Is less innovation actually better in product design?
“Redesign the wheel” only when it’s truly essential to your business, and focus on finding your “Critical Behavior Change”.
Design is the science of shaping behavior. If there was no behavior that we were trying to change or influence, there wouldn’t be a need to design.
But changing behavior always equals friction. And friction makes the likelihood someone takes the desired action lower.
For example, getting a customer to switch to your product–even if your product is head-and-shoulders above what they were using before–is still a behavior change, and therefore a point of friction (called “switching cost”).
Designers — and company founders — face implicit and explicit messages that it is important to “think differently” and innovate at every turn. “Novel” designs can seem like the things that will get your portfolios noticed, win awards, and gain clout. It’s tempting, as designers, to listen to our ego when it tells us we should be innovating every component we design.
But science (and history) reveals that limiting novelty to only the “minimum viable innovation” will lead to a much higher likelihood that the innovation succeeds in driving transformative change.
The most impactful innovations are often just one “Critical Behavior Change” away from current behaviors
The easiest action to take is always “no action”. The easiest thing to do is to keep doing what we’ve always done.
As humans, we value the things we own more just because we own them, we find defenses to confirm our decisions we have already made, and we like things more when we have been exposed to them more. For humans, changing our behavior patterns directly challenges our psychology. This phenomenon presents an interesting problem for designers and founders.
Companies do typically have a “Critical Behavior Change” that they must succeed in changing in order to be successful in their work. The most innovative companies are not those that “innovate” the most; they are the companies that “innovate” only in the most essential ways.
How designers can change the trajectory of their companies by changing the user experience
When a product is highly usable, it is typically one that limits behavior changes only to those essential to the differentiated value the product is aiming to deliver. “Usability” often means “functioning in a way that aligns with expectations and current behavior patterns”.
Individual designers can maximize the likelihood of the companies they design for succeeding in driving a “Critical Behavior Change” by limiting friction elsewhere in the product experience.
Identify your company’s “Critical Behavior Change”
If your company is aiming to do something better in a market that already has competition (more usable, better features, more affordable), your company is likely aiming to be a “market-winning” company. If this is the case, your “Critical Behavior Change” may simply be getting people to be willing to switch from a competitive product to your own, so that they can experience how superior your solution is over the competition.
If your company is aiming to do something new or different from how your customers currently solve a problem in a market with little direct competition, your company may be aiming to be a “market-creating” company. Market-creating companies often have to generate demand, and have “Critical Behavior Changes” that require more significant internal mindset changes from customers. As you might imagine, the “costs” of the latter are higher, but the rewards (if successful) are larger.
At my company, Packback, our “Critical Behavior Change” was changing instructors’ use of discussion in their classes from using instructor-led prompts, to using student-led questions as discussion prompts. It might not seem like a big change, but this is a huge shift in many instructors’ behaviors around online discussion, and as a result has serious psychological “switching costs”; the loss of control over their class’ discussion, the fear of incorrect answers or inappropriate questions, and abandoning the use of instructor-written prompts that took time and effort to create.
All of our differentiated features relied on achieving this single “Critical Behavior Change”, and by doing so we were able to move the market towards student-led learning, while also opening up opportunities for technology that makes this specific approach to discussion more engaging, more time saving, and easier for everyone involved. To achieve this “Critical Behavior Change”, we kept all other aspects of our user experience as close to expectations as possible.
As Gary Keller says in his book, The One Thing, “What is the one thing that makes everything else easier or unnecessary?”.
What is the single-core behavior change in your product that could eliminate the need for many seemingly “table stakes” features to be built on your roadmap, moves you out of direct “comparison” to competitors and into a category of your own, and creates the opportunity for secondary innovations that make your product increasingly valuable to adopt?
Increase incentive and decrease cost of that “Critical Behavior Change”
As a designer, evaluate how you might “offset the cost” of a behavior change by deliberately looking to increase the incentive to change, and reduce cost to change.
As designers, ask how can our product offer sufficient incentive to change?
The Fogg Behavior Change Model asserts that humans have three behavioral drivers that motivate us to act: Sensation (Pain / Pleasure), Anticipation (Fear / Hope), and Belonging (Rejection / Acceptance).
