Cognitive Dissonance

This internal contradiction includes the mental conflict when your beliefs don't reflect your actions.

For example; craving fast food, but also wanting to feel healthy, or have the perception that you're someone who cares about fitness. 

Often people will address this by:

• Lying to themselves (i.e., opting to believe a lie, or excusing an action as "not that contradictory").
• Changing their behaviour (i.e., an animal-lover deciding to not eat meat).
• Adopting a new behaviour (i.e., going for a run to offset eating a cake).

Churn

• If the discomfort of holding conflicting opinions is too great, the user may decide to not use your product at all.

Feature usage

• Instead of churning, people may simply avoid certain features.
• For example, the user may avoid purchasing your 'chocolate-to-your-door' subscription, even if they eat the same amount daily. It's not because they wouldn't benefit from the service, it's because that specific feature (i.e., commitment) may trigger their cognitive dissonance.

Habits

• The user may have a natural tendency to avoid habits that they feel conflict with their opinion of themselves (i.e., avoid being addicted to Netflix).

Input quality

• The user may lie (or exaggerate) how much they do certain things, increasing the difficulty of user testing.
• i.e., "how much do you expect to use the gym?" is unlikely to reflect their actual usage, and may even create cognitive dissonance if you remind them of this commitment later.

Discomfort & frustration

• Cognitive dissonance is both frustrating and uncomfortable.

Happiness & enjoyment

• By removing (or reducing the effects of) cognitive dissonance, you can find that your product is more enjoyable to use.

Here's how you could design a product, with these responses in mind: