Creating Positive Change with Behavioural Design
There’s no denying that understanding human behaviour is a difficult and complex task. How many times have you caught yourself wondering, “why did I/he/she (re)act that way?”
Advances in behavioural sciences have overturned the idea that humans are rational and autonomous agents that largely act towards their own self-interest. Instead, we’ve come to realise that human behaviour is largely irrational, unconscious and driven by external contexts.
But what if we can tap into these unconscious and irrational choices to promote a positive change?
What is Behavioural Design?
Behavioural Design is about adapting techniques and patterns from behavioural sciences (like psychology) into designs to ease the decision-making process of people interacting with a product.
Behavioural designers focus on how design can shape or be harnessed to influence human behaviour – in a good way. Products are designed to communicate with the unconscious brain, using shortcuts in a user's brain to move towards a predetermined decision.
To understand why and how decisions in the human brain are made, behavioural designers commonly use theories such as Nudge of Thaler or System 1 and 2 thinking of Kahneman. The key takeaway of both books is that only 5% of our decisions are made in a rational manner and the other 95% are made unconsciously. It is this 95% of unconscious decisions that behavioural designers try to influence.
The ethics of Behavioural Design
The concept of an unknown someone trying to influence your behaviour through a design can seem pretty scary when you're reading about it. Fact is, behavioural designers do have quite a lot of power in their hands and there's a thin line between manipulation and positive influence.
What are the pitfalls that behavioural designers need to watch out for? Dark patterns (behavioural design that encourages people to do things they don't want to), being manipulative or paternalistic, or serving a crooked goal without regard for ethics.
Behavioural Design is a bit like The Force in Star Wars. You can do a lot of good with it, but can also easily slip into the darkness (using it with bad intentions that worsen the world). This is the never-ending struggle that behavioural designers need to deal with: watch yourself as you're designing and never use The Force for personal gain.
Jokes aside, NOT using behavioural design techniques can be considered unethical as well. What if your design is inducing unethical or unwanted behaviour, but you could've prevented this situation if you'd utilised behavioural design techniques and considered the consequences of a design beforehand?
How Behavioural Design can change the world
Designers can elicit a lot of positive (re)actions by designing to encourage correct and ethical behaviