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Julie Dirksen Goes Beyond Learning For Behavior Change | Episode 357

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Behavioral Science Meets Learning Design. We feature a deep dive into the role of behavioral science in creating effective learning interventions. Our conversation sheds light on how principles from behavioral science can be employed to bridge the gap between knowledge and action. By focusing on learner behavior and the contexts in which they operate, we discuss how to craft learning experiences that lead to meaningful and lasting change. Our guest, a seasoned learning strategy consultant, shares practical examples and methodologies to ensure that learning is not just informative but also transformative. This is a must-listen for educators and instructional designers seeking to enhance their impact.

Julie Dirksen is the author of the books Design For How People Learn and Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behavior Change. She is a learning strategy consultant with a focus on incorporating behavioral science into learning interventions. Her MS degree is in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University. She’s been an adjunct faculty member at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and is a Learning Guild Guildmaster. She is happiest when she gets to learn something new, and you can find her at usablelearning.com.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob:
Hey, this is professor game, where we interview successful practitioners of games, gamification and game thinking who brings the best of their experience to get ideas, insights, and inspiration that help us in the process of multiplying engagement and loyalty. I’m Rob Alvarez. I’m a consultant and founder of the Professor Game and professor of gamification and games based solutions at IE Business School, EFMD, EBS University, and other places around the world. And if this content is for you, then perhaps you will find our free gamification course useful. Find it for free. Free@professorgame.com freegamificationcourse all one word professorgame.com freegamificationcourse hey engagers, and welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game podcast. This time we have Julie with us. But Julie, we need to know, are you prepared to engage?

Julie Dirksen:
Absolutely. I’m here to engage.

Rob:
Let’s do this. We have Julie Dirksen. Is that good?

Julie Dirksen:
Pronounce? That’s great.

Rob:
Julie Dirksen is the author of the books design for how people learn and talk to the elephant design learning for behavior change. She’s a learning strategy consultant with a focus on incorporating behavioral science into learning interventions. Her MS degree is in instructional systems technology from Indiana University, and she’s been an adjunct faculty member at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and is a learning guild master. She’s happiest when she gets to learning something new and you can find her@usablelearning.com. dot Julie, I’m guessing that we said plenty of things there. Is there anything that we’re missing that we should know before we dive into the first questions?

Julie Dirksen:
You know, I am a big learning nerd, but I do actually really also love the game design and how that can apply to learning environments and things like that too. So if we want to have a conversation about why plants versus zombies is a masterful flow experience for learning development and totally do that.

Rob:
So engagers, you definitely know from the intro, from what she just said as well, why we have Julie with us today. She has a lot of stuff that to geek around just as we do. So Julie, what are you doing nowadays? If we were to hang around with you for a day, for a week, a month, whatever you want to describe, what would it look like? What would it feel like to be Julie DirKsen these days?

Julie Dirksen:
Yeah, well, so learning design is an interesting area because almost everybody comes to it through maybe domain knowledge or just happenstance. Very few people are like, I think my career choice when I’m twelve years old is I’m going to be an instructional designer. Like, nobody says that. And most people don’t even know that it’s a thing. But what happens is people, I mostly deal with workplace and adult learning. I don’t really do anything with school age kids, but in workplace or adult learning, somebody’s like, hey, you’re a good customer service rep. We’re going to let you train the other customer service reps, and then all of a sudden you’re a trainer and not a customer service rep anymore. And lots and lots of people wind up teaching things because they know their subject well. And what that means is they know their topic really, really well, but they don’t necessarily know how to explain it to people, or they don’t necessarily know how to build a whole learning experience around it. So most of what I’m doing now, this is how I started. I was a good data entry clerk, and they said, hey, do you want to train the other data entry clerks? This is now 30 years ago, something like that. Wow. And so anyway, I got interested in this and I was like, learning technology is really interesting. How do we create good learning experiences? How do we create learning experiences that are really effective at helping people with behavior change? All of those kinds of questions. Now, I spend most of my time doing that. I still do some consulting work where I actually do some curriculum design and create learning experiences for people. I was just talking about financial literacy today and how do you help people save money and make better financial decisions and things like that. But a lot of what I’m doing actually is workshops or talks or things like that to help this audience of new people who are like, hey, I just got handed this task of creating a learning design because I was a web designer or I was a software programmer, or I was, again, I was a bank teller, whatever it is. How do I create good learning design for other people? I help people with that. I do a lot of workshops and I do a lot of talks and help people understand. Well, here are the things you really want to think about if you’re creating good learning experiences. Cool. Cool.

