Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

A few posts ago, I talked about the pseudo-formula :

Behavior = function(people, environment).

Succinctly, to elicit a certain behavior you can manipulate the environmental variables. People are who they are and it's hard to coerce them in to behaving a certain way.

When I wrote that original post, I was thinking mostly about functionality. You can change the features you offer, such that you channel people's behavior. If a certain behavior is desirable, then build out tools to support it.

But is that enough?

On a recent project, I was thinking about how to subtly encourage people to complete an action. The behavior we wanted was engagement: reading content on a site and completing certain activities. Drawing from patterns used on LinkedIn and online dating sites, we settled on a progress bar to encourage certain types of interaction. Surprisingly enough, knowing that you're "incomplete" is an incentive to perform the next suggested action. This is especially true if that action substantially changes the completeness.

But on thing still nagged at me. The site was designed to be very personal. The progress bar, on the other hand is a bit cold. It unemotionally calculates the height of a bar based on elementary math. So I started thinking. People tend to be attracted to faces. What if the progress bar was humanized a bit?

Below are four comparisons of the same data. The first is the pure math, where completeness is expressed as a percentage. The second is a typical thermometer, which shows the completion differential. The third and fourth make this a bit more human. The third simply adds features, giving it more personality and expressive qualities. The fourth takes a static image and brings it out of the blur and into clarity.

With the last two, you lose a bit of the differential--i.e. your degree of completeness. But in the process, I think, you gain something a bit more humane and ludic.

What do you think?