Forces Friday: Pull and Anxiety

In this Forces Friday installment of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio, Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek (joined by Ervin) take a deep dive into two of the Four Forces of Progress: the pull of a new solution and the anxiety that same solution creates. They explain the “light bulb” moment, the difference between being pushed and being pulled through a circumstance, and why adding more features and benefits often backfires by raising anxiety instead of lowering it.

Use the player above, then read on for the key takeaways and the complete transcript, organized by topic with short explainers of the core concepts. Real interview stories anchor the discussion: a laptop bag, Kohl’s return policies, the moving business, and one host’s own standoff over whether to buy an iPad mini.

Forces Friday: why pull and anxiety belong together

Chris: Welcome. I’m Chris Spiek. I’m here as always with my partner Bob Moesta.

Bob: Hey, Chris.

Chris: And Ervin.

Ervin: Hey Chris.

Chris: And we are here to do an episode primarily focused on our Forces Friday theme that we kicked off a couple weeks ago, a couple months ago now. We want to talk about pull and along with pull comes anxiety. We’ll get to that in a second. A couple other things to announce: we have the Switch Workshop coming up in Chicago on June 21st so that’s this Friday. Then we just announced Cambridge in England will be on July 25th. This is the first European Switch Workshop; we’re pretty excited to go over there. We’re being hosted by Simon and the people at Red Gate Software.

Simon attended a workshop a couple months ago and was excited to come over and have us present to all the people in the UK and around England. Can’t wait to do that.

Bob: That’ll be a lot of fun.

Chris: Yeah, that’ll be a great event. That’s on a Thursday. You can find info on JobsToBeDone.org; make sure you get in and register. This last one in Chicago sold out in four or five days, something like that.

Bob: Even a little bigger. We’re still playing with sizes trying to see what the right kind of mix is.

Chris: We’re always focused on having that small, intimate group. I think the last one we did in Chicago we had a couple of 37signals people join in and we ended up around that 30 participant number and it felt really good. We thought we’d go up to 32 this time; it sold out at 32.

Bob: I think we want the diversity. When it’s too small what happens is you get two or three people from the same company in there, it’s really good to have a diverse audience while we’re doing that.

Chris: We found that usually there are one, two, three people from the same company that have an interest and come together so a bigger group and diversity across industries, across big companies, small companies, startups. That kind of thing is always awesome especially when we get to the break out sections and people…

Bob: The one in New York where we had an investment banker. It was the first time an investment banker came. He was blown away; it was awesome. I’m talking to him quite a bit so it’s fun.

Chris: That’s fantastic. The last one sold out quick. This one’s probably going to do the same so if you’re thinking about going jump on JobsToBeDone.org and you can find info there.

Another item in the event space is the people from MeetUp.com, if you’re in New York, have started a series around how MeetUp is using the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to understand the reasons people are hiring Meet Up events.

If you’re in New York or traveling through New York go on MeetUp.com, find the Jobs-to-be-Done group and make sure you join that so you’re getting the announcements around upcoming events because I have a feeling they’ve got some pretty cool discussions going on.

We’re here in Detroit and haven’t had a chance to make it out to any other events but we hope to do that soon. They’re doing a lot of cool things around user experience design, user testing. They attended the last event in New York when we were there doing a Switch Workshop and I think they came away with a lot of useful information; it sounds like they’ve been applying it in cool ways.

Bob: Cool ways. Very cool.

Chris: David from Meet Up is heading that up so be sure to look that up. There’s info on that to be found on JobsToBeDone.org. Finally, our wine project is still ongoing. Ervin, I know you’ve been putting in a lot of work on that.

Ervin: I’ve been having a lot of fun with the wine project. We’re still looking for more people to participate. Currently the people who have bought interviews and decided they want to practice, we’re setting them up now with interview participants and they’re all getting together.

We’re doing interviews with them and that’s a lot of fun. Of course we always have room for more; the more people we can bring in, the ones that fit into our sample size will be a pretty good time so we’re looking for people to join us.

Chris: If you’ve been to a Switch Workshop and say, you work for a software company and you’re doing a bunch of interviews around the people that have bought your software, it’s always good to get some practice interviews outside your industry. You always pick up new techniques when you’re talking about the way a bottle of wine is purchased is a lot different than how software is purchased. You learn little tips and tricks when you’re trying to dig in to a subject matter so it’s always good to diversify.

