We spotted an interesting statement by the “Father of Behaviour Design”, BJ Fogg:
“For somebody to do something – whether it’s buying a car, checking an email, or doing 20 press-ups – three things must happen at once.
The person must want to do it, they must be able to, and they must be prompted to do it.
A trigger – the prompt for the action – is effective only when the person is highly motivated, or the task is very easy. If the task is hard, people end up frustrated; if they’re not motivated, they get annoyed.”
See Ian Leslie’s article “The scientists who make apps addictive“.
If we want users to read Help text instead of calling the support line, then we maybe we need to meet those three criteria.
We can assume the user is motivated to fix their problem.
We can write instructions that are clear enough to make them able to solve the problem.
Where some applications fall down is they don’t prompt the user to read the online Help. The link to the Help text is often tucked away in the right hand corner of the screen.
Instead, we could put some of the Help text into the User Interface or the dialog screens, and we could prompt the user to follow a link to more information. Doing this could get users to read the online Help rather than call support.
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