Lessons

Lesson Info

The Fogg Behavior Model and how it Applies to Good Landing Page Design

How do you design fans and welcome back everything we've spoken about up until now essentially comes down to influencing people's behavior regardless of what conversion action you're tracking if it's a sailor to form. Ultimately what you're trying to do is get a person to act or behave in a certain way on your website or landing pages. That's what this is all about. And because at a very fundamental level, forget about all the techniques for a second. Forget about all the best practices for a second. Forget about the the buying funnel for a second at its most base level. What we're talking about is influencing human behavior. So because of that it's worthwhile spending a few minutes on discussing some of the core components that influence human behavior and there's no behavioral formula that is more elegant, that is more simple as the fogg behavior model. So let's talk about the fog behavioral model for a minute. It was introduced by BJ Fogg who is a stanford professor. He's an author,...

he's a behavioral scientist um and he also founded the persuasive technology lab at stanford University. So he's he knows what he's talking about. His behavioral model um is accepted in the field as one of the most trusted and one of the most significant behavioral models. When I was taking my Master's degree in industrial psychology. This was the primary behavior model that that we focused on when learning about human motivation and human behavior. I want to do a quick exercise with you first to help illustrate exactly what the fog behavioral model is. Okay, now say your home at night, right? You're on your couch. It's dark out. It's late and your doorbell rings, okay? And you don't get up to answer the door. Why not come up with a reason? Right down. A couple of reasons right now. Just pause, take out a piece of paper. Keep them in your head right down. A few reasons why you might not have answered the door. I'll wait. Okay. Hopefully you have a couple of reasons. Did you say something like I'm scared of who it might be? I'm scared that it's a, it's a, it's a serial killer at my door. That's why I didn't go to answer the door. Okay. You might have said something like, um, I know it's my wife and she always rings the doorbell even though she has keys just to see if I'm a dedicated husband and I finally snapped and I'm not answering the door anymore. Nothing to do with me. That's awkward. But you might have said that you were in the shower. Um, or you might have said that your brother who's morbidly obese was sitting on you and you just couldn't get up to answer the door, right? So these are all different reasons. So some of those reasons were lacking in motivation. The reason why you did not respond to the trigger. I'm gonna start using these terms because these are all essential terms of the fog behavior the fogg behavior model. The reason why I didn't respond to that trigger of the doorbell ringing. It might have been because I lacked the motivation, right? I was scared of the serial killer at the door or I wasn't gonna go answer the door from my wife or my husband. I lacked the motivation. You might have been in the shower, you might have been under a really heavy sibling and you lack the ability. Right? So there in the fog behavioral model, it's very simple and very elegant. B equals mm at the same time. Okay behavior can occur when three things converge in the person at the exact same time. Em you need motivation. You need motivation. You need to be motivated to act. If any one of these three elements are missing, there's no behavior A. You need ability, You need to be able to actually carry out that behavior t is trigger something has to spark or initiate that behavior. In our example, the doorbell is the trigger and in order for me to get up and answer the door, I need to have the ability and I have to be motivated to actually go and do that behavior. Every behavior. Every action a person can take, every action a person takes could be stripped down to these three core components. If one of them are missing, that behavior will not occur. B. J. Fogg does a lot of research when it comes to design and how to design websites, how to design products, how to design a corporate structure with regards to this be matt behavior equals motivation, ability and trigger at the same moment. And we could take a look at what the fog behavioral model looks like in the context of good design. Right? So you have a vertical axis and a horizontal axis over here. Okay, so let's say on the horizontal access we have motivation. So there's a scale, right? There's a continuum, there's a continuum of motivation. It could be you could a person could be very unmotivated. Right? So I could be low on motivation and I can go all the way to being hi in motivation. Right on the horizontal access access. Let's say we have ability, right? It could be very hard. The task can be very hard. The proposed behavior could be very hard or it could be very easy. Right? That's the continuum for ability. And the behavioral model is is plotted like this, you have an action line that runs like so and this is called an action line. Now it's it's really straightforward. Your triggers are going to be successful over here. Right? So triggers will work and under the action line, your triggers are gonna fail and there will be no behavior triggers fail over here and triggers work above the action line over here. Now this is very important for for web usability. Right? So say we have a person who is let's say highly motivated but it might be pretty difficult, right? So there's it's it's it's a hard task, but they're highly motivated. You can have a person who over here, there's a low level of motivation, but it's a very easy task to accomplish. Once again, the behavior will, behavior, will will happen. The trigger is gonna work whatever trigger you provide will