If you’re looking to do some of those practice interviews hit the website, it’ll tell you how to get into the program. It’s literally just a matter of signing up and we will match you up with people who have filled out our survey and said, “Hey, I drink wine. I want to be interviewed.” As funny as that sounds.

Ervin: Mark from Australia, this guy who got in touch with us, is one of our wine interviews. He had a great time and then he actually flew from Melbourne to the New York Switch. It was pretty awesome to have him there.

Chris: We interviewed him on how he came to buy a bottle of wine in a restaurant. That was a cool interview and ended up really enjoying the workshop. Get involved, take the survey, sign up for some interviews. We’d love to have you involved in that wine project. Forces Friday is what we’re here to talk about: pull and anxiety.

Ervin: These two in particular I want to set some time aside, I’ve got you two here, let’s talk about pull and anxiety. On the surface it’s kind of easy to understand but I know there’s a lot of nuance that I’ve heard us talk about around the office and I think it would be helpful if other people can get in on it too.

Bob: I think they need to be connected primarily because once…it has to do with a light bulb. When you see “This is what I can do” there’s an attraction to doing that either from the outcome, we’ll dive into that, but there are forces about the nicety of it. Then there’s this friction: “What about this?” And “That’s not going to work.” It’s the anxiety. It’s really good to talk about those two coupled together than just talk about…

The push was really about the situational context; what in your life is happening to you that says “I need to make progress.” When we start talking about that pull the pull and the anxiety go together so I think it’s worthwhile talking about it.

The light bulb: imagining your life with the new solution

Ervin: We say “light bulb”. For anyone new listening light bulb is…

Bob: It’s a new idea. It’s an idea of what your life will be like when you have the new solution. “Oh, now that I have an iPhone I can do this.” The light bulb would be the iPhone and then your life with the iPhone in it. It’s not just the product; it’s the future you with that product. It’s that vision.

If you’ve never heard any of this before…we talk about what we call “progress making forces”. It’s the notion that there’s a push to a situation that causes you to say, “I need to do something different” and you usually don’t do something different until you know that there’s a way to do something different and that way has attractiveness or a pull, and then has some anxiety attached to it.

Then there’s some allegiance you have to the past that kind of says, “I’ve been doing this for years. I really don’t want to change.” It’s the play of those forced over time that cause you or to either switch to something new or keep doing what you’re doing.

Chris: If this is totally foreign to you go to JobsToBeDone.org and do a search for “forces diagram”. There are pictures there. The other interesting thing…you brought up push and before we dive in I want to bring this up because we had a great question recently that got asked of us: what’s the difference between being pushed through a situation and being pulled through a situation.

Pushed vs. pulled through a situation: the laptop bag

Chris: It actually took me back to the interview we did with Sarah that we’ve referred to before, around buying a laptop bag. Essentially the story goes she realizes she has to go on this three week long trip for work and she wants to take a laptop bag with her instead of a separate laptop bag and a separate purse. She wants a laptop bag that’ll act as a purse for evening functions, basically.

For 90% of the story there’s no pull. She’s being pushed by this calendar date that says, “In a month I’m leaving and I want to solve this,” and the situation is pushing here to make progress. That’s her story. If you think about the opposite, the person that doesn’t need the laptop bag that’s walking through the mall and sees the Tumi store and it’s like, “Oh my God. That laptop is amazing,” but they have no situation to connect it to that would be the equivalent of being pulled through the moment.

It’s like, “I really didn’t think I had a problem, now I see this cool, fashionable thing and I’m trying to connect it to something in my life and find push.” In the current situation is your life driving you, or is that seeing the iPhone for the first time and saying, “Oh, my God, that’s just a fantastic device. I have to figure out how it ties back to me”?

Bob: In my head all these things happen to me that say, “I’ve got to do something different” and they add up and they pull together and snowball. The thing is when I see the Tumi bag in the window what happens is you have to think about there are a bunch of pieces in my mind that suddenly start to click together.

Like, “Oh yeah, now I wouldn’t have to do that.” It’s almost like backward rationalizing but it’s the disparate pieces in your mind but when you see the solution it starts to connect that push together to say, “Oh yeah, this would make my life easier in these ways and I wouldn’t have to do these things.”

For me, having done this for a long time, there’s always some kind of push. It could have accumulated over a long period of time and there’s really never not a push. There’s always a push to me.

