Examining User Behavior
Exploring How Human Behavior Affects Product Adoption
A successful product doesn’t just solve a problem, it addresses the behavior change needed to make people adopt the solution. The purpose of a product is to solve a meaningful problem for someone. However, once people become accustomed to a set of behaviors, it’s hard to convince them to embrace something new. Even if their current experience is bad, it’s familiar. Meanwhile, New solutions require them to change how they behave, which is not easy. Therefore, a product’s benefits need to be compelling enough to outweigh their aversion to change.
Before product teams can establish a strong business case for solving a problem, they need to consider if they deeply understand the associated behaviors. They have to evaluate how their users act, think, and feel, and uncover what drives their behavior. When teams stay focused on the people they are building products for, they can discover what really matters to them and why. This ensures they have the context necessary to build a product people will actually use and benefit from.
Understand The Behavior Change Involved
The first question people have when presented with a new product (or feature) is “Why does this matter?” or “Why should I care?” Often product teams spend too much time highlighting how they are changing someone’s experience. However, you are asking the user to embrace some drastic change for the sake of some uncertain improvement. It’s not easy for them to accept this. They often resist new solutions because they don’t understand their value. Therefore, you have to inform them why you want to change their existing behavior.
Since you are disrupting your user’s current experience, you have to ensure they have a good understanding of what has changed, how it has changed, and why. Whether they perceive this change positively or negatively depends on how you communicate it to them. More importantly, you need to guide them as they learn the new set of behaviors your solution requires. Getting this part right requires planning, testing, and refinement. However, this is what convinces them to stick with your product despite the initial learning curve.
Recognize The Need For Control
People want to feel in control.
The desire for control is one of the main reasons we are resistant to change. They have to abandon some degree of control to accept something new. Experiments indicate that products that offer users (or appear to offer) more control are better received. For example, a new productivity app that claims to give users “more control over their time” is more likely to resonate with them compared to one that gives them “a new way to manage their time.” Therefore, it’s often more helpful to emphasize how a solution helps achieve a greater sense of control, in some aspects of user’s lives. While the extent to which control matters to people varies between use cases, it’s still an important factor to consider when designing solutions.
People want to exert minimal self-control.
Behavior change requires self-control because people have to make a conscious decision to not follow familiar patterns. The more a solution requires the users to deviate from how they currently behave, the greater the resistance to adoption. No one likes actively forcing themselves to behave differently than they normally would. Therefore, often the best way to implement a behavior change is to incrementally introduce it or tap into existing patterns that users recognize to ease adoption and minimize friction. People gravitate toward things that feel familiar. So rather than asking users to abandon their habits, find ways to integrate them into your workflow.
Map Out The Desired User Behavior
Ensure users complete the desired actions by amplifying benefits and reducing barriers.
When you understand what affects the user while completing a target action (Ex. using a feature), you can optimize the conditions needed to drive that action. Therefore, you need to first identify a highly specific action you want someone to do and then map out every single step that the user must take. Identify every single user interaction that would need to happen within your product. While this is a common step in designing user experiences (UX flows), product teams often fail to consider the barriers and benefits associated with **each step. They assume that the final outcome of using the product (or feature) is compelling enough to convince users to complete all the necessary steps. However, in reality, you have the continuously highlight benefits and eliminate potential barriers to keep the user engaged throughout the process.
Benefits - Why should the user complete the next step in the process? If there is no clear benefit for completing a step (time saved, increased satisfaction, etc.), the user will not be motivated to continue. Even if the step is an intermediary step, there needs to be some indication of what the user has to gain by completing the process and using the product (or feature).
Barriers - What might prevent the user from completing the next step? There may be friction within the process that disincentivizes the user from moving forward (the step may be tedious, confusing, complex, etc.). Besides minimizing these frictions, there also need to be affordances (FAQs, chat support, tooltips, etc.) that help the user navigate potential issues.
Identify The Right Triggers And Rewards
Use triggers and rewards strategically to get your users to actually use your product.
A product is only valuable if people use it. Often teams get so focused on solving a problem that they neglect the behavior necessary to make the user engage with the solution. It’s like giving someone a tool but forgetting to tell them to use it when a relevant situation arises. Once they start interacting with the solution, they need to be incentivized to meaningfully engage with it and realize the value proposition. This is where triggers and rewards come in.
Triggers are cues that prompt users to take an action. They can be external (CTAs, notifications, alerts, etc.) or internal (routines, habits, etc.). Effective triggers are timely, relevant, and unobtrusive. Overused, vague, or poorly timed triggers are easy to ignore. By identifying the right moments to nudge users, products can successfully cue desired behaviors.
Rewards reinforce actions, making users more likely to repeat them. While immediate rewards spark initial engagement and deliver instant gratification, long-term incentives sustain behavior over time. Balancing immediate and long-term rewards ensures users feel motivated both in the moment and over time. This combination drives adoption and builds user loyalty.
How Duolingo Combines Triggers and Rewards
Duolingo is one of the world’s most successful learning-based businesses. They use notifications with clever, personalized messaging to pull on psychological levers (like scarcity, loss aversion, etc.). These notifications are specific, urgent, and strategically timed triggers that highlight a consequence or benefit, motivating users to take action. They have gamified the language learning process with elements such as XP, Quests, Achievements, Badges, etc. These are the immediate rewards that users earn by completing lessons, making them feel like their effort was worth it. Users feel a sense of achievement, which encourages them to return and continue their progress toward their larger goal of language learning. Additionally, streaks—a measure of consecutive days lessons were completed—tap into a psychological commitment to maintain progress. Duolingo’s clever mix of triggers and rewards demonstrates how products can build habits that sustain user engagement.
Conclusion
Great products meet users where they are and guide them toward better outcomes. Every solution introduces behavior change. People need guidance on how, where, and when to use new solutions. Furthermore, the intended user behavior needs to be easy, intuitive, and consistent with their expectations. When product teams thoughtfully incorporate user behavior into their product design and development, they can create solutions that reflect what users care about, beyond addressing their needs. It’s important to remember that human behavior is a product of a complex series of interactions. Therefore, product teams must focus on understanding the full context of people’s lives to ensure they build the right things.
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