A primer on behavioral mapping

When I first saw Nobel laureate Richard Thaler explain the hot hand fallacy in the (nearly perfect) movie The Big Short, I thought to myself, “behavior science is cool!” Five years later, I completed my master’s in the behavioral and decision sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. During my studies, I mastered one of the most important skills that I’ve been using professionally — behavioral mapping. Developing a behavioral map will equip you to launch smarter marketing campaigns, design customized interventions, and develop strategies that target people’s behaviors. In this article, I’ll provide a quick introduction to this process, an overview of the process's individual steps, and a short checklist of things you should consider when launching an intervention.

What is behavioral mapping?

Behavioral mapping is a tool that professionals like market researchers, product developers, and data scientists can use to visualize the steps that a user has to go through to take any action they want the users to take. Using the map, they can design behavioral strategies that would encourage users to take that action. Teams use behavioral maps to analyze the psychological and behavioral mechanisms that prompt consumers, employees, and clients to make certain decisions. When done right, having a behavioral map can reveal the root cause of many business challenges and can ensure your firm applies its resources to solve the right problem.

Luckily, it isn’t rocket science. There are seven simple steps in the behavioral mapping process:

Step 1: Identify the status quo behavior

What are your users currently doing? This is the behavior that needs to change. For example, if they’re skipping YouTube advertisements, then that would be the status quo behavior.

The key is to be as specific as possible. For example, when skipping YouTube advertisements, specify aspects like the number of seconds they wait before skipping, and if the behavior is consistent across mediums (laptops and mobiles). You may also think about segmenting your users and specifying the difference in behaviors across different times of the day. However, one drawback of being too specific is that your mapping may not apply to a large section of your users. So the best approach is to keep specifying until you reach a threshold number of users for whom you are creating the behavioral map.

Additionally, avoid focusing on the concept and instead focus on the action. Instead of saying that people skip advertisements, say users press the skip button at the bottom-right after five seconds.

Step 2: Identify the desired action

What do you want your users to do? This is the behavior or action that you want your user to take,, which would benefit your company. You must connect this desired action with the goals and KPIs of your firm. Encouraging your user to take this desired action should help your firm financially or non-financially (ideally both). Also, like the previous step, you must be both specific and action-focused.

Going back to the YouTube advertisement case study, perhaps, your firm wants to increase users who visit your website, and your advertisement has a clear call-to-action at the end which you want them to follow. Then the desired behavior is for users to respond to that call-to-action.

Step 3: Brainstorm the intermediate steps

In this step, your team must brainstorm the intermediate steps that the user must take between the status quo behavior and the desired behavior. The key skill here is empathy. Put yourself in the user’s shoes and understand what must happen for the user to take the desired action.

By the end, you should have a path that you want the users to follow. Consider every step, no matter how minor. You can never have a trivial step because every tiny decision that the user has to make can be a potential barrier.

Sometimes, it may be helpful to go backward from the desired behavior to the status quo behavior. Also, you may have branches of action that may lead elsewhere. These branches may exist because of differences in user-personas. But it is always useful to have a central path that represents the average user and build your solutions for that user.

Let’s consider an oversimplified example in our case study for the sake of explanation. The intermediate steps would be (i) the user doesn’t press the skip button and decides to wait for a few more seconds to watch the advertisement, and (ii) the user watches the entire advertisement and reaches the call-to-action (CTA).

Step 4: Identify barriers for each step

Users at every step have reasons that prevent them from taking the next step, known as barriers. Again, these barriers have to be action-focused and specific. Also, each step can have multiple barriers. Your team has to prioritize which barrier they want to address first.

One of the best ways to understand what motivates people from moving forward in your map is to conduct surveys and ask users directly. Ask what stopped them from taking a step you wanted them to take. However, in many situations, what people think they would do rarely coincides with what they actually do — know as the intention-action gap. So use their responses with a grain of salt.

For example, a possible reason for the user to decide not to wait and instead skip the advertisement could be that they did not find first five seconds of the advertisement interesting. Similarly, a barrier preventing the user from watching the entire advertisement could be that they don’t think the advertisement will have a rewarding payoff at the end. Finally, too many CTAs at the end may be overwhelming for users, and so they can’t choose any of the options.

Step 5: Connecting barriers with behavioral frictions

This step is closely linked to step 4 and requires you to connect each barrier you’ve identified with a behavior science bias or heuristic (known as frictions) that can be easily diagnosed later. This may be among the more involved steps and requires the expertise of a behavioral scientist.

Ideally, these frictions are informed by literature in the behavioral sciences. A good method is to review research papers and learn what science has to say about behavioral mechanisms that prevent taking specific actions. Books like Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler are great sources to understand these frictions.

For example, if your YouTube advertisement encourages people to get vaccinated, then a useful model that can be handy is the transtheoretical model of health behavior change. Other industries and functions may have their own behavioral models, which may be worth exploring.

In our case study, one possible behavior science concept linked to people not finding content interesting is ambiguity aversion. Similarly, people's tendency to avoid completing a task because it may not have a satisfactory conclusion is known as anticipated regret. Finally, the phenomenon that people fail to make a definite choice if too many choices are presented to them is known as choice overload.

Step 6: Connecting frictions with behavioral fuels

Linked to each friction are potential behavioral fuels, which are behavior science-based strategies that have the opposite effect of frictions. These strategies encourage users to move forward in your behavioral map. Like frictions, these fuels can be found in behavior science literature and would require the assistance of a behavioral scientist who is familiar with the relevant theory available.

Typically, these fuels tackle one of these behavioral drivers of decision-making — susceptibility to social influences, acceptance of information, emotional drivers, obedience to regulations, influence by the presentation of choices, and receptiveness to material incentives like reward points and discounts.

For example, to tackle ambiguity aversion, an effective strategy documented by experts is to make one’s objectives clear as early as possible. So, the advertisement should clarify its purpose within the first five seconds before users can skip. Likewise, one can leverage the Zeigarnik Effect — the tendency to remember incomplete tasks more easily than complete tasks—by making the unseen part of the advertisement more salient using countdown timers and progress bars. Finally, a simple strategy to manage choice overload is to reduce the number of choices you present to your users and make the option you want them to select more attractive using techniques like the decoy effect.

Step 7: Planning an implementation strategy

By this stage, you will have a complete behavioral map with all necessary components — barriers, frictions, and fuels. Your team must now identify the fuel that can have the maximum impact and plan your intervention around that fuel. To plan an implementation strategy, you need to make some important decisions, like:

Concluding thoughts

Developing a behavioral map for your ‘average’ user can be a fruitful task. Your firm can plan initiatives that are better targeted at specific customer and client behaviors. This focus on innate motivations of people will ensure that your firm uses its resources smartly for maximum impact. With more people-focused initiatives, you have a better chance at helping your customers live better lives.