Chris: If there’s no push and you walk by the Tumi store you’ll never notice the laptop bag. As much as you’ll say, “I saw this great laptop bag,” there’s something that’s going on…

Bob: It’s a trigger that goes chk, chk, chk, chk. Things connecting and linking up.

Ervin: I want to break that apart for a minute. You’re saying I’m walking through the store. I see the Tumi bag. The Tumi bag is the most beautiful bag I’ve ever seen in my life. There had to have been a push in my life that hasn’t recognized this…

Chris: Your eyes would have gone by it.

Bob: You might appreciate it for its beauty and then moved on but when you stop that’s where it’s like, “Click, click, click, click. This would be really good for that.” In your mind you’re connecting it to the problems that you have. I always think of people having a list of problems that’s a thousand long in the mind, right? You’ll usually work on the top five.

The thing is, you’ll walk by the Tumi bag and it might be four or five little things that are lower on your list that all of a sudden collect together to make it a bigger priority. It’s like, “My other one’s kind of ripping. I really haven’t thought about that. My laptop…” You start to piece it together and then, “I’m going to buy that bag.”

Again, people would call that impulse buy. I don’t believe in that concept. I think that it’s the triggers in the moment that can cause you to make it look like an impulse buy but there’s still causality behind all of it. There’s some value proposition that forms in people’s heads that make it worth paying $200 or $500 for a bag that would seem like it’s an impulse buy. And that’s where you have to be able to unpack it and that’s what the interviews are about.

Pull is the magnetism that comes from the product

Chris: The pull that we’re here to talk about is primarily the energy that comes from the product essentially. This is the magnetism one. I can be working on push a long time: I can say, “I have the trip coming up. I have the trip coming up.” There’s no pull until I see that first bag or I have the idea of that bag and I can say, “Okay. This is a possible solution.” That’s pulling through the moment. It will have some sort of magnetism that draws me towards it, that draws me to play out in my mind what it would be like to travel with it, use it for work, use it as a purse in Sarah’s instance.

“There’s no pull until I see that first bag or I have the idea of that bag and I can say, “Okay. This is a possible solution.””Chris Spiek

Bob: There are two techniques. One technique is as they talk about the product what you want to be able to do is make sure you get to the notion that what are you going to be able to do that you couldn’t do before? It’s ultimately what they’re trying to get done. It’s the notion of them saying, “Oh, God. I really love that laptop bag because it looks so cool.” You start to unpack it: really, the shoulder strap is the best because this one digs into me and now my shoulder won’t hurt. What you want to get to is “my shoulder won’t hurt.”

Because the outcome is what you’re trying to get to, not necessarily just the feature or the benefit that they articulate. It’s making sure you get deep enough into what will it do for them in terms of how will it make them feel? What will they be able to do that they don’t do now? What does it get rid of? What does it add? It’s about making sure you get it down to what it does for them not what it does.

Because they’ll say, “Looks great.” “Looks great” doesn’t tell me what it does. Does it make you look great? Does it look great because it’s more comfortable? What does “look great” mean? You’ve got to be able to connect it back to why it’s important so that’s where we play the little interview trick of “I’m confused”. You bought this because it looked great but why is that important?

You start to go back and forth on it. Really, I wanted to look great for this trip because I was trying to impress people blah, blah, blah, and you start to get the real understanding that it was giving them confidence or something like that.

Anxiety: the self-doubt the new solution creates

Chris: Talk about anxiety as it relates to the light bulb.

Bob: Again, there are three elements here: there’s the light bulb, the pull and the anxiety. Any new solution can create magnetism or pull but it doesn’t have to but what most people miss is the anxiety that the new solution creates. This to me is the kind of one of the hidden gems is that people keep thinking, “If I add more features and benefits people will like it more,” so I create more magnetism and it actually makes it more attractive.

What they miss is the anxiety of the complexity. I add all these features and, “Now I don’t know how to work it. Oh, my god. How do I do this?” It’s almost the self doubt that you have and it’s the things you think about like, “What am I going to do about that? Will that work that way?” It’s almost that self-doubt, that friction you create within your mind that literally says why this wouldn’t be the right solution, or you don’t have the right information. There are two ways to get around this. One way is to provide more information or to minimize risk. It’s like a money back guarantee.