work down here, you could have low motivation and it's hard, Right? So your trigger is gonna fail, it could be easy and the person is not motivated and and it will fail. Right? So this is very, very important when it comes to understanding how people are moved to behave in general and how to design effectively around that. Let's talk about the different types of motivation, right? There's there's in the fogg behavior model, there are three primary types of motivation. You have sensation, anticipation and social social cohesion, anticipation is basically the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain, right? Seeking pleasure, avoiding pain. Typically, research has shown that avoiding pain tends to be more of an effective motivational factor than seeking pleasure. Then you have anticipation. Right? So, I'm motivated to do something, I'm motivated to behave in a way that's going to produce some sort of desirable, desirable result. Not necessarily the seeking the pleasure, but just the sense of anticipation is a very, very strong motivational factor. And then you have social cohesion, people want to be part of a group, people want to do things that create a sense of group identity, Right? A lot of social circles are built around things that we share in common, right? So people are motivated to act in a way that will create a sense of social cohesion. Those are the three primary types of things that will motivate people ability is much more straightforward, right? How do you increase ability? Well, you could you could train somebody, right? So if you train, let's say something is tran, that's how you train somebody, right? So you train somebody as you train them, the ability to accomplish a difficult task goes up. Now that's problematic for web design because you're not going to train people to no one's coming to your website and is interested in learning how to navigate your site, how to you're the product details are so complicated, right? That's not gonna happen. Or if you're asking them to do a task. If you're asking them to convert in a way, like we said, if you make my checkout process too difficult, I'm not gonna there shouldn't have to be a user guide, right? People are not interested in being trained. So what does BJ fogg always talk about when it comes to creating behaviors out of perceived difficult tasks, Right? Your product might be complicated, You might want somebody to do something which they perceive in terms of their ability, is you make it simpler? As you increase simplicity, you increase ability and you decrease perceived difficulty. Okay that's huge. As you increase the simplicity of your conversion action. As you increase the simplicity of your landing pages you decrease the perceived difficulty of the conversion action that you want your visitors to take. That's crucial when it comes to understanding um good lining pages on it. Now let's talk about triggers for a second. What color do we have left? Let's do something. Let's let's take green. Okay you read let's talk about triggers. There's three different types of triggers and this is really the most important concept we're gonna talk about here because your triggers are your calls to actions it's the text inside your button. Right? Please tell me that you don't have the words submit by any of your forms. Right? Of course not. Um If you do you're gonna have to change that real quick. So you have triggers. There's three different main types of triggers. Okay You have and this is all this I'm not making this stuff up. This is all the fogg behavior model. You have one facility taters. Okay you have signals and you have sparks. Okay really? The Sparks should be above signals but it's okay. Facilitators work. Well when the visitor is high in motivation but low in P. D. Perceived difficulty. Right so facilitators for a user who's motivated they want to they want to engage with your product but they think it might be very expensive. I might not be able to buy it or this sounds very complicated. You sell a service that sounds very difficult to really understand what it is you do if I'm going to sign up with you as a personal injury lawyer, it looks like I might have to go through lots and lots of paperwork. I'm nervous about all the different phone calls are gonna have to take, I'm nervous about have to drive into your office. Uh, so the facilitator calls to action on your site have to be making it look easy, right? It's really easy. Just fill out a form and we're gonna take care of everything for you, right? You're not, you're not selling the product because the facilitator trigger is where you have motivation, right? The users motivated already, they want your service, but they just think it's very difficult, Right? It's it's a, it's hard, right? It's it's a hard task. You know, so your, your calls to action and you're supporting copy, we should talk about why this is simple, why? It's really easy, why? It's not as difficult as you think it's going to be and then make the navigation, make the, the actual copy of your site, the actual structure of your site. Also simple to navigate. We're gonna skip signals for now because that's the third one and then you have Sparks, right? So Sparks is just the opposite Sparks is where a person is low on motivation, right? But high on perceived difficulty of perceived ability. Right? He thinks that this is an easy task. Easy task, no big deal. And you want me to submit a form, You want me to sign up for my newsletter? Great example. But I just don't really not so motivated. Right? So I come to your blog, I'm about to leave. I gotta pop over, sign up for my newsletter. It's easy. All you gotta do is put my email address in, but I honestly don't want to read or get emails from you. Okay, so low and motivation. So your calls to action Should be increasing motivation and showing value in signing up for my newsletter. So sign up for my newsletter and you're going to receive 30% off