Behavior happens when motivation, ability, and prompt meet at same moment. If behavior fails, one element is missing.
When to use
- Onboarding design.
- Conversion improvement.
- Habit building.
- Feature adoption.
- Drop-off diagnosis.
- Behavior change intervention.
Goal
- Define target behavior.
- Find weak element.
- Design intervention.
- Measure behavior change.
Elements
- Motivation: user wants to act.
- Ability: action is easy enough.
- Prompt: trigger appears at the right moment.
Ability factors
- Time.
- Money.
- Physical effort.
- Mental effort.
- Social risk.
- Routine fit.
Ability is limited by hardest factor.
Rules
- Define behavior specifically.
- Start by improving ability when unsure.
- Make action smaller before adding persuasion.
- Prompt only when user can act.
- Avoid interruptive prompts.
- Measure actual behavior, not intent.
Flow
- Define target behavior: who, what, when, frequency.
- Score motivation, ability, prompt from 1-5.
- Find bottleneck.
- Break down ability factors.
- Choose intervention.
- Define success metric.
Output
## Behavior Analysis
Target behavior: [specific action]
User segment: [who]
## Scores
- Motivation: [1-5] - [evidence]
- Ability: [1-5] - [evidence]
- Prompt: [1-5] - [evidence]
## Bottleneck
- [motivation | ability | prompt]
## Intervention
- [specific change]
## Success Metric
- [behavior rate and target]