Chris: It’s amazing how many times we’ll talk to people and they’ll say, “I thought about it and I knew I could just return it.” Then they’ll go on to say, “Yeah, I returned a bunch of stuff to this store. Over the past ten years I’ve brought stuff back.” And they’ll actually think about the last time they brought something back. “Oh, that wasn’t that bad. Okay, now I’ll go make the purchase.”

Until we talk to them and interview them, you say you’re leading them on, but they can actually say, “Yeah, I actually considered what it would be like to walk through and bring this thing back and that’s the point at which I tipped and actually made the purchase.”

Reducing anxiety in the wild: Kohl’s, moving, and returns

Bob: For example Kohl’s, if you think about Kohl’s department store, I think it does a very good job on pull and minimizing anxiety. The pull is they offer these coupons that are time based that say “You get 30% off up till Friday” and they have them expire on the days you’re not wanting to shop. It’s like, “Oh I can go get this. I need these tennis shoes. I’m going to do this.” The whole thing is if you buy something there you can always return it; no questions asked.

Bob: There are numerous people we’ve interviewed who were like, “Yeah, I bought it because I knew if it didn’t work I could return it.” And it didn’t work for them. “Did you return it?” No, I didn’t return it. It just gets over that anxiety of what am I going to do and how do I return things and so you find the anxiety being able to understand what’s holding them back.

Bob: The classic example is in the moving business. We went to find out what was holding people back? It wasn’t actually making the houses more attractive or adding more features to it; it was us managing the anxiety that helped improve sales. It was helping people move. Like, literally, you know what, I included moving as standard: packing them up. The one thing for older people is they didn’t want to go in the basement and pack 20 years of their life and the thing that was holding them back was all the stuff in their basement.

Chris: As much as a new home is a product they’re seeking out, there’s this whole purchase and move that is user…the software guys would call it a “user experience”. When I sign that purchase agreement and start this process I’m going to essentially have a user experience: I’ve got to get the mortgage, I’ve got to pack up all my crap, the basement’s got to be cleaned out, I’ve got to sell this home. It’s all that friction in the “user experience” that held people back not the garage isn’t big enough. It doesn’t have granite.

Bob: Thing is what you do is you compete with “I’ll give you free granite this month if you buy today.” The reality was, no. I’m not going to give you free granite. I’ll include moving as standard. Sales totally went through the roof. It’s a totally different force but it’s being able to understand that just because I increased the pull doesn’t make people flip because sometimes increasing the pull actually increases the anxiety.

Bob: I’ll give you free granite. “Oh, my God. If I did this thing…But I’m never going to get someone to buy my house.”

Chris: All the energy goes up.

Bob: It adds energy to the situation, adds tension but it doesn’t necessarily force movement because the pull goes up and the anxiety goes up equally and they negate each other but it’s now a situation intention.

“Sometimes increasing the pull actually increases the anxiety.”Bob Moesta

Chris: Does Kohl’s play up that no-questions-asked return policy? Do you think they do a good enough job?

Bob: I think they do a great job. Again, I haven’t done a ton of interviews in that space…I guess I have done a ton of interviews in that space. It’s one of those things that enable people to do…I think that’s what JCPenney missed.

Chris: If I’m buying for my kids, buying for my husband, Kohl’s has that nature: you’re buying for somebody else if they don’t like it or it’s the wrong size…

Bob: Just bring it back. I think the thing Penney’s missed is the…my belief is it’s all a game. They’re willing to sell anything at a price and the reality is they mark it up to get there.

Chris: Discount it down.

Bob: But they create this urgency between a coupon and an expiration date…

Chris: Like a weekend sale or something like that?

Bob: Exactly. What Penney’s was trying to do was go to a “Hey, we’re going to give you everyday low prices. Here’s what it is.” And they destroyed the example of a pull force. I think they had the notion of better service but the fact is that it was the game that people play on the pull that enable people to say, “I’m going to go buy clothes.”

Chris: You could also have anxiety around getting the lowest price. If I’m worried about getting the lowest price, and most of us are; I don’t want to pay more than I have to for something I’m buying. I’m a sucker, right? But if I see the flyer that says, “30% off this weekend only,” sometimes it’s not completely logical. It’s like, “Hey, this is a great deal.” That anxiety is much lower around that purchase. I’m going there because they’re having this blockbuster sale.

If you say “every day low prices” it doesn’t have that time compressed energy around it. It’s not going to run out. I’ve got all the time in the world to research and to compare prices. It doesn’t have the same effect on that anxiety force.

