In the BJ Fogg article, Fogg argues the best way of creating persuasive design is understanding what persuades human behavior. Through the Fogg Behavior model, he explains how human behavior is influenced or increased by motivation and ability to do a target task. He also states that trigger and timing is a factor in the model as triggers and timing vary motivation. Fogg elaborators motivators (pleasure/pain, hope/fear, social acceptance/rejection), ability (time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, etc), and triggers.
Fogg thinks its important to understand human behavior to understand how to build persuasive design, and I couldn’t agree more. It makes me reflect on how much I behave is due to the way my surroundings are designed and how much human psyche is integrated within it. Perhaps we can even build better designs to persuade us into doing things that improve our lifestyles and make our lives more productive, that counteract the idea that we are fundamentally lazy by creating effortless designs to be less lazy. It also makes me reflect on how my behaviors can be changed with the change in our environments for example making it harder to achieve something that will cause me to procrastinate.
This model makes me think about the article about procrastination I read a month ago in the New York Times how we procrastinate as a form of self-harm — its a problem with “emotional regulation.” That perhaps our procrastination isn’t driven by self-control (or in other words control of our surroundings or “design” of our surroundings), but our emotions. I wonder how his model works within these areas of human behavior — such as depression, anxiety, or apathy — and how we design for those areas of human behavior, or even how some designs could affect it.