Can innovation make you lose weight? Innovation as behavioral change catalyst.

Since July I lost 30lbs.

I did not starve myself, I did not run 20mi every day and no, I did not have cosmetic surgery. What I did was experience user centric innovation. I will explain what I mean by that and introduce what is possibly a broader view on innovation at the same time.

User Centric Innovation as Behavioral Change Catalyst

Consider innovation for products or services that interact with end users. What a new product or a new service really does is be a catalyst for a behavioral change in the user. When cars were introduced, they (indeed) altered our behavior when it comes to mobility. When the Internet was introduced it changed the way we looked for information. Pretty much all innovative consumer products and office products fit this definition. They are behavioral catalysts first, tools second.

A sample subset: Mobile persuasion

This is how it all started, with a mobile app that indeed persuaded me to change my behavior. Let's go in order. First I am borrowing the term “mobile persuasion” from Prof. Fogg with Stanford University. The first time I was exposed to the concept of how the interaction with mobile technology changes our behavior was back in 2007 when I attended the first event at Stanford named, you guessed it, Mobile Persuasion 2007. At the time it was harder to really imagine how much mobile computing can affect our lives. Mobile phones had great potential back then but limited ability to unleash it. We just could not see how much we were being held hostages by the status quo. For example during the event Prof. Fogg asked us (the audience) to swap cell phones with the person next to us and to send each other an SMS. Back then each device had its own design, its own concept of user interface, its own "best practice". The result? Pretty much nobody was able to use the other person cell phone on a moment notice. It was an eye opening moment for many, author included. Today we are finally moving away from the mobile platform fragmentation and most smart phones follow very similar UX guidelines. Moreover, today we know that smart phones can be a Swiss army knife of our daily lifes thanks to hundreds of thousands of small software applications. Who can forget the sound bite:"there is an app for that!" We have come to expect that smart phones can let us access email, surf the web, post a photo on FB or an update on Twitter. Now what?

Unleashing the potential of mobile persuasion

Early last year I decided that my weight was getting out of control and I started a more rigorous exercise routine and what I though was an healthier eating habit. To no big surprise it did not work, not by any measurable amount. By word of mouth I learned about an app for the iPhone called LoseIt that helped someone I knew lose 10lb. That number got my attention so I downloaded it. As the name eloquently suggests, it is meant to help you lose weight. How? By helping you count calories.

Calories counting, big deal!

I know, calories counting has been around for a long time, so what is different? The difference is a convergence of technology that enabled behavioral changes much more effortlessly than before:

1. I did not have to go anywhere to get the calorie counter tool I needed, it was readily available to me on a device I carry with me all the times.

2. it cost me nothing to try it, there was no barrier to entry

3. the tool made it significantly easier for me to experience this new behavior. It was right there whenever I had to decide what to eat or how much of it. It made the experience bearable if not “cool”.

Cool is a good thing when it comes to new ventures since it bolsters user adoption. Not because I say so, Geoffrey Moore said so. But I digress.

To be honest I am not even counting calories that much, I am just ball parking it. Chances are that my numbers are off by more than 10%. But it worked. I still lost 30lb and counting. How? Or more importantly, why did I lose weight so effortlessly this time?

The How

How is relatively simple. One of the golden rules of science is that if you cannot measure a problem, you cannot solve it. The moment I was able to measure my "problem", that is the amount of calories I was consuming, I was able to "solve" it by making smarter choices and

eventually eat less nearly effortlessly (more on this shortly). What this specific innovation (the iPhone+LoseIt) was doing was teaching me how to eat. It was teaching me how many calories are in a tomato Vs. filet mignon or a table spoon of olive oil or a serving of salmon. I was learning to quantify my food choices and to make better ones over time. Sure I also exercised three to four times per week but I have been exercising regularly for ten years and never lost an ounce. Exercise is important but it wasn't why I was losing weight.

The Why

The iPhone and the app did exactly what Prof. Fogg has been evangelizing for years. It persuaded me into a new behavior. The critical part was that I was doing so without realizing it. If you ask entrepreneurs and innovators they will tell you that this is the Holy Grail of user adoption and the path to a sizable customer base. So build something that makes life better and you will be successful...Not quite.

Careful here, improving people lives is not that simple.

Let's use my experience to illustrate this point but it should be clear to the reader that the same reasoning can be applied to any innovation, not just the iPhone app experience.
The behavioral change I went through is usually characterized by saying that the product "made my life better" and that is why I adopted it. Although this statement satisfies logic and common sense, it is very dangerous to live by it, here is why. We can all agree that improving the quality of life of the user is a necessary condition for adoption of a new product. But I claim that the reason why a product is successful and it is adopted has to do with fitting the user need *and* ameliorating the effects of requiring changes to the user's behavior. No matter how much better life will be down the road because of using a new tool, we resist using it (more on this shortly). That is, what matters most is what the user experiences right now.

Case and point: anybody who is 30lb or more overweight can rationalize the benefits of losing weight and if that is all it took, dieting should be a no brainier. Why would anyone resist it? But I did. In fact several millions people do that every day and, medical conditions aside, they continue to be overweight because they struggle to change their behavior, not because the tool they may be using to address the problem does not work. LoseIt did an exceptional job in mitigating my resistance to change by spreading it over enough time that it became imperceptible. This allowed enough time to get by that the benefits become self evident. LoseIt does the same thing that dozens of other products and services out there do, it counts calories. What it is doing better is that it is addressing behavior too.