Bob: I did an interview in New York with Tim on shoes. He actually went to a Kohl’s and bought a new pair of shoes. He wore a new pair of shoes and he kept putting them up on the table. Remember? It turns out he actually bought three pairs of shoes not one and he didn’t actually remember he bought three pairs until about halfway in.

He got his 30% off discount to get it and the thing is, at some point in time he liked the shoes so much, the one pair, he was worried they’d go away that he went out and paid full price, went back to the same store, bought the same shoes at full price to be able to buy. That notion of what you’re saving and what you’re doing distorts things. It’s almost like a form of surrealism. It’s…help me with the word.

Chris: It skews everything.

Bob: That’s a good word: it skews everything. In the middle of the interview he was like, “The coupon was going to expire today and if I didn’t spend it today, I didn’t get it. I saw two pair and hey it’s 30% off and I could get three pair for this. I’m just going to get three pairs of shoes.” It’s like, “I never buy three pairs of shoes.”

It was that whole notion of “If I’m buying one I might as well buy three” and it highlighted this whole notion of the dynamics of anxiety and if I didn’t like them I could always bring them back. He wears them at different rates and it’s very, very interesting.

Anxiety on the web: the most overlooked force

Chris: I’m a web guy at heart. I’ve got to bring it all back to the Web. I think anxiety is probably one of the most overlooked aspects on the Web. You’ve got e-retailers trying to deal with it. I think Zappos is doing a fantastic job because you can’t really size shoes on the Web; you’ve got to be able to return them easily. They’ve probably cracked the code on lowering that anxiety around purchasing shoes.

But a lot of services could really put the mirror on their product, or look in the mirror and say, “Can we do a better job reducing anxiety?” I’ve gone through so many sign up processes where I’ve scratched my head and said, “You’re asking me the hardest question up front.”

I went through setting up an e-commerce store a couple months ago. The first question when I clicked “sign up” was “Name your store”. I’m sorry. I know what we’re going to sell, I know who the supplier is, I know everything. I don’t have the name yet.

It took me two weeks to sign up for e-commerce package which I was going to pay a monthly fee to this. Sign up now, put in the name. And you can never change this because we’re going to create a DNS record and it’s going to be a domain name. Okay. I need to stop everything…ask me that last or let me put it in optionally but when you think about….

Ervin: Or have me lock it in later. Fine, do it temporary to this point.

Chris: It’s always, “What does your user have to go through to find this information and bring it to the forefront?” Just because it’s the way the database is laid out is that the first thing you need to ask or can you move that back?

Bob: But from their perspective it’s the most important thing because it sets the DNS, it sets all these other things. Without it I can’t… and I can’t do anything about it. Like you said, they asked the hardest question first. They don’t even allow you to wade into it. You’re in or you’re out.

Chris: Half the time, when you’re building something like that, the name is going to occur to you as you go through the process anyway. You title the book at the end because it always comes out. That’s just one example but from an e-commerce perspective and a web services perspectives having an idea of the anxiety that’s holding people back is critical. It’s as critical as the pull.

There is a catalog of actual interviews along with analysis available here.

The iPad mini standoff: pull, anxiety, and non-consumption

Bob: What’s your take on it, Ervin? What’s pull and anxiety to you?

Ervin: I’ll tell you how it’s changed. In the beginning, I believe pull was something the product could create. I thought Apple made pull. Not anything to do with me. I want into the store and just by the sheer beauty of an Apple product I would just go buy it. It never happened to me because I never cared. I was like, “No I’m not going to jump into iTunes. I’m not going to have Apple survey everything I do in this world. It’s just not going to happen. I’m going to keep my Blackberry until I die.”

I was pushed into the situation when I came here. Now I understand there’s something about me had to connect me to the iPhone. Wait. This is going on with me. I’m pulled through it. I can see that now because I’m on the horns of a dilemma now thinking about getting an iPad. iPad, iPad mini. I haven’t had my event yet so I’m not going to tip.

There’s not enough pull there because everything I believe I can do with the iPad, we talk about consumption of the mind, me living my life with an iPad, I can see myself doing with my iPhone. Nothing’s tipped yet to make it worthwhile; there’s not enough pull for me in that situation. Anxiety at this point for the money. That’s probably what my rational mind tells me; but it’s 600, 700 bucks. I’ve got Netflix on my TV, I’ve got Netflix on my phone…why?

Chris: At some point there’s pull but is there actually any push that is unaccounted for? I’m pushed to use the iPad. No, my Mac Book is right there. I could just use the iPad. No, my phone’s right here. It’s as if you’re compensating for the push all over the place and there’s no place for the iPad to fit into.

Ervin: Exactly. That’s my take on it.

Bob: There are two ways we can get him over the hump. One is to give him an iPad to try for the weekend just so he can see. Again, he has no experience with know how to work with the hand and the fingers. In your mind it’s just a big iPhone. No, it’s not that. But most people who are buying an iPad for the first time don’t know what it is and they can’t really anticipate what the experience is until they have some experience with it.

Chris: You find a lot of people in interviews tip when they get the expert opinion. Even in consumer packaged goods I was walking down the aisle and this lady said she was an expert in this and she does it professionally and she said this is the one I use. I switched to it right away. She knows a lot more than I do. Doing the demo for a weekend is huge.

I had the iPad for the longest time. We were in San Francisco with Ryan Singer and he pulled out his iPad mini and I said, “What do you think?” And he said, “This is the size the iPad was meant to be.” Didn’t need to ask another question. For me I was like, “That’s the expert opinion…”

Bob: [inaudible] right away. Get rid of the other one. [inaudible]

Chris: Order on Amazon. A lot of times you have that outside force; somebody’s meddling with you that will say why don’t you test [on] this?

Bob: In some cases that’s a reduction in anxiety. The fact is when you get that expert opinion it’s not a push or a pull; it’s sometimes a reduction of anxiety of “I don’t want to make the wrong decision.” But if Ryan’s done it and Ryan’s got all this and now I get it.

Chris: I think it’s a pull too. I think you’re short circuiting consumption in the mind. He no longer has to envision his life with the iPad. He now can live his life with the iPad for a couple days and you take it away and it’s like, “I can’t do any of those things anymore, right?” It’s the free trial. It’s the 30 day sample. It’s all that stuff.

Bob: It gets back to probing into what did Ryan’s comment do for you? Did it actually create more pull, or did it actually reduce anxiety to get you over? Ryan had both, he made the switch. So was it, hey, somebody else has made this switch; I should probably make it too?

Chris: One of the situations was that at the time we were in that all day conference. We had put on the Switch Workshop, the next day we were in the all day conference, and it was this feeling in the conference of, “If I pull out my full size, big daddy iPad which is like [inaudible]”

Bob: Like the old TRS 80. Let me just plunk it on the table.

Chris: The fans start going. But I’m going to be the guy who’s not paying attention, who’s answering email or whatever. But I’ve got Ryan sitting next to me who’s got his mini in his lap; he was comfortably taking notes and tweeting and he’s not getting looked at. Neither you or I don’t think took out our iPads the whole time.

That to me was non-consumption. In all honesty, not to toot my own horn, but it really comes true. I will find myself walking into a bar or restaurant to meet somebody, my iPad would not have made it with me but the iPad mini, it disappears on the table. When people show up it’s like we’re all here to talk.

Yeah, I’ve been sitting here going through the Feed reader, reading blogs, tweeting comfortably for 20 minutes before people show up and when they get there it’s not…it’s funny to talk about what’s the difference. It’s like an inch and a half or something but it’s big enough where that experience changes and is worth it.

Find the anxiety: selling houses, first Macs, and BJ Fogg

Ervin: Here’s the thing though: How could Apple possibly get that message to me? Currently, I know that feeling you’re having of I don’t want to be the guy to pull out the big huge…

Bob: TRS 80, there you go.

Ervin: Yeah. But how can Apple put out a commercial that says, “Hey, whenever you want to do a covert operation with the iPad mini. That’s what we’re here for.” The only commercial for the iPad I see is we can play chopsticks on both of these. That doesn’t speak to me.

Chris: We have advertising people that are brilliant that listen to the show so we want ideas on how to communicate the situation Ervin would see to say, “That’s me. That’s when I wouldn’t use my iPad.” I need to buy.

Bob: Right. To be honest, it gets back to the mini. Where’s non-consumption? If you show non-consumption in those anxious moments where it’s like, “Yeah, I don’t want to pull out my thing,” and someone else pulls out the mini now it just shows…”Yeah, I have that moment too.” To me advertising is about showing you the moments that you aren’t aware of that you have all the time.

