Behaviour change demands a different starting point
Most experience design briefs are really behaviour change briefs. The client asks for a better platform, a redesigned journey, or a new product, but what they actually need is for people to act differently: to start, persist, return, or follow through.
That distinction, between designing an experience and designing a behaviour change, sits at the heart of how Elemental Concept approaches customer experience and product design work. The two things look similar from the outside. They require fundamentally different foundations.
What does behaviour change design actually mean?
When the brief is behavioural, the design process needs a different kind of foundation.
Screens, journeys and features can describe an experience, but they cannot explain why someone would move from one behaviour to another, or what might stop that movement happening in practice.
For that, we used Bob Moesta’s Four Forces of Progress. The framework starts from a simple but useful premise: people do not move towards a new behaviour simply because the alternative looks better. They move when the push of their current situation and the pull of a better one become stronger than the anxieties of change and the habits of the present.
That distinction matters because most digital products overinvest in pull: clearer benefits, better messaging, smoother journeys, more engaging features. But in behaviour change work, the forces holding someone in place are often more powerful than the thing trying to move them. Design has to work with all four forces, not just make the desired future more attractive.
This is also why traditional customer experience measurement so often fails to predict behaviour change. Satisfaction scores and NPS tell you how people felt about an interaction – they do not tell you which forces are keeping them where they are, or what would cause them to move.
What are Moesta’s Four Forces of Progress?
The Four Forces of Progress, developed by Bob Moesta as part of the Jobs to Be Done framework, map the competing forces that determine whether someone moves from a current behaviour to a new one.
Push is the dissatisfaction with the current situation – the thing driving someone to consider change at all.
Pull is the appeal of the new behaviour or product – what makes it attractive.
Inertia is the weight of existing habits and the cost of leaving them behind.
Anxiety is the fear of the new – the uncertainty about whether the change will work out.
Behaviour change happens when push plus pull exceed inertia/habit plus anxiety. Understanding which of these forces dominates for your specific audience is the diagnostic that shapes everything else in the design process.
Mechanisms, not features
With that foundation, the design work itself shifts from features to mechanisms. The mechanics can be borrowed from products that have already proven them at scale, from the readiness scores of wellness wearables to the forgiving streaks of language learning apps.
What changed in our practice is how we treat those borrowed patterns.
We stopped collecting them as inspiration and started documenting them as mechanisms, each with a structured anatomy: the behavioural principle underneath it, the evidence it works, the data it needs about a person, and how it may fail for the people we are designing for.
The failure mode is the design brief
Behavioural mechanics are powerful, which is exactly why they need a duty of care. A streak motivates until the streak is broken, which could then be interpreted as failure. Social features provide proof that progress is possible, or they provide comparison that confirms someone’s worst beliefs about themselves – the difference being entirely in how that comparison is expressed. Before any mechanism is adopted, we need to understand the potential harm it could create for the person using it, and whether it materially contributes to one or more of the Four Forces of Progress.
How to test behaviour change before you build
The final shift is in how we test.
Because the value lives in the mechanism rather than the interface, most of it can be proven before anything is built. For example, a guided onboarding conversation can be run by a researcher over a fortnight. If a human applying that mechanism cannot shift behaviour, software automating it will not either. This is Lean Startup logic applied one level deeper than the feature.
The practice we have arrived at is straightforward to state. When the brief is behavioural, start by understanding the Four Forces of Progress. Then design mechanisms grounded in evidence rather than features grounded in convention, build the context that makes those mechanisms intelligent, and prove they move people before committing to build.
Behaviour change and customer experience strategy
For organisations investing in customer experience, this framework changes the question. The standard CX question is: how do we improve this journey? The behaviour change question is: what is preventing customers from making the progress they are trying to make, and what would shift that?
The second question is harder to answer but considerably more useful. It is also the question that Jobs to Be Done research is designed to answer – which is why the two practices, behaviour change design and Causal CX, sit alongside each other in how we work. Understanding what customers are trying to accomplish and what forces are acting on them is the foundation for both.
If your product or experience design work is producing better interfaces without producing different behaviour, the starting point is probably not another round of journey mapping. It is a clearer diagnosis of the forces at play.
Elemental Concept works with organisations across the globe on customer experience strategy, behaviour change design and UX research. Find out more about our experience design services.