Rob:
Good stuff to be, to be thinking about these days. And you were saying something that I want to make sure doesn’t go under the table. You were saying, and it mixes with your background as well about changing behaviors, because learning, I know that there are some things that you just have to do a learning program around that is sort of law says you have to give this training. And if people don’t get this training, your company is going to have legal problems. I’m not talking about that kind of training. I’m talking about almost everything else, right? The almost everything else. You actually have training and you have people working in l and D, learning and design and development. Sorry. Because learning those things is going to have an impact in the business. And that means that people, after they see the training, they do things certain way.

Julie Dirksen:
Yes.

Rob:
If you don’t do that like everything else is, it doesn’t matter. Right. It almost doesn’t matter. Like, how do you get there? The thing is, you do this training not to throw some information and see what sticks. It’s about getting the people who get trained to do something a certain way. Right. So it is at the center of all this. And it’s why I feel that oftentimes, more often than not, some companies do not feel the value of an area like this one as much as it should, because not everybody is taking the perspective that you are, that you’re just discussing, which is how does this actually impact the everyday work of people? And that’s what impacts the bottom line of a company eventually, right?

Julie Dirksen:
Yeah. And so one of the things that I do is I usually sort of ask the question of what’s the gap between where the person is now and where they need to be to be successful? And so let’s say I need to file a new tax form for my business or something like that, and I don’t know how to do it, then knowledge is probably the gap, right? If I can just find a YouTube video that explains how to fill out this tax form or if I find good instructions for it, I’m probably fine. I have to do it by a certain deadline, so I’ll get it done, and that’s all great. Right? But then we have all sorts of other types of learning needs that are a little bit more complicated, and it’s not just knowledge. So, for example, if I’m a manager and I need to be better about giving my employees feedback, I can know that I should do that and yet somehow still doesn’t happen. I can even know kind of how to do it, and yet maybe it still doesn’t happen. And so that’s where a lot of the behavioral science comes in, is this question of when it’s not primarily a knowledge problem, what else is going on? I start my new book with a whole discussion of condoms, and this whole journey started with condoms for me, which sounds weird, but I promise I’ll explain. I had a whole debate with my publisher about whether I could put a big picture of condoms on the first page of the book. We decided not to, but, you know, but it was a project that I was attached to in like the mid two thousands on AIDS and HIV prevention for audiences, specifically people who are online, you know, it was targeted mainly at men who were online, you know, who were usually. So it was targeting, like, specifically things like AIDS and HIV prevention were targeting things like condom usage. Well, by 2005 or whenever this was, most people had heard the message that if you want to prevent the spread of AIDS and HIV, condom usage is super important. Telling people that louder and more emphatically wasn’t really going to change the behavior. It wasn’t like, hey, we don’t think you got the message, so let’s just tell you again. Right? You know, it’s kind of like telling people, hey, smoking is bad for you. Well, you know, most smokers know that already. Like, that’s, that’s not the barrier. There’s a lot of complicated barriers. So then it was like, okay, my toolbox of helping people understand things or helping people remember things or helping people, you know, learn how to do things is kind of not enough here. You know, if. If the problem isn’t what they know, what are a series of solutions? And that kind of set me down a path that ultimately led to a lot of the work that’s happening in behavioral science around. What else? I mean, you know, knowledge is always going to be part of the solution for those things, but what else do we need to do? What are the other things?

Rob:
You know, so amazing. Amazing. You just gave us a story of how you got into this, so I actually want to dive into another story. How about, okay, you tell us of a time where you were doing this behavior design, behavior change through learning or in this space, and things actually did not work out. Yeah. How did that go? Of course, maybe you changed something after that, but initially, we want to be in that difficult position with you. We want to feel a little bit of that pain and of course, take away some of the lessons that you took from that part of your journey.

