Light and information about the universe mastery test

You don’t have to be a psychologist to know that people like being good at the things they do. In fact, competence or mastery is one of three basic human needs that need to be met for a person to be motivated according to self-determination theory. If you have a technology-based program and want to engage your users, you need to consider how to help them perform at their best.

There are at least two dimensions to this idea of performance and mastery. The first has to do with behavior within the technology. For someone to be motivated to use a technology, they have to understand how to operate it. The second dimension has to do with behavior outside of the technology. If the application is for weight loss, how does it help the person adjust diet and exercise? If it is an educational application, can the user actually practice his or her new skills? Both aspects of competence need to be met for people to be motivated to continually interact with a technology. Part of what excites people is not only doing well at something, but improving their skills over time.

Baselines. For people to improve performance, they require some indication of how they’re doing to start. Without a stick to measure against, people may not understand if they are doing poorly or well. Consider the example I used previously, about OPower customers who were able to reduce their electricity consumption by 1.5-3.5% after the simple intervention of understanding their neighbors’ power use.

Providing baselines has some dramatic effects in health behavior. For people who want to lose weight, tracking their eating and exercise can be critical. One study found that people who kept a food diary 6 or more days a week lost twice as much weight as people who rarely kept the diary (1). On the exercise side, simply using a pedometer leads to a 27% increase in the number of steps people take (2). In both cases, tracking current behaviors allows people to make a judgment about changes they might make in order to improve their outcomes.

Feedback. In order for someone to get better at something, they need information on their current performance and some indication of what it would take to improve. The feedback you offer your users could take many forms from straight-forward to whimsical. One example made famous in the book “Nudge” by Richard Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein is the stickers that look like flies placed inside the urinals at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport. Given a target, men become much more precise in where they aim. In this case, offering an anchor or baseline improves individual performance.

Another of my favorite examples of well-done feedback comes from the video game Rock Band. Players press buttons on a toy instrument in time to notes on the screen, and are given immediate feedback on whether they hit each individual note correctly by means of a flashing light. At the same time, players receive ongoing higher level feedback in terms of their total score and progress toward bonus points. Between the two metrics, players can quickly understand what’s going well and how to score even more points. Providing feedback on both individual actions and overall performance can be especially useful for getting people to improve their skills over time.

Optimal challenge. “Optimal challenge” refers to setting a level of difficulty that is not so easy that it bores someone, but also not so difficult that it frustrates them. Structuring tasks so that people progress from easier activities to more difficult ones helps create a sense of learning over time. A big challenge for product designers is understanding users’ skill levels when they first interact with the product; some ways to address this are either allowing the user to self-select their level of difficulty (for example, as in a video game or an e-learning platform), or offering an initial skill assessment and placement (again, education provides an obvious example).

An example of optimal challenge that recently hooked me is Duolingo, a free language-learning program. After you select your language, you’re put into a learning track that requires you to complete more basic lessons before moving on to more difficult ones (if you’ve got some background in the language, you can also test out of skills along the way). Even as you advance your skills, you still must return to earlier lessons to practice occasionally lest your score decrease, but you’ll find those lessons have been made more difficult based on your most recently completed units. The Duolingo experience is engaging, with over 94% of participants in one study saying they’d keep using it after 8 weeks. More impressively, it seems to be effective at teaching basic language skills. One study found that 34 hours of Duolingo provided the equivalent of a university semester of language learning. Personally, I recently scored at a third-semester level in German after working my way through the Duolingo course. Gut, nein?

Amy Bucher is a psychologist who focuses on designing programs that help people live healthier and happier lives by changing their behaviors. She is Associate Director of Behavioral Science for Wellness & Prevention, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson Company.

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