What is behavior change design?
Behavior change design is a combination of sub-disciplines of psychology, sociology and neuroscience — as well as product and UX design. It's no wonder it had its first bloom at Stanford University!
There have been findings on how to specifically control behavior since B.F. Skinner and his cage from 1930.
In (Digital) Behavior Design — Where the cage is our various devices, the process: “trigger”, “action”, “feedback” and/or “reward” quickly formed a basic formula for initiating a specific behavior. B.J. Fogg, Researcher and teacher at Stanford University since 1997, brought all behavioral theories together with the idea of social learning for the first time and related the whole thing directly to technology. At the beginning, his institute was also called “Persuasive Technology Lab”, and his research area was called “Captology” (“Computers as Persuasive Technologies”).
These three elements are very closely linked. For example: The lower ability and motivation, the better (i.e. more effective) a trigger must be to induce the person to behave. Fogg calls that”To get above the action line”.
B.J. Fogg had many students who significantly shaped Silicon Valley after graduation - with companies such as Instagram or Facebook. Hence his nickname”The Millionaire Maker”. According to reports, however, he was not happy with the very monetary-driven purposes for which his students used the knowledge they had acquired from him. He stopped teaching behavior change design openly, or for companies, and currently only accepts selected students in workshops. For self-study, he recently published his knowledge in the book “Tiny Habits: Why starting small makes lasting change easy.”