Julie Dirksen:
Yeah, I mean, we can have different. We can have all the good intentions in the world, and you can even do, like, user research and all these kinds of things. And things can not work out. I was working on a curriculum several years ago that was for grade school teachers who were teaching drug and alcohol prevention for middle school students. So target audience, like 11, 12, 13 year old kids. And it was actually really fascinating curriculum because it had a lot of really great behavioral strategies in it. One of the things they found with kids that it wasn’t an again, it wasn’t a knowledge problem. It wasn’t like saying drugs are bad. It was, how do you help these kids navigate that tough social moment when somebody offers them something and they don’t want to look like a big dork. And so the curriculum itself was really great because it really focused on, like, the kids would do skits or they would do little role plays or they would do scenarios or they would create ads or they would do all these things. But as part of this, it was a 13 week curriculum. And as part of this, they would practice, you know, navigating, like navigating those conversations every single week and thinking about their answers and being ready and so they wouldn’t have to feel awkward when they got into that situation. They could feel comfortable because they’d already practiced it and they were already ready to go. So great curriculum. Fantastic. And so the curriculum was once a week for 13 weeks. And when I was talking to the teachers, I was like, oh, how much time do you spend prepping for this curriculum? And they’re like, maybe 30 to 60 minutes before each lesson. And I’m like, okay, great. What if we gave you a little learning experience that prepped you for the curriculum and you could do it each week before the thing and, you know, before you would teach it the next day? And so we, we broke it out into 13 lessons, and we were all set up like that. And it turned out we hadn’t factored for the issue that if teachers want to get paid for their time doing this as a curriculum, they have to do it on their in service day, which means they would sit down and they would do all 13 of these start to finish so that they could do it. Yeah. And it wasn’t designed that way because there was, like, repetition and it was longer than we would have ever made anybody. If we’d known they were going to do this in one sitting, we never would have made it as long as we did because we thought it was like, oh, we’re going to have to remind you of a few things because it’ll be a week since you’ve looked at this and all this kind of stuff. We thought that design through really well. We just didn’t know that there was this systemic, you know, the system factor of they’re not going to get paid if they do it, you know, the night before as part of their lesson prep, but they will get paid if they do the whole thing on their one in service day. And it was like, oh, we didn’t, we didn’t factor for that we could have designed it differently if we’d known you were doing it all in one day. And so, you know, and I had gone to the. I’d gone to some of the in person classes, and I had talked to teachers, and I thought that I had done my user research and figured this stuff out. And somehow, I mean, I didn’t know to ask this question, but that’s what happens when you don’t understand all the factors that are going to influence the people in your audience.

Rob:
So I was about to ask, what would you have done differently? But, I mean, at least from my perspective, I hear you saying this, and the thing is, you don’t know it. You don’t know. Right. And the thing is, you literally tested it out with a live audience. Right. Some things did not work out. I’m sure other things did work out. But what you could do is, you know, maybe if you had to change it, you would next year you would do it just differently, right. You would account for this so that people, when they were preparing for this, they would have these 13 hours or whatever amount of time they’re investing in this whole thing. It would happen differently. But I don’t know. Is there, when I say this is it, do you cringe and you say, oh, well, actually, I would have done this other thing. I don’t know. What’s your reaction to that?

Julie Dirksen:
I think we would have had to talk to the client and find out, this is when I was working for an agency, and we would have had to talk to the client and go, okay, how do we want to handle this? Right? Do we want a shorter version for people who have to do it kind of in all sitting? Do we want to have both options? Do we want to, you know, do we want to have a short version they can do on their in service day and then really small, you know, lessons just to prep people on, like, key ideas beforehand. But we would really want to, like, look at what is going to work for what is going to work for this audience. And, you know, the client I was working with knew this audience really well, and they understood a lot about him, and they didn’t flag it either. So, you know, I’m not sure if we could have asked the right question, although I think the thing that we weren’t doing is we were doing user interviews to involve them. Design. But if we had had a current teacher in the design process, because we had teachers in the design process, but they were all people who had been teachers in the past, and so they had this. They were a little bit more expert and things like that. And so one of the big strategies that you see more and more of is this kind of co design with your audience, where you bring people from your audience into the room and have the design conversations, not just interviewing them outside, but actually, like, involving them in the design conversation. And I think that might have been a strategy that could have helped us identify this earlier.

Rob:
Involving the actual people who are actually going to be doing this stuff is something that, you know, it’s easy to dismiss as well. It’s like, yeah, but they don’t know what they don’t know. And there’s many reasons to dismiss it. But as you’re highlighting right now, it’s also a key thing that can bring and flag up new things, bring up new perspectives. When I talk about, I have a class where I talk about product management completely, it sounds very unrelated to some of my operations students. And one of the things that we talk about is when you have a product team, you think of the engineers or the coders or the developers, you think, oh, you give them something and you sit them down so they do their stuff and they’re super valuable in that sense, don’t get me wrong, but you’re only getting half the value, or probably even less, if you don’t involve them in the conversation of what you’re creating, because they’re also creative people. They also know the way around things, and they’re also able to bring in things to the table that you otherwise would have just overlooked because you’re not in the weeds every single day doing this thing. And they are, again, co design, in this case, a product team. But I think it can be a very, very powerful thing to do. But again, it’s easy to overlook oftentimes.

