Habit.

An automated activity acquired in the course of frequent repetition. This simple word is fundamental to every UX designer or product manager. It’s because every interface is a nest of such habits. Every website, app, internet product is an incubator of habits.

When you go on Facebook, you no longer think where to check for notifications or how to write a new post. You see something interesting and you want to take a photo with your phone and then upload it to Instagram? Sounds banal, but in fact it’s quite a complicates series of activities. But those who use Instagram do it almost automatically.

Every UX designer knows that there are also global habits, which our industry refers to as conventions or design patterns. It’s thanks to them, among other things, that in a new website you always look for the search bar in the upper right corner of the page, and for the logo in the left.

Habits can be really helpful in our daily lives. Sometimes, they can also make it so much more colorful. If you’re like me and you ever wanted to sent a hot text to your girlfriend, but you habitually picked the first person from the recent recipients list and… it turned out to be your mom, then you know what I’m talking about ☺

But let’s go back to the crux of the matter.

Habits can be considered loops. This is the visualization proposed by Charles Duhigg in his otherwise very good book “The Power of Habit”. Duhigg wrote that habit is a constantly working loop: cue — routine — reward. I want to have a pleasant evening — that’s my cue. I text my girl — that’s my routine. I send the text and catch myself smiling to myself — that’s my reward.

Habits are established when we repeat an activity often enough. So if you often use an internet website, read the news on your favorite portal, check the game results, or just look at the weather for tomorrow — sooner or later you’ll form at least a dozen habits.

Simple. Nothing controversial or innovative.

But the fun starts when a forced change occurs in the habit. And here’s where we come in — the people who create internet products. Every one of us — through project decisions — has the power to influence the habits of our users, specifically the main element of the habit loop — the routine.

Let me use an example that I gave at the UX Poland 2015 conference. Two months ago, on Wirtualna Polska’s homepage (the biggest portal’s homepage in Poland), we conducted an A/B test of nine variants of the navigation bar. I’ll show you three of them. The most frequently used navigation element — on practically every Polish portal — is the mail link. It collects tens of thousands of clicks each day. On the current header, the mail icon was always next to the search bar. But in these three variants we changed its placement.

Multivariant test of navigation bar

And what happened? The test showed that the icon that replaced the mail icon next to the search bar generated most clicks in each variant. It always worked best. What doest that mean? It means that users used that element from memory. They clicked a familiar place, not noticing that the icon and its name had changed.

You probably already know what we were dealing with. A habit. And we influenced it, quite inadvertently, by changing the standard placement of the mail icon.

And this is the crux.

Every time we want to test any change in any system that will influence the user’s habit, we can be sure that tests will not tell us whether what we want to change is better or worse than the previous solution. The test results will probably be surprising, but they won’t give us an answer, or the answer will be negative.

This was our case — we suddenly found that in the tested variants, the number of clicks on the mail icon dropped dramatically. We were wondering where those clicks had gone when we noticed the unusual behavior of the icon next to the search bar. We then understood that we had stepped on a habit’s toe.

You could say: “you should just test the interface change long enough”. Long enough for users to change their habit and only then check whether the change is better or worse than the current solution.

Unfortunately, the business reality is not that perfect. To explain why, we need to go back in time a little.

I’m sure you heard that 21 days is all you need to shape a new habit or change an existing one. This myth is a misinterpretation of studies conducted by plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz. In 1960 he published a book entitled “Psycho-Cybernetics” which sold 30 million copies and became almost instant bestseller. In the book Maltz described how patients on whom he performed serious plastic surgery, e.g. nose modifications, needed around 21 days to get used to their new appearance.

Maltz wrote: “Observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell”.

This was followed by an outpouring of all sorts of guides on how to change any habit within 21 days. However, it is easy to miss one important part of Maltz’s writing — the words “a minimum of”.

In 2009, doctor Phillippa Lally, a health psychologist at the University College London published the result of another experiment. She investigated 96 people who were tasked with forming a new habit in their lives over 12 weeks. Results?

Indeed, those who wanted to make a habit of drinking a glass of water with lunch, were able to form that habit within around 20 days. However, those who chose a more difficult habit — eating fruit for lunch — needed as many as 40 days. To shape the habit of taking a 10-minute walk after breakfast, the subjects needed 50 days, and getting used to doing squats after morning coffee required 84 days.

Doctor Lally’s subjects needed between 18 and even 254 days to form a habit. On average, it took 66 days. But doctor Lally’s main conclusion was that shaping habits is a highly personal characteristic and it is impossible to predict the duration of the process.

But let us go back to UX.

It is true that by performing a sufficiently long test we would be able to remove the influence of habit change on results. But in a business reality this is a pipe dream. Who has the time to test a single element for three weeks? Not to mention 66 days, which is over two months. What about time-to-market, ASAPs and deadlines? And even if we took tests that long, we would not be sure that enough time had passed.

OK. Let’s leave habits, because they’re only the beginning of our problems with tests and studies.

Any change of an important part of an interface carries one more risk.

If you’ve ever been involved in a large internet service, one with millions of users, you surely know how people react to major change.

First, angry users’ reactions to recent redesigns of major Polish portals

What you see are user reactions to recent redesigns of several major Polish portals, including our Wirtualna Polska. Why all the rejection and anger?

The culprit is a phenomenon described by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. It can be simplified and visualized with the so-called Change Curve.