your next purchase or share this page on social media and I'm going to email you a 70 page blueprint for how to create incredibly effective Facebook fan pages. Right? So you're gonna increase value and you're gonna increase motivation. So that's what a spark trigger could do. The important thing is, is not to screw this up, right? Because when you try to motivate somebody who's already motivated, it's a turn off. If you try to make a task look easy when the task is already easy, it's a turn off. So for example, if you're gonna sign up for my newsletter and the call to action will be, hey sign up for my newsletter. It's really, really easy. All you gotta do is put your email address. It's so simple. So that's like, yeah, I get it simple. That's not my problem. My problem is I don't want to be on your, your email list. Right? So you got to talk in a way that increases motivation and not talk in a way that increases the simplicity. And the flip side is true by the facilitator trigger if your customers are highly motivated to buy what you have, but they feel that it's hard. This is a classic thing, right? Leasing a car, anybody is your, your average customer who's gonna lease a car is highly motivated. Right? I just leased a car. I was highly motivated. It was exciting process and look at all the different models I wanted to buy. I was checking out, you know, different interiors, different color schemes, all those different things. The problem was that they were all a little freaking expensive. Right? So the copy that, that was going to appeal to me, I was going to chez, why? Oh, you could afford it. We have this option. You can get it a little cheaper if you don't have the heated steering wheel, whatever it is. Right? So I didn't need to be motivated. I needed to be, I needed more perceived ability to lease that car. Right now you have the signals, signals is just, it's just, it's just vanilla. Oftentimes your conversion action is pretty straightforward. Right? There's, there's not, there's, there's no major lack of motivation and there's no, you know, particularly low level of perceived difficulty or high level of perceived difficulty. So in those instances, which is probably what's typical for simple conversion actions, like viewing a key page or viewing the pricing page or signing up for a newsletter. There's for the, for the right visitor, they'll be sufficiently motivated and there's, there's, there's, it's easy task. It's an easy task. So you just need a signal like this is where you could do it. Here's a button, click this button, this is how you're going to be on our email list. This is how you're gonna get these, these different benefits. It could be a pretty straight forward button um, or pretty straightforward call to action. So you have facilitator signals and sparks. Those are the three main types of triggers that that effect, motivation, that effect, um, perceived ability, perceived difficulty, Right? Those are um, the core components of the fogg behavior model and how they relate to web design. So remember every behavior, especially every behavior on your website and landing pages needs these three components to happen, you need to have motivation. You need to have ability, perceived ability and you need to have a trigger. Right? So very straightforward if there's no button, if there's no download. Now call to action, there's no way for them to download, right? That's the trigger. But then you need to have these other 22 concepts, these core components, the motivation and the ability and the most important thing to really remember as you write. And as we design, we're gonna talk about the design of calls to action later on in the course. But the important thing to remember are the three different types of triggers, how you talk to your people, how you try to facilitate your people. Is it a facilitator, trigger, a signal trigger or a spark trigger? And that's gonna help you get direction on how you should write the copy on your page and how you should design your calls to action. So the important thing is for you to be able to kind of get into the heads of your typical website visitor? The types of people coming to your site. Do you sell something which is a complicated B. Two B. Service. Do you sell even complicated B two C. Service? Are your products simple products or complicated products are unique and and kind of well known or do you sell something rare? A little bit more exquisite. Little bit more sophisticated needs more explanation. What are the struggles of the people coming to your site? Are people just not motivated because they're just not. They're not excited enough about what you sell or is what you sell expensive or? The information is difficult to understand. So what are what are the things that your visitors struggle with that's important to know because that's gonna help you understand how to design your calls to action. And it will help you understand how to influence your visitor's behavior in a way that will ultimately increase the revenue from your landing pages and website. So the quick exercise for the end of this lecture on the on the fogg behavior model is to simply think about that right right down on a piece of paper. What are people struggling with when they come to my website? Are they lacking motivation or are they lacking um perceived ability to convert to understand what I sell to interact with my brand? If so, or are they lacking in both? And if so, what can I do? How can I speak in a way that helps either influence motivation or influences ability and perceived ability. So my triggers will be effective to get my website visitors to convert. So I hope you thought this is as exciting as I think it is. I think it's a beautifully elegant and simple model for human behavior. I really enjoyed it. Um, it's 100% pertinent and relevant to good and effective website design and I will see you very soon in the next lecture. Don't forget to do your exercise