Julie Dirksen:
Well, and it was interesting because on that particular project, we did a lot of user testing. So we actually, it was a very cool kind of thing where you had a little simulated teacher teaching a classroom and you could make choices and do things. We had a bunch of scores that were sort of gamifying it a little bit and things like that. Turns out a lot of those scores were interesting data to collect that we never used, but that never happens. But I was doing user testing, and like I said, this is also kind of the early, mid two thousands. And so user testing, we didn’t have Zoom because now I just do it over Zoom or something. But I would actually take my laptop to some grade school where somebody from the company knew somebody who was a grade school teacher and sit them down and watch them use it and do that kind of user testing. And then I would take the results back to my team and I’d be like, oh, we need to change this. And this. I was getting all this pushback from the developers or the graphic artists, and they’re like, really? Do we really need to change that? And then when I would actually take them along on user testing or have them watch, then all of a sudden they’re like, oh, we got to fix that. That’s terrible. That was completely confusing. I totally see what happened. Me distilling the results of watching users and trying to explain it to my team was a little too abstract and they were very resistant. But then as soon as they saw users actually struggling with it or having real problems with it, they were all completely on board and they were participating in the question of how do we fix this? And obviously, instead of why, which is.

Rob:
One of the questions that sometimes you get, why do we fix this? Instead of how do we fix this is the important factor.

Julie Dirksen:
Exactly. And you have time constraints. I can’t take the developers on every single bit of user testing because it’s just expensive eventually to have. And you also don’t want nine people watching a user click buttons on the screen because that’s not nerve wracking at all. But being able to at least somewhat give them the experience of what it looks like when we’re actually using it made a big, big difference.

Rob:
Totally. I love it. Love it. And Julie, you mentioned that you kind of gamified this a bit and that you designed the experience again, thinking about how to change the behaviors of the students, which were the end, sort of the end user, so to speak, in this case. And you trained the trainer, which are the people who were there. If you were going to create, maybe it’s not about this program in particular, but any other thing which you probably still do, as you were mentioning today as a consultant, and you’re also a speaker and workshop leader, so I’m guessing this is already, you know, down and narrowed down. How do you do this? How do we do meaningful learning that changes behavior? Do we follow some steps? How do we approach this?

Julie Dirksen:
Yeah, there’s a couple things. One is whenever we’re designing learning environments, we have actually two different kinds of motivation that we’re worried about. One is their motivation to engage with the learning experience at all. So, like, are they going to take the course? Are they going to finish it? You know, I was talking to somebody yesterday about, there is a period in the teens where moocs were going to change everything. The massive open online courses, moocs are going to change the world.

Rob:
Well, universities will disappear.

Julie Dirksen:
And there’s conversation right now. There’s a blogger who does math education stuff whose stuff I like a lot. His name is Dan Meyer, and he is talking. He’s expressing his frustration, I think, a lot, with the rush towards AI tutors. So everybody’s like, AI is going to teach. Everybody teach all these kids math. And there’s a video with Sal Khan from Khan Academy and his son where the AI is prompting his son through the. I don’t know, it was calculating the area of a triangle or something. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but. And Dan Meyer’s kind of skepticism around this is, this works great. Things like Khan Academy and AI tutors and all these things, this works great for the students who are motivated enough to use these kinds of tools to help them. And when there was one study of Khan Academy users, they looked at all the people who logged in or created accounts or did anything, and then ultimately they found that about 5% of students that created accounts or logged in really stayed in there and actually made use of the resources. And so he’s kind of like, well, that’s great for that 5% of motivated learners who are really going to dig into this stuff, what are we doing to serve this other 95% of learners?

Rob:
And those are the ones that even register to this platform. That’s a percentage. And that’s a percentage of a percentage of people who even register to this. They’re already motivated enough to register.

Julie Dirksen:
Yeah, right. Exactly. And so, like, I don’t know about you, but I signed up for a bunch of moocs.

Rob:
I mean, I created mooks. I have to say that.

