To completely understand the reasons behind what drives users to a certain behaviour, we need to look at the psychology of the user himself. We can create a great user experience, only when we understand the user motivation that guides the action.
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In order to craft a great user experience, there are three important sectors we need to consider, which is motivation, ability, and trigger. So what actually this means? And how are these three famous behavior facts interlinked?
For an example, a simple shopping funnel. Users check out your website, browse its articles and add one to the basket. After a few minutes, this visitor leaves the page with no purchase. Where did we go wrong? And a better question is how to motivate this visitor for a future purchase?
The user needs to be motivated to buy the product. We see that there is the desire in the user to buy a product, but there was not enough motivation, ability or correct trigger to complete the purchase.
We can motivate the user by numerous ways possible. One of them is to give visitors some discount, simple reward or heart-warming micro text. The user will be happier, hence we satisfied the emotion source of behavior. We also must make sure that there is a correctly aligned trigger to our motivational strategy and that the user has the needed knowledge of motivational benefits.
As we can see in the above example, the two famous behavior facts actually work together. The main difference is that the Pluto’s behavior sources are more linked to what goes on within users, and it’s primarily deeply connected with the user itself. Where the behavior model describes these behavior sources (desire, emotion, and knowledge) as motivation of user and how they are interlinked with environmental influences like the ability of the user itself to make the purchase (simplicity of purchase, financial stability), and that the user behavior, can be manipulated with correctly placed triggers on the website.
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How can we use these behavior models to design better UX?
As we understand basic principles of user psychology, we can plan UX much better. We can check any onboarding, shopping or purchase process with the previously mentioned behavior models. When the user makes something that does not make sense, we reverse-engineer his process path and try to make multiple scenarios why the user behaved the way it has. With the behavior model, we can find out what was missing in the process and how can we improve it. The best way to improve user experience is to create multiple A/B tests with different improvements that will satisfy every scenario and parallel check conversion of user process on the website. With analytic data of A/B tests, we can then make a much more rational decision which is based on the real data.
It’s time to start making rational design choices based on big data and user psychology. The whole point of the User Experience design is to create as smoothest, warmest and simple process for the user we can. The user will never forget how you made them feel. And that needs to be the basic fact of UX design.