Читать книгу Engaged - Amy Bucher - Страница 48

Behavior change is hard. Most people realize that. If a goal is important to them, they are often willing to put up with some hardship. As a designer, it is your job to be truthful about what that hardship might look like within the experience you’ve built. That gives users who aren’t willing to make those particular sacrifices the chance to walk away, while others who find the trade-offs reasonable will move forward.

As the designer, you may not always know what aspects of your behavior change design are positive or negative for a given user. Users will have different preferences and priorities. Some users might love the idea of going cold turkey on smoking cessation, while others prefer to use nicotine replacement therapy. Some may hate that a program has a social component, while others thrive on sharing their progress. When you describe what your behavior change program entails, keep it factual. Your users can decide for themselves whether the experience you describe is one they want to try.

Oftentimes, designers don’t so much lie about what their programs include as they fail to be fully explicit with the truth. Take the example of Sweatcoin. Sweatcoin is a physical activity program that counts outdoor steps and converts them into currency. That’s pretty much the language they use on their website to describe their program (see Figure 3.7).

After you start using Sweatcoin, you see how much currency you’ve earned that day right in the center of the home screen, and your balance at the bottom (see Figure 3.8).

FIGURE 3.7 Sweatcoin pays you in currency for the steps you take outside. Note they don’t tell you which currency they pay with.

FIGURE 3.8 The center of the screen shows how much currency you’ve earned, both today and to date.

What wasn’t apparent to me until the second or third day that I used Sweatcoin was that the currency they paid me with was not U.S. dollars. It was Sweatcoins. Sweatcoins can be redeemed for items in the app marketplace and even exchanged for real money once you pass an earnings threshold, but they are completely useless at the local mall.

To be clear, Sweatcoin never says it pays in dollars. If you scroll down on the product home page just below the main messages, they clearly tell you all about the Sweatcoin currency. But like many users, I didn’t initially scroll down below the big call-to-action at the top of the screen. And the Sweatcoin symbol could be mistaken for a stylized dollar sign if you were just glancing and not looking closely, as I did. An important piece of information that should have been made very obvious to me was communicated subtly, and I missed it. And I work on this type of program for a living!

Be up front with your users (or potential future users) about what your product is and what using it will be like. You may find fewer people who are on board, but those who do get on board are more likely to stick with you over time.