Enable, Don’t Drive, User Behavior

In the field of product design and user experience, there's a growing conversation and focus on the behavioral aspect of products. However, I hear the term "driving behavior" in almost every conversation. Indeed, I have used it myself in the past. But the more I reflect on this, I realise this suggests a controlling approach, where users are piloted, risking their autonomy. This approach misses a crucial factor: user agency. Empowering users means recognising and nurturing their ability to make choices, creating a transparent and consensual trade-off between a product’s benefits and its costs.

The Core Product Trade-Off

As a product is used, it provides benefits but also extracts costs from the user. These costs can include time, attention, energy, money, and the opportunity cost of not spending these resources on other things. Usage itself is an investment by the user. These costs are inevitable as users extract benefits from the product, and actually contribute to the repeat use and the competitive edge that the product gains.

The Problem with "Driving Behavior"

When we talk about "driving behavior," it implies that products control users, moving them on a predetermined path. Indeed, this is the dream of every product builder - to nail the user journey predictably and scalably. And yet, when the effort to ‘drive’ users becomes the single goal, it can make users feel like drones, stripping them of their autonomy and reducing their role to merely executing the motions in a pre-designed system. This model fails to acknowledge the importance of individual agency—the capacity of users to make choices, take actions based on their own will and really influence outcomes of importance to them.

It turns out that user agency is crucial for meaningful interaction. When users feel in control, they engage more positively with a product.

This control is a transparent trade-off between the benefits a product offers and its costs—whether cognitive (mental effort), physical, economic, or social. For example, as YouTube users upload vidoes to the product, they get its benefits - but also invest time and effort (‘sunk cost’), and develop concerns that their content will be inaccessible if the service breaks (triggering strong feelings of ‘loss aversion’). The success of the platform comes from being able to help users see and navigate this trade-off sustainably. Products that respect this balance foster sustained engagement and satisfaction.

The Psychological Phenomenon of Reactance

When users experience a lack of agency and control over the cost-benfit equation, negative consequences follow. One is the phenomenon of reactance, where users resist or rebel against perceived restrictions on their freedom. This can lead to users abandoning a product or using it in unintended ways to regain their sense of autonomy. Although reactance is not sustainable for long-term engagement, it demonstrates that users can regain control and pull back.

However, there can be other worse consequences. When users feel too driven and lose autonomy, the negative impacts can range from churn—where users leave the product for better alternatives—to more severe personal consequences, such as addiction or other undesirable behaviors due to lack of control. Every point along this spectrum has negative consequences for the company, from losing customers to potentially causing harm. A powerful example of how reactance can play out is captured in the video below, on how Etsy prioritising business outcomes over seller agency has created blowback. One seller summarised the problem as follows.

“I get that it is business, but it is so not how I want to do business.”

Enabling User Behavior - Product Development Steps

To avoid the pitfalls of driving behavior, products should focus on enabling users. This approach implies at least two major steps in product development. First, designers and developers need to understand the psychological principles behind, and impacts of, their designs - why their features work the way they do. Second, they must engage users in understanding these psychological impacts and the costs they pay to gain the product's benefits. This second step is particularly hard because of the focusing effect—drawing users' attention to how the product does what it does might shift their focus from the task they’re trying to accomplish to the behavioral mechanics and trade-offs, potentially disconnecting them from the product's workflow.

The solution is that the educational part need not be done simultaneously as the product is used. Enhancing user agency and enabling users can be built into the product design. Practices like co-creation, continuous discovery, and embedding user insights and research deeply within product teams offers the possibility to sense and address signals of user autonomy and agency issues well in time. Companies must recognise that they are competing for users' limited attention and effort spans. Engaging a user excessively to the point where they spend unhealthy amounts of time on the product is eventually unsustainable. Instead, companies need to find the sweet spot where they remain relevant to the user while knowing when to exit the user's life and workflow - if they are to earn the desire to be used again.

PS:

In an ironic example of the core point of this article, LinkedIn does not allow me to see analytics on this post because "it is visible only to my connections.” What does that even mean? Isn’t the whole point of posting on LinkedIn SO THAT the post can be seen by my connections above all else? Well, not according to LinkedIn, apparently. It is interested in spreading my article across the platform in order to fuel the network effects it relies on. In the process, my (the user’s) agency to understand how this article was received via analytics is compromised. Soon, those network effects are the main reason I want to remain on Linkedin, not because of its user experience, which leaves me looking for better alternatives to accomplish my goals.