Ervin: It will be interesting to see what people come up with and what ideas come in. Every iPad, or for that matter, every Apple commercial I see, none of them speak to me that way. They just say, “Wow. Look how beautiful it is.” Yeah, it’s beautiful but…

Chris: I think Siri did a great job of that.

Ervin: I just thought about that too.

Chris: It’s aspirational so it’s like I’m going to be running down the Hudson River and “add lunch with Bob to my calendar”. They showed that simplification of different kinds of tasks, replying to an SMS message. I’d love to be able to just hit that button and reply to a text message. When you showed the time crunch jobs, “I’m doing something else and I need to interact with my phone and Siri is going to let me do that without stopping.” I think that connected. I don’t think the other ones…

Ervin: This is weird. You know [that even] spoke to in my life, my dad, who if he could would still have a StarTAC, the old push button Motorola phone. That’s the only time he’s ever spoken to me about another phone of this generation. He’s like, “If I could just talk to the dang thing that would change my life.” It didn’t tip him but he’s like, “Ah, that would be perfect if I could just press a button . . .”

Bob: Find out where the anxiety is. The thing is it gets back to in selling houses or early days…Push: I can see the situation where they’re going to value this. Pull: oh my god, they love what I’ve got. Why aren’t you buying it? I don’t understand. What’s going on? And it’s the two hidden forces of anxiety. “Yeah, I’m not sure.”

The big thing for me is I think people are afraid they’re not going to know how to use it and it’s going to be too complicated. When you get your first Mac and you open the box it’s literally like “push the button and start.” There’s no “put in this, make a password”.

The Windows experience and the Mac experience are totally…but the thing is I think the anxiety for your dad is how do I set it up? Where would I go? Do I have to sync it to something? I don’t even know if he knows what syncing is. You don’t know what his anxieties are. The thing is if he’s at least giving indications of progress, you have to almost dive down and see what’s the friction that’s holding him back.

Ervin: Yeah, okay.

BJ Fogg: make it easier, not more motivating

Bob: To me that’s why I think you’ve got to think about pull and anxiety. The other thing is this really plays to BJ Fogg’s stuff. Those who don’t know, BJ Fogg is a behavioral scientist out at Stanford and he talks about basically why do people change behavior? It gets back to depending on how motivated people are and how easy it is to do, there’s this relationship between how often they’ll do something.

Chris: It’s like chunking tasks down? Chunking down change.

Bob: When motivation is really high it’s easy to get people to do hard things. What happens is when something is hard people will add more features and benefits to increase motivation. What BJ talks about is, no. You need to make it easier.

He’s highlighting this whole notion of the anxiety force of don’t add more features and benefits. Minimize the anxiety, figure out how to get rid of the anxiety and you’ll actually get more people to do what you want them to do.

It’s a very interesting thing; he plays on the right side of the forces diagram with that in terms of you’re not going to motivate more people with more features and benefits. I just don’t believe it happens.

“Minimize the anxiety, figure out how to get rid of the anxiety and you’ll actually get more people to do what you want them to do.”Bob Moesta

Chris: We’ll put some links in the show notes about ways to…some of the books.

Bob: He’s got some good stuff. Anything else?

Ervin: No. I think you guys did a pretty good job of breaking that down for us. I appreciate it.

Chris: I think that’s good. For the next show we’re going to have Amrita on. She attended one of the workshops at 37signals. She’s done a ton of interviews and we’re going to talk to her about what’s she’s learned. I think that’s a good thing to talk about.

If you listened to the last episode, I highly recommend it. It was Erika DuFour and Disrupting Photography with Jobs-to-be-Done. We’ve had her on, we’ve had Ryan and Jason on, all kinds of Switch Workshop alumnae. I guess I’d say if you’ve gone through the Switch Workshop, done some interviews, and want to come on and tell your story, we love hearing from these people and talking to them.

You don’t have to disclose all the secrets you found because we know some of it is confidential and trade secrets but talk about your experiences at least with tactics and techniques of conducting interviews because people really love to hear that. We’re going to wrap up this Forces Friday series up in a few weeks with The Habit of the Present. We’ll be back for that. Thanks guys. See you.

Show notes & links

• New York Jobs-To-Be-Done Meetup
• BJ Fogg’s Website
• BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model

Subscribe to Jobs-to-be-Done Radio

Don’t miss upcoming episodes. Subscribe via RSS or Apple Podcasts.