- Sensation: Can your product help people save time, save burden, save money (that frees that money up for other uses), or increase their joy and enjoyment?
- Anticipation: Can your product help people avoid things they fear, or seek hopefulness?
- Belonging: Can your product help people feel a sense of acceptance, belonging, meaning, or community?
A sufficiently high motivating “value” of a product makes people willing to accept a very high “cost” of switching. Just think how easily Netflix can raise their cost; their product offers very high incentives tied to Sensation and Anticipation!
As designers, how can we reduce the cost to change?
In business, the friction of switching from one solution to another is called “Switching Cost”. It typically refers to switching from one product to another, but applies just as well to situations where the customer may not have used any product before yours. There are several dimensions on which it can “cost” a user to switch to a new solution and change their behavior; Financial Cost, Time Cost, Effort Cost, and Psychological Cost.
A great example of this is Uber. Uber’s “Critical Behavior Change” was to get both riders and drivers to feel safe and comfortable riding with “peers”, rather than professional taxi drivers. Until Uber changed this foundational behavior their solution could never gain traction, and no amount of other cool features would matter.
To increase their likelihood of success around their “Critical Behavior Change”, Uber offset their “switching cost” on the “Financial” and “Psychological” dimensions:
- Reducing Financial Cost: Initially, it was cheaper to take an Uber than a taxi. In those early days (if you’re old enough to remember!), it wasn’t always guaranteed to be able to whip out your phone and know that you could have an Uber at your door in a few minutes; there were many times when drivers simply weren’t available or were 45+ minutes away. So the lower initial cost gave people enough of an incentive early on to keep checking if a car was available. And if people were “checking to see if there is an Uber” nearby, that means they had succeeded already in their “Critical Behavior Change”!
- Reducing Psychological Cost: Additionally, Uber launched with a premium “black car” service offering. I don’t think this was a coincidence; I think one of the main barriers to their “Critical Behavior Change” was the concern around the safety of riding with a “random” person. Offering the ability to filter to a “premium” car added legitimacy and an air of safety to the offering.
A product design analysis around each of these “switching cost” dimensions when building a new product can result in extremely interesting breakthroughs that can reduce the “cost to change”. These breakthroughs often don’t require significant technical investment. They may be as simple as using different language when discussing the service, or framing options in a new way in your interface, like in the example I shared earlier of Uber offering their “black car” option to lend credibility to the offering in a way that reduced the Psychological Cost of switching.
Innovation happens by degrees
Big, sweeping behavior changes can be the right strategy for a company; but it is important to know that with “big behavior changes” come big “costs” your product will need to offset.
The most innovative companies deeply understand the existing behaviors of their customers and then introduce the “minimum viable innovation” that allows them to drive massive, transformative change. Innovation can happen by figuring out the one variable that you need to change that actually changes everything.
Vision is most valuable when paired with empathy and understanding for how to change behavior, which means that designers are ideally suited for being drivers of innovation in organizations.
Additional Reading:
Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug. Learn about limiting cognitive load (and behavior change) in user interaces.
Hooked, Nir Eyal. Learn about how motivates people to change and keep coming back to products.
The One Thing, Gary Keller. Learn about identifying your one “most important thing” in building your business.
Zero to One, by Peter Thiel. Learn about building innovations that create new markets, rather than competing in existing markets.
The Fogg Behavior Change Model, BJ Fogg. Learn about a model that outlines what compels people to change.
Learn more about Switching Cost.
*P.S. Bonus idea for reducing “cost” of behavior change: Make the change invisible.
A behavior change only introduces friction when someone has to choose to do something differently. When building a product experience, consider how you might change behavior in an “invisible” way, by embedding it right into an expected workflow. Rather than requiring someone to learn a new process or modify their behavior, how might you offer them novel value within the same process they are used to?
A great example of this is actually Medium’s text editor. Try adding two spaces between a sentence in Medium’s editor, and you’ll find it is simply not possible! They changed behavior for thousands of users who would have typically been “double-spacers” by removing the choice, rather than explaining, convincing, or cajoling people to align to a standard. The resulting outcome is that every one of the millions of article on their platform uses a single standard.
