Interview: Brian Cugelman, Digital Behavior Change Psychologist

What role does authenticity play when designing for behavior change?
A lot of people who talk about persuasive design sometimes think other people are dumb. I don’t think those people have a lot of experience. It’s very hard to get people to do anything. Most people are smart and most people can tell when they’re being conned. Of course, online fraud is pretty big, so some people do fall for it. But generally it’s pretty hard to trick people.

I think one of the great books that’s misrepresented is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People. People think that’s a book about manipulation, but Dale Carnegie argues that you can only flatter someone if you actually admire his or her quality.

The book is really about personal development. Dale Carnegie states that you are influential because you earned it with people, by being an honest and sincere person, and by using good tactics along the way, but essentially by being honest. So the trick is to show sincerity and authenticity. There is a lot of technical ways we can do that, starting by avoiding bad clip-art. It’s about showing your true colors, your true personality, and not trying to be what you are not.

Do some persuasive principles go in the way of authenticity?
Yeah. If you go a little too hard on some of the sales techniques it can be a problem.

To my knowledge, most of the techniques in store sales actually operate exactly the same in digital environments. I find that when I overdo those, things start to look a little cheap. If you overdo it, you start to look like a hustle. So yes, you can definitely overdo it.

For example, many people buy a sports app and stop using them along they way, but have still learned a lesson. They buy a FitBit or any accelerometer technology, and set the goal of doing 10.000 steps a day. The device shows you, that you are only doing 3.000 steps a day, so you change your routines and get up to 7.000 steps. By that point you haven’t completed your goal, but you now know what 7.000 steps feel like. Once you know what it feels like, you can usually maintain the routine as you now have a sense of how it feels.

Those who stay with a program receive the benefits. Those who drop out, but have learned something, might continue on their own. However, you also have those who just drop out without that much happening.

Most of the research do not go into detail about what happens when people drop out. A lot of the classic selling and marketing models like AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action) should probably be “Attention, Interest, Desire, Relapse, Uninterested, No-longer-paying-attention”. These steps are included in some of the more popular health models and it makes sense.

I think because of that, a lot of marketers, UI designers, and product developers, don’t think about what we should do when people leave the program and the strategies for bringing them back in.

There is good advice for that, from the health field, which we can bring in. Normally in health, if somebody falls off the band-wagon, the original things that motivated them are brought back in their faces to get them on that wagon again. So they are basically reintroducing motivation.

Another scenario is that somebody had a problem because of their skills, efficacy, or because the challenge was too hard. In this case, you help them get back in by helping them. By making it easier or facilitating their journey.

So there are two ways of tackling users who drop out: Deal with the motivation problem or deal with the barrier problem.

How do you apply your techniques to selling in the digital sphere?
I think a landing page should be based on a sales person. It should have the personality of a really good sales person. Some people think that a high presure hustle page is a good sale page. I disagree. I think of the high-presure sales page is a hustle. It is like going into a shop and being cornered by a pushy sales person who haunts you down – people want to avoid that.

Learn more

Learn more about the work of Brian Cugelman by visiting his personal website cugelman.com, or book a seat in one of his upcoming workshops at alterspark.com.