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 matter what features you have if people don't use them to accomplish a goal. When people achieve a goal using your product that they were previously struggling to achieve on their own, then you've won their User Involvement. This creates a positive feedback loop: they'll behave in ways that enable them to accomplish their goals and accomplishing the goals reinforces the value of their current style of usage. Designing for user involvement has positive effects on adoption, retention, and virality.
Products are fundamentally voluntary. People can always choose to use the product, use an alternative, or use nothing at all. In fact, not using your product is a consumer's default state of being, and you’re trying to get them to do something different in using your product. The goal of behavioral product strategy is to turn usage of your product into a default behavior for certain goals.
This is where behavioral science proves its worth for product decisions. By understanding users and their behavior through these lenses, we are able to
- Design a product that people want to use
- Facilitate, encourage, and enable them to use the product to its fullest potential to accomplish the goals that they have.