In August, we shared with you our submissions for SXSW 2014. Here we are eight months later and I couldn’t be happier to share that all of your support paid off. Right now, I’m in Austin taking in the sights and sounds of SXSW and getting ready for my very first SXSW Interactive session, titled “Time: The Invisible Design Medium.”
During the session, I will be discussing a new design process I developed at EchoUser called the CAPTivate Framework. It’s a four-step design framework to help interaction designers and developers incorporate the most important medium for their users, time.
Not taking a user-centered design approach to engagement too often leads to interrupted users and missed opportunities for interaction. That’s why I created the CAPTivate Framework. As interaction designers, we have the responsibility and opportunity to redesign how people spend their time. It’s time…and, we take that seriously.
In case you’re not in Austin but want to learn more about the CAPTivate Framework and how designers can use it, here’s a breakdown:
Step 1: Choose an Activity
Write down all the activities someone does to engage with your service. Once your list is created, pick an activity you want users to engage in more frequently.
Step 2: Determine its Context
With your selected activity in mind, we then need to map that activity to time. To do this, identify all the moments in the user’s life that they might engage in that activity -- can they do it at home, at the office, in transit, when they’re talking with their significant other? These are all contexts in which the activity could take place. Brainstorm as many as possible and choose the one you want to target with your design.
Now you’re armed with your activity and context, and you are ready to select a target for engagement. For example, you could be targeting exercise at home, or writing documents at the office.
Once you have an engagement target, you need to think about how you can add features to your product or service to influence people to more frequently engage in the activity/context you are focusing on in your design. That’s where plans and triggers come in. But first, an interlude to consider barriers...
Interlude: Identify Barriers (and design ways to overcome them)
Taking a page from our existing user-centered design playbook, your next step is to identify the barriers that are preventing users from engaging in your target activity/context at the frequency that your business and your users desire.
Some barriers are ability barriers, such as not knowing a good home exercise routine or having exercise equipment at home. In this case, providing tools and information could remove the barrier and increase the frequency of engagement.
Some barriers are motivation barriers. Pinspiration features are a great way to increase motivation, as are social features. With a complete view of context, including barriers that may need to be addressed, we can move on to Step 3.
Step 3: Identify Triggers (and design new ones)
Triggers are events that cause a person to switch activities within a certain context. It could be a notification, or something more subtle.
According to Stanford Professor BJ Fogg’s Behavioral Model, B=MAT. Behavior is a function of motivation, ability and triggers. So once you have removed ability and motivation barriers, all you have left to do is trigger the user to get them to do your target behavior.
Step 4: Identify Plans (and redesign planning activities)
Plans are activities that people do ahead of time that result in them switching from one context or another -- for example, an IM conversation with a friend is a planning activity that could determine where those two people end up in the evening: they could end up at a restaurant, a movie theater, a gym, or some other “context.” If you’re working on a restaurant-oriented service or an exercise-oriented service, there’s a lot at stake for you in that IM conversation, so designing that planning moment is important for increasing your engagement.
When to Design for Engagement
You can use the CAPTivate Framework exercise when you’re designing new features, so you’re designing for increased engagement right out the gate, or you can do it later when you’re optimizing existing features for growth.
If you’re at SXSW and want to learn more, I hope you’ll be able to attend my session tomorrow. You can find all details here. Those of you who took this year off can follow along with the hashtag #TimeDesign.
Let me know your thoughts on the new CAPTivate Framework in the comments below or on Twitter, @boazgurdin and @Echouser.
