change people’s behaviors in the real world. Behavior change designers call those products interventions. That sounds very clinical, but an intervention doesn’t have to be dry or complicated. Some of the behavior change interventions you’ve probably heard of include MyFitnessPal, Runkeeper, and Duolingo, none of which feels like a heavy experience. But all three of them get people to do something differently on purpose: MyFitnessPal encourages users to be mindful of their eating and movement; Runkeeper helps people train to run longer or faster; and Duolingo teaches new ways of communicating.

Behavior change interventions are more common in certain subject areas. In this book, you’ll find a lot of health examples, because that’s the domain I know best from my career and one where behavior change has been embraced. Health interventions may help people along a spectrum of functioning—from coping with acute illness or injury to managing chronic conditions, supporting wellness, or reaching sports and performance goals. And they can target a range of behaviors, including eating, exercise, taking medication, going to doctor’s appointments, or deep breathing through stressful situations.

Behavior change interventions in financial services may center on major life goals like going to college (and paying off the associated loans), buying a home, or saving for retirement. Some successful financial behavior change interventions include changes to tax notices to prompt timely payment and changing 401(k) enrollment processes so that more people sign up.

Education is a natural outlet for behavior change; if people are building deep knowledge or new skills, they’ll need to engage in practice behaviors. Some types of education manifest through behavior, like speaking a new language, writing code, or repairing an automobile.

The performance management tools that big companies use to review employees and manage bonuses are a type of behavior change intervention.

Environmental science organizations practice behavior change, too, whether it’s getting people to consume fewer plastics or choose more sustainable fish to eat. As people realize the impact that their individual behaviors might have on the global climate, more digital interventions are being developed to support them in changing their efforts.

NOTE WHAT BEHAVIOR CHANGE MEANS TO PEOPLE

Early in the process of writing this book, I asked people on Twitter to recommend behavior change apps they had used. The overwhelming majority were workplace wellness apps, the type of health interventions you might get as part of your employer-offered health insurance. Even accounting for the fact that a lot of my Twitter followers are in the healthcare industry, it’s striking that health is the first thing that comes to mind when people think behavior change.

Behavior change design can also be used to make consumer products and experiences more engaging—while sometimes having the positive side effect of helping users develop new habits or skills. Pokémon Go! is an example. It was designed as a game, but users report boosts in their daily step counts as a result of their quests to capture Pokémon. Even products without much potential for positively changing people’s behavior, like shopping websites or music apps, could be made stickier using the strategies you’ll learn about in this book. In fact, many of the most “addicting” digital experiences borrow heavily from psychology in their design.

But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. It’s easy to creep into dark patterns and manipulative design choices, if your goal in applying psychology is to keep someone within your product as long as possible without it being beneficial to them.¹ Behavior change design is about helping people achieve their goals, not yours.

In this book, I focus on digital products—apps, websites, connected devices, and the ways in which they intersect. Many behavior change endeavors today include a digital component or are entirely digital; technology makes interventions scalable, so they can be delivered quickly and cheaply to large groups of people no matter where they live. And digital offers opportunities to reach people in or near moments where they’re taking actions that matter. It’s a channel with enormous promise for affecting outcomes.

Like it or not, people are going to use tactics from psychology to make their digital products more engaging. They might as well learn to do it right.