I'm flexible in the ways I work with clients. Below is not an exhaustive list of possibilities, though there are a few patterns that my engagements tend to follow. I generally work to improve adoption or retention through improving User InvolvementUser Involvement
Imagine purchasing a gym membership in order to lose weight or grow more muscular. Having a gym membership is not enough on its own! In order to successfully accomplish that goal, you would need to work out regularly on the right muscle groups. You might have a higher likelihood of success if you participate in exercise classes or hire a personal trainer. Your outcomes are shaped by your own behavior in the gym.

User involvement is defined by the set of user behaviors that lead to experienci.... See: Designing for user involvement has positive effects on adoption, retention, and viralityDesigning for user involvement has positive effects on adoption, retention, and virality
Adoption


The most successful app adoptions come from a project because that gives users the motivation to learn functionalities in the context of when they are useful and persist through failures. Adoption requires a baseline of user involvement in order to overcome inertia. Designing for user involvement allows you to Speak to the user with a shared vocabulary. People design their own experience in an app through their actions, so designing for User Involvement early on means that the user...

People who get to this point often like to see TestimonialsTestimonials
Adam Taylor
Cofounder and CEO of Fabriq

"These days, it's all too easy to think you’re implementing effective behavioral design principles after reading a few articles, or a one-off conversation with someone who’s “done it before”, but Rob provides the kind of expertise that product design teams are unlikely to possess in-house, even if they are well schooled in UI/UX/CX. Rob’s contribution to our “goal & reward” system redesign was not only a crucial correction to our process and the di.... Here's one from Adam Taylor, CEO of Fabriq:

"These days, it's all too easy to think you’re implementing effective behavioral design principles after reading a few articles, or a one-off conversation with someone who’s “done it before”, but Rob provides the kind of expertise that product design teams are unlikely to possess in-house, even if they are well schooled in UI/UX/CX. Rob’s contribution to our “goal & reward” system redesign was not only a crucial correction to our process and the direction we took the work, but it was an educational opportunity for our team(s) that gave us additional lenses through which to view our work that will pay dividends down the line.”

I initially performed a behavioral audit of Fabriq, analyzing its behavioral influence over its users in the context of company goals, identifying key opportunities and frictions. Afterwards, we signed a six month retainer. We cycle between strategizing product decisions and implementing/iterating, where I support them along the way. At the end of those six months, we renewed the engagement.

Please feel free to email me directly if you would like to work together: rob@influenceinsights.io

We usually start with discovery

This helps us understand the ways that we can work together long term. Empowered with shared This often comes in the form of a behavioral audit or a workshop (of varying degrees of formality).

Engagement type: UX / Product Audit, with a focus on Continuous onboardingContinuous onboarding
Horizontal products like Notion, Airtable, Excel, and Obsidian are all powerful/flexible and require learning and expansion of use cases over time to wrap your head around them. Given that, why do they only teach people how to use the app for the first few minutes?

It's not just horizontal products though. Continuous Onboarding applies to most apps that aren't just "open, press a button, and close." Are you continuing to add features over time that would benefit users that are more than a mo... or mental modelmental model

In the behavioral audit, I'll analyze your product and talk with you and members of your team about business and user objectives to gain an impression of your product. After a few weeks, you will receive a report of how your product is currently influencing user behavior and directions to explore for a more goal-driven Behavioral Product StrategyBehavioral Product Strategy
The way a product is designed shapes the way that people use it. Every app is designed for behavior change, intentionally or unintentionally, so the questions that drive behavioral product strategy must be addressed. User Involvement is a set of metrics whose success is defined by the combination of user behaviors that contribute towards creating a desirable outcome. Behavioral product strategy is making product decisions to influence user behavior and improve user involvement.

It doesn't ma....

Engagement type: Workshop

In a workshop, my goal is to orient you and your team around the right questions to begin developing a behavioral product strategy. One example of this is a workshop where we Use a badging system as a method of actionable user researchUse a badging system as a method of actionable user research
If you have a high quality badging/achievements system, then that means you know what the user goals are, you can recognize when those goals are accomplished, and your app notices when the user behavior is bringing the user closer to accomplishing their goal.

The three most important questions to ask of a badging system:

What are the user's goals?
What signals progress to the user/company?
What signals failure along the process of goal achievement?
What signals success to the user/c.... Soon afterwards, you'll receive a summary of what I believe the main takeaways should be.

Occasionally, it will be clear through discussion that your organization has unique needs. In these cases, I generate customized workshops of varying degrees of formality from my Lenses of behavioral science and game design principlesLenses of behavioral science and game design principles
I like to Learn by going up and down the ladder of abstraction. One of the main ways that I do this is through developing and testing lenses.

Whenever I find (or come up with my own) frameworks or principles of behavioral influence in a paper, game, or my own practice that I feel may be "generalizable" in some sense, I turn them into a series of abstract questions that I can ask myself across situations. This allows me to solve future problems with my present work and encode knowledge. As I ... that are relevant to your situation. These allow us to combine my knowledge of behavioral influence with you and your team's knowledge of your company's context.

The next engagement is based on what we uncover in exploration

From the first engagement, it tends to be clear to me what our next steps will be.

Engagement Type: Retainer

The most flexible type of engagement is a retainer. This is for teams that work fast on dynamically changing priorities. This includes includes ongoing discussion to hone an evolving strategy in response to a dynamic situation, as well as stewardship and commentary over time on initiatives to implement said strategy. As Every app is designed for behavior change, intentionally or unintentionallyEvery app is designed for behavior change, intentionally or unintentionally
As described in The Kurt Lewin Equation, people’s behavior is influenced by the relationship between who they are and the context of their situation. While the user is paying attention, the app controls a portion of the user’s digital context. As such, app design exerts significant influence over user behavior, whether you designed it intentionally with this purpose in mind or not.

The large majority of behavioral science research can effectively be summarized as “here’s how this environment..., my role here is to make sure you and your team are thinking through the proper questions in the right way to influence user behavior intentionally.

Engagement Type: Project

It will often be the case that the exploration engagement reveals a well-defined project where you would want me in a more involved role. An example of this would include my work with GuidedTrack, where I developed plans for their pre-launch onboarding, validated those plans through user research, iterated, and am helping develop product functionalities that will make the app fundamentally easier to learn.

Engagement Type: Workshop Series

One type of engagement that I have been curious to explore more is a series of tailored educational workshops with the dual goal of maximizing your product and facilitating team growth. Learning through doing is the best way to learn how behavioral science and game design insights work in your specific context. This would follow a general cycle of learning about the company's current challenges, finding the relevant Lenses of behavioral science and game design principlesLenses of behavioral science and game design principles
I like to Learn by going up and down the ladder of abstraction. One of the main ways that I do this is through developing and testing lenses.

Whenever I find (or come up with my own) frameworks or principles of behavioral influence in a paper, game, or my own practice that I feel may be "generalizable" in some sense, I turn them into a series of abstract questions that I can ask myself across situations. This allows me to solve future problems with my present work and encode knowledge. As I ..., facilitating a workshop with the team, and then I would review and help hone the ideas to be implemented.