Change someone’s behaviour by giving them Mojo

Mojo: the simple framework for behavioural design

Mojo is a design framework to help you change people’s behaviour by increasing their motivation. By giving them mojo.

It’s based on the psychological principles behind Motivational Interviewing, an NLP technique designed to engage the intrinsic motivation within someone in order to change their behaviour.

What is intrinsic motivation?

I’m glad you asked. Intrinsic motivation is the drive to do something because you want to do it. It is the opposite of extrinsic motivation, which is the drive to do something because you want what’s on offer if you do it.

Intrinsic motivation can be created in a number of different ways. A tool I use a lot in my day-to-day work at Tictrac is a gamification framework called Octalysis. Yu-kai has done a great job of uncovering 8 core drives that generate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, that can be applied to any human-focussed design problem.

Gamification is the craft of deriving all the fun and engaging elements found in games and applying them to real-world or productive activities

But I want to focus on another source of intrinsic motivation — your brain’s campaign to be at peace with itself.

Your brain has a mind of it’s own

Consider this example. Let’s say you like doughnuts but you’re on a diet. Someone puts one in front of you.

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

You want to eat it (because it looks so tasty) and not eat it (because you’re on a diet). So what do you do?

You know doughnuts are high in sugar, and you know eating high sugar foods are not good for your diet, so your brain gives you 4 options:

1. Justify eating it by ignoring or denying information that conflicts with what you know: “This doughnut is not high in sugar”
2. Justify eating it by changing what you know: “I am allowed to cheat on my diet every now and then”
3. Justify eating it by adding a new behaviour: “I will spend thirty extra minutes at the gym to work it off”
4. Change your behaviour so you don’t eat it: “I’m not going to eat this doughnut”

Everyone wants to achieve option 4, but it’s difficult. Why? Your brain is programmed to eliminate the mental stress, or cognitive dissonance, experienced when your mind wants two different things. And it’s a lot easier to do it by changing what you think than what you do.

Give people Mojo

To help someone achieve behaviour change (option 4) you need to increase the amount of motivation they already have to do it.

You can do this by focussing on 3 areas:

1. Importance: How important is it for you to change your behaviour?
2. Resistance: How possible is it for you to change your behaviour?
3. Confidence: How confident are you that you’ll be able to change your behaviour?

We created the Mojo design framework to ensure we considered each of these as core user needs. The framework has been invaluable in framing our thinking throughout all design thinking phases, from building empathy across the team to reviewing existing experiences and ideating around new ones.

If you’re designing for behaviour change then I recommend you add Mojo to your toolkit.

Download the Mojo framework cheat sheet as a PDF.