Julie Dirksen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Well, and I mean, you know, like, they were clearly useful for the audiences they were useful for, which is probably a tautology, but, you know, like, they worked really well for people who, you know, were well adapted to do kind of self study environments. So they were great. You know, it was a great tool for a bunch of people. But at the same time, when they tried to take moocs, Sebastian, from, who was the creator of Udacity, was like, you know, he was going to save education, which, you know, those of us who’ve been working in education for a while kind of like, are you really? But when they tried to take the udacity format for remedial math students, they had a contract with, I think I want to say it was like San Jose State or one of the California schools, they found that the remedial math audience did not work great in a self study environment. These are people for whom math was horrible and they still hate it and they failed at it earlier in their lives, maybe, or that they legitimately got some issues with the idea of even engaging with this. And so to put them into an environment where they’re not getting an actual instructor who’s building a relationship with them, you know, trying to adapt what everything is to their particular situation or their particular needs, like, guess it was shocking that that didn’t work well. They couldn’t just take a whole bunch of remedial math students and throw them into a math, into a self study math class. And then we’re like, huh, it didn’t work very well. So, you know, this is part of it too, right? Like this is how, how does all of the shiny technology tools, who does it help and who does it not help and who needs something else from the environment? Because when we’re looking at a lot of these kinds of things, the relationship matters. The belief that somebody’s going to pay attention and going to ask me about it, that there’s going to be some accountability, like that matters. The only way I get anything done in the world is somebody’s waiting for it. And so if nobody’s waiting for it, there’s a few other ways I get things done. But the main way I get things done is there’s a human being who is going to say, hey, Julie, is that ready yet?

Rob:
Or you expect that that will happen if you don’t have it ready at least.

Julie Dirksen:
Yes, exactly. Right, right. Try to avoid the awkward conversation. And that is a big part of educational environments. And so as we lean more and more into technology, we can’t be surprised when maybe an environment with lots of technology but no accountability doesn’t work for everybody. So.

Rob:
Yeah, totally, totally. I think we ended up here because we started talking about moocs and why they, some of the reasons why they didn’t work, but we jumped away from how do we actually get to something that changes behavior and so on.

Julie Dirksen:
Let me get back to that one. The model that I used in the most recent book where I was looking at the behavioral design as one that’s out of its university College London center for Behavior Change has a model that they refer to as the behavior change wheel. But a lot of people know it by one of the sub models that exists within it, which is called combi, which is just asking a couple simple questions. At the face of it which is, is the person capable of doing this? So, you know, the way that I sometimes see this question get asked in learning and development is if I give them a million dollars, could they do it? You know, like we took motivation off the table and made the reward big enough, could they do the thing? You know, could they give feedback to their employees? Yeah, they could. Okay, great. So I know it’s not a capability issue. So then what else is going on? Is it that they. So the c is capability, o is opportunity. And we look at two different things. When we look at opportunity, we look at is it, is there a social opportunity? Does their social environment support it? Do they see other people modeling the behavior? Is there a norm around it? Or are we kind of battling against a norm? Right? So, you know, if I say you need to report safety instance, safety incidents on construction sites, but if you report safety incidents on construction sites, you slow down work or you’re telling on people and they get mad at you, or it’s like, it’s kind of an uncool thing to do in your social environment, then we have to deal with that. We have to figure out how do we address that norm or how do we work within it. Can we make reporting anonymous so you don’t have to worry about people being mad at you. That could be a strategy, but we need to look at the social environment and think about what supports it and then the physical environment. So one of the perennial challenges in healthcare training is getting people to wash their hands enough. And we all just came through the pandemic and had our own relationship with handwashing and hand washing compliance in the US went up. I think the rough afternoon is like 30% when we changed the physical layouts of things, but mostly added in the alcohol based hand rubs. So when it was soap and water, in 20 seconds it was a certain rate. And then once they added in the alcohol based rub, so that, which is faster. Right. We could increase our hand washing compliance. So that’s not about motivation, it’s not about ability, it’s not about a bunch of things. That’s just about making sure that there’s a lot of alcohol based hand rubs in these environments and that it’s easily accessible. So can I change the environment as a way to support the behavior? And if I can, that’s probably a good choice because you’re going to get bigger gains and you are trying to like convince people. And then the last one’s motivation, you know, am I motivated to do it? I know how to do it. My environment supports it, but I still not motivated. Right. So if we look at something like saving for retirement, you know, everybody kind of knows they should do it, but, you know, especially if you’re younger, you may not be all that motivated about it. And so whenever there’s a big time delay between when you have to take the action and when you get the feedback on the action, those are typically really hard behaviors. I think every single behavior change, real chewy, difficult behavior change thing I’ve ever seen has delayed or absent feedback as part of it. One of the things they’ve done is those little apps that age you up. So they’ll have people age up. There’s research out of Stanford where they’ve done this, where they have people walk around in a virtual reality environment as their retirement age self, you know, like their 65 year old aged up self, and see if that makes them feel more compassionate and more like it’s a more pressing issue to say for retirement. The answer, kinda. Yeah.