Thus the innovation is in my behavioral change, not in the app. The app enabled it to happen and *that* is the value it provides.

Why one should not underestimate resistance to change

Pretty much every behavioral pattern we develop is subject to the same desire to resist change. This comes from the biology of our brain that is programmed to store successful behavior for self preservation and to resist "deleting" or altering those patterns known to be

successful*. In my case, if I am used to eat too many calories but the only thing my brain knows is that the tank is full, I am reinforcing the wrong behavior at an intellectual level but at the biological level the brain considers it the *right* behavior and it carries on. We will omit the chemical reactions involved here since I am not qualified to speak about it intelligently. It will suffice to say that the stomach and the brain are perfectly happy with over eating especially since over time one can reinforce the wrong pattern by keep adding calories to the daily intake. Consequently there are two aspects to innovation when it comes to products and services for end users: the value and the behavioral change catalyst. We will see shortly that these two elements are indeed present in many successfully products and services we use everyday.

How much "newness" can you introduce

What emerges here is that when introducing innovation one must have a proper methodology in place to reduce the amount of behavioral changes required at any given time for the innovation to benefit the user. Apple did that by running educational advertisement for the iPhone. LoseIt did it by spreading the reduction in caloric intake over enough time to develop a new behavioral pattern painlessly. What we have learned so far is then:
1) teach your users one thing at the time when introducing something new
2) make the benefits of using your product evident at all times
3) your teaching efforts (1) should be proportional to the delta between your product and the status quo.

LoseIt did that and that is why I lost weight. In the case of LoseIt, (1) was the act of entering what I was eating in the app. (2) Was the ability to clearly measure and review my choices and progresses and (3) was achieved by limiting the number of features and the amount of commitment needed to use the app. For once, the app requires no registration and additional features can be accessed at later time if the user so chooses.

Wait a minute, what about Obama?

The last Presidential election may appear to contradict this entire post. Forty plus millions people voted for change. So much for resisting it! That is true but this actually teaches us that there is one more dimension to consider when looking and the behavioral change: how is the environment affecting our natural resistance to change and our assessment of risk Vs. rewards. Incidentally we should not overlook the forty millions Americans who did not vote for him, but I digress. Here we want to discuss the ones who did. Obama's voters clearly were in "pain" and that pushed them to act. Going back to products and services we can clearly see similar patterns: Vista's users were in pain and that forced them to switch to a different operating system. Blockbuster's users where in pain and they migrated to Netflix and so on. This is what marketing calls the painkiller territory where what you offer is something that takes pain away rather quickly and in a self evident fashion. Unless you work in the medical or pharmaceutical industry though you cannot count on this happening all the times, if at all. In fact pretty much everybody else has to introduce innovation to people who are experiencing much smaller degrees of “pain”, down to mere discomfort. Case and point, Kindle.

A successfully example of innovation that accounted for user behavior: Kindle

Nobody was screaming in agony because they did not want to use books anymore. A book is a familiar and relatively painless experience. It is a though sale to convince people they needed to change. Ask Sony. They have been selling e-readers for years with marginal success. Enter Amazon. They saw the opportunity created by the convergence of technology needed to take the book industry to the next era and they took it, carefully. They had to educate their users to the benefit of e-reading and they had to show them how easy it was to get new ebooks by introducing wireless downloads from a well stocked selection. But that alone would not have been enough, after all that was only marginally better than the existing offerings from Sony. The smart move was that Amazon targeted a subset of its own customer base: avid readers. In fact this is the category of users experiencing the most “pain” from using books. These users love Amazon as it made it considerably easier for them to manage their passion for reading with on-line purchases, free shipping and preordering of the hottest upcoming titles. What was left to improve was the physical interaction with the media. Books have one major drawback: mass. Try going on a trip with a half dozen books in your carry-on bag and you will “feel” the problem of using books very vividly. Amazon told these users they could continue to have the benefits of the on-line purchasing experience plus the benefit of virtually no weight. They listened, they trusted Amazon not to give them drastic changes and to take the pain away. Kindle delivered both and the rest is history. Kindle took off sustained in part by word of mouth advertising from those very same adopters who have been liberated from the burden of gravity. Amazon understood that moving readers to embrace this innovation was all about showing the value while reducing the  behavioral changes required at any given time.

Do I have a point?

Resistance to change is always there. The issue is how much effort will you face when trying to remove it. If you are lucky the answer may be "none" but for most of us that is not the case, as we briefly discussed. Thus it is important to be aware of the behavioral impact that our innovations have on the target users and to learn and evolve strategies to manipulate those changes to bolster adoption and to ease the discomfort of changing one's behavior. Do that right and the next thing you know one of your users loses 30lb and he writes a blog about it.

(*) the brain is actually very receptive to change in our early stages of life especially around two years of age. After that the brain start resisting changes as a mechanism to reinforce successfully behaviors. I am obviously oversimplifying here, for more qualified opinion and information on the matter I recommend "The Computational Brain" by Patricia Churchland and Terrence J. Sejnowski. And old book to be sure but still an excellent read.

Please note that the opinions expressed in this article are solely my opinions and does not reflect Ricoh Innovations' position on this issue.