Rob:
They are actually more like retirement. That’s amazing.

Julie Dirksen:
Yeah.

Rob:
Be more sort of sympathetic to older people that even people do live action role plays in some nordic countries. Here in Europe. Yeah. You know, after spending like, two, three days and people treating you like a 90 year old or whatever, after that, people started, like, calling their aunts and their moms and their grandparents and so on more. And they visit them more because they realize they empathize a bit more with that. But saving for retirement was something I did not expect of an experience like that one, to be honest.

Julie Dirksen:
Yeah. A lot of times the behaviors we struggle with are because it’s abstract. Right? So, like, one of my personal behavior change struggles is wearing enough sunscreen. And I know what happens. I know what you know, like, I’ve had some small, not super dangerous, but some things that. And even so, you put on sunscreen now, but the behavior never. You never are like, oh, I didn’t put on sunscreen at 02:00 on Thursday. So therefore, now I have to go see the dermatologist and have this problem. And so that’s making it feel more real to people, making it feel more tangible. There are apps where you can post your picture and you can swipe back and forth to see what the effects of ten years of smoking will do to your skin or different kinds of health conditions. And you could see what not wearing sunscreen could do to your skin to make it feel more real for people or to make it feel more tangible. I think we struggle whenever we have to do a behavior that isn’t supported by our physical environment. So if I clean my house, I have a cleaner house. So that behavior pays off immediately. But if I wear sunscreen, I get a benefit from it. But it takes a really long time and it’s harder for me to go, okay, well, if I was outside for ten minutes without any sunscreen, what happens? Versus if I’m outside for like fell outside for 4 hours without any sunscreen, I know what happens. I get sunburned. Right. But if, if it’s like 15 minutes while I like walk the dog around the block, you know, how much does that matter? It’s hard for me to say. Right. You know?

Rob:
Yeah. And you were saying that I was thinking about going back to your previous example of hand washing. Right. You don’t really get the benefit. You just probably don’t get sick. But you don’t feel that you don’t get sick. You just, you know, as you were right before washing your hands. So it’s, these are complicated behaviors. I like the idea of using these visualizations, at least for the immediate term, and then, you know, hopefully trying to get into a habit ish or something you do often would probably help, you know, doing the whole, let me put on some sunscreen.

Julie Dirksen:
Yeah. Because I mean, germ theory is very abstract. Like, I don’t think people have a trouble washing their hands when they actually have stuff on their hands. Like if they actually had, you know, if your, if your hands turned blue when you had bacteria on them, you would wash your hands because you’re like, I can’t walk around the world with blue hands. I’ve got to be clean. Right.

Rob:
Or you can feel it sticky or something.

Julie Dirksen:
Yeah. If you feel something or if you’ve actually gotten something on your hands that’s visible, like people wash their hands in those circumstances. The place where people struggle with it is I washed them five minutes ago and I know intellectually I need to wash them again, but they feel clean and they look clean and it just doesn’t seem like I need to because it doesn’t, you know, they’re not going to look any different. So if I wash my hands, they’re going to look exactly the same as I did before I wash them. And then there’s also not going to be, if I’m a healthcare provider, I am never going to know that this patient got sick because I didn’t wash my hands on that day at that time. Right. There’s no way to draw that line because we live in a complicated world and there’s a bunch of other ways that a patient could get sick. And so when, because one of the things I look at too is where does feedback become visible? Like, so if I’m a salesperson and you teach me a new way to do sales, I am going to see results personally, right? Like immediately going to go up. But if I’m a healthcare person and I wash my hands, I don’t ever know what the results of that are other than intellectually. I can be like, well, it should be good, right? And so I don’t see it at the system, I don’t see it at the individual level. I don’t get this feedback. It might be that somebody got sick on the ward and we know that there’s an infection because something we had a failure of hygiene or whatever it is. And so then we at least know at the group level that there’s a problem, but I still don’t know that it’s my behavior. And we really don’t know that we’ve got a significant problem until we’re looking at a whole system level and we’re comparing the rates in our hospital versus other similar hospitals and realizing our rates are much worse or could be better or whatever, but that we’re in comparison. So the more distant that feedback gets, the more difficult it is to kind of stay focused on changing that behavior. This is something where the game environments are really interesting because the game environments are much better than real life at providing feedback on actions. You know, there’s all these ways that games provide feedback. It could be sights and sounds and you know, obviously all the points systems, but it could be a result that you see or, you know, anything like that. And I saw a statistic once where like the EA Sports games wanted people had a heuristic of sorts. And I’m probably going to misquote this, but, but the idea is, I think, solid where they didn’t want to ever go more than like 10 seconds without making the player making some kind of decision and they didn’t ever want to go more than like two to 3 seconds without some kind of feedback on those decisions and things like that. So you were always getting, you were always making decisions and getting feedback. And so these iterative cycles of I did a thing, you know, I used to use diner dash, that game. I don’t know if you’ve, but where.

Rob:
You send the plates and they keep coming.

Julie Dirksen:
We got a little server at a restaurant and we counted, I would show this to my class and we count all the ways that they do feedback and there’d be the clink of the plates, and there’d be the expressions on the faces of the customers, and there would be little hearts that came up, and there would be some points over here, and there would be, like, a little time thing and all this kind of stuff. And they were like, probably at least a dozen different ways that every action you took in the game got feedback. Well, you go to a learning application, like an e learning or something like that. And I said, okay, how many ways are they getting feedback? And they’re like, well, when you take a quiz, you find out if it’s right or wrong. And I’m like, great, because you can see the difference, right? You can see how these environments are really, like, one environment’s giving you constant feedback, and the other one, you might get feedback every 20 minutes or so. Yeah. So that’s part of my interest in a lot of the game environments is how are they doing feedback, and how are they, you know, kind of helping people? And we look at some of this stuff is showing up in, like, Fitbit apps or something. Right. Is much more of this kind of gamified feedback so that you. Because, you know, exercise is one where, like, if I started exercising, you know, an exercise program today, it might be like two months before I notice that physiologically, I feel different. Right?

Rob:
Yeah.

Julie Dirksen:
That’s a really long time to do a behavior without any kind of positive feedback. But if my Fitbit tells me I just climbed the Eiffel Tower and steps, that’s something that’s a more immediate form of feedback that is at least kind of fun. So looking at all of these variables when we look at behavior change helps us address it. So we had capability, we had opportunity, and then motivation comes down to things like, am I motivated? What will help me be more motivated? How do we provide feedback systems for motivation? How do we provide social examples for motivation? How do we show consequences as a form of motivation? There’s a lot of strategies that we can use, but if we just kind of ask that question, then at least we’re sort of hopefully answering the right problem, because a lot of times, it isn’t about telling people this is the right thing to do. It’s about finding other ways to support or encourage the behavior.

Rob:
Cool. Love it. Fantastic. Fantastic. And, Julie, we’ve been in this conversation for a bit already. You have a bit of the vibe of the podcast. If I told you, who would you invite to the podcast, or who would you like to listen to answering these questions in a future, a future guest for professor gain.

Julie Dirksen:
You know, I’m going to suggest Dan Meyer, the blogger that I told you about, he might be a really amazing person to have on the podcast. I don’t think he identifies what he does as being gamified. I don’t want to speak for him, but I suspect he might resist that description. But he has these great things around three act models and creating an interesting sense of need. The way that he designs math education environments that I think might be really interesting.

Rob:
Sounds like a very cool person to interview, for sure. And keeping up with that recommendation scheme, so to speak, right next to both of your fantastic books, what book would you recommend? An audience like this one. People who are keen on using games, game design, gamification, and all these strategies to change behaviors, to think about learning in a different way. Again, it could be direct inspiration or even fiction, whatever goes to your mind.

Julie Dirksen:
Yeah, I mean, easily the most influential person on me as a learning designer is Cathy Sierra. And she did a whole series of books called the head start or the head first books. Headfirst books. Headfirst head start is childhood program, the headfirst books, and they started with Headfirst Java, which was, I think, the best selling Java programming book ever. It’s a part of the O’Reilly imprint. But Kathy Sirrah and her husband, Burt Bates, who’s also an editor in the of the books, created this whole series of books. And I feel like I learned more from her than anybody else about good learning design and how do you make it feel real and urgent for people? And she has a book called Badass making users awesome. I’m pretty sure that’s right. That’s the right title. It’s definitely badass. But I may be getting the subtitle slightly wrong, but it’s a fantastic book. And it gets into a lot of this stuff about skill development. And her point when it comes to things like product design is that nobody cares that your product is awesome. They really, like, that’s never what you should be trying to communicate. What you should be focusing on is how am I awesome using your product. Right? So how does this give me superpowers or make me amazing or any of those kinds of things? And so focusing on that as a way to think about it, and I use that constantly in my learning design, is how do I. How do I have people walk away from a learning experience feeling energized and like they’ve got some awesome new superpowers that they can’t wait to try out? And I feel like if I can, if that’s the if that’s people’s takeaway. Then it’s much more likely that they’re going to actually go and they’re going to use it and they’re going to do things and they’re going to try stuff. And so that’s frequently one of the outcomes that I’m hoping for from a learning experience.

Rob:
Awesome. Love it. Love it. And the book seems very, very interesting as well. And in this world of learning, design, behavioral change and all this, what would you say is your superpower, that thing that you do at least better than most other people?

Julie Dirksen:
Yeah, I think the thing that I hear from people and that I sort of think is, in addition to what I just said about kind of helping people walk away feeling more capable and more able to do things is my main superpower is taking kind of complicated things and figuring out ways to explain them that people can kind of wrap their heads around. I’m a big fan of interest, using the metaphor of the analogy. My books have things like lots of little stick figure illustrations that try to explain stuff. I was trying to work with an illustrator on the first book, and it was just taking too long and it was going to be too expensive, and I decided if XKCD comic webcomic can use stick figures, well, let’s give it a try. And so taking a lot of these things and making it easy for people to kind of absorb and understand and then hopefully subsequently do something with that’s my superpower, if I have one, seems.

Rob:
Both like a superpower and also, in the best of sense, is your obsession. Right. It’s the way that you want to make sure things are working and how they actually get to work. So I love it. Great. And very useful as well, in your case. And now we get to a difficult question. You’ve also talked about how some of you get inspiration from some games, some games that you mentioned in your sessions and your workshops to inspire people to look at things in a different way. What would you say is your favorite game?

Julie Dirksen:
Oh, the game that I’ve probably. I do have a lot of love for plants versus zombies because I really think it’s a masterclass in flow theory. And so that one’s good. But I’d say my favorite game of the last few years was Gorogoa. And I don’t know if you’ve seen this one. It’s just an iPad game, but it uses four little kind of, like, animation or cartoon panes to do a lot of problem solving and puzzles. And it’s just so clever about how it uses its. The different elements as part of its visual interface. So. And it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful, beautiful game. And so, you know, the whole issue of kind of different kinds of game satisfiers and that feeling when you figured out something, you know, hard, that game is full of that, like, satisfaction. Hard to figure. Yeah. Of figuring out the hard fun or figuring out the puzzle or, you know, things like that. So that’s a stunning game that I, it’s best the first time you play it, but I’ve played it a couple of times just because it’s so lovely and it’s so clever in the way that it does things in terms of the interface.

Rob:
Amazing. Amazing. Sounds like a very interesting one, honestly. Maybe I look at it and I’ve seen something about it, but I had never heard of it before, as far as I can recall at this time. Julie, it’s been fantastic to have you here. I mean, where can we find out more about you? Where do you want to lead us? If you want to lead us somewhere, you have a CTA or anything. This is a perfect time for that, of course. Any final words, any final piece of advice? Also, the microphone is yours.

Julie Dirksen:
All right, thank you. Yeah, you can find me@usablelearning.com and you can find information about both of the books. Their design for how people learn is really that book for people who are like, hey, I just got handed this thing and I need to teach it to somebody else. What do I do? And then talk to the elephant is really this sort of like, they know what to do, but they’re still not doing it. How do I fix that? Or how do I help with that? You could also find me on LinkedIn. I have a Facebook group for instructional designers that’s just called design for how people learn. Yeah. So I’m around different places. I have one elearning course on making learning more engaging, and that’s at design, better learning. And there will be probably more courses coming soon, but for now, that’s the one that’s available.

Rob:
Nice, nice. Hopefully looking forward to those courses coming out in the future as well. Julian, thanks again for taking this time, giving us some inspiration, a little look into your world, some of the stuff that you’ve learned and that you’ve been studying and understanding and practicing for all this time. However, Julian, engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Hey, engagers. And thank you for listening to the Professor Game podcast. And since you are into gamification and game inspired solutions. How about you go into the free gamification course that we have for you? Just go to professorgame.com freegamificationcourse all one word, professorgame.com freegamificationcourse and get started today for free. After that, we will also be in contact and you will be the first to know of any opportunities that professor game might have for you. And remember, before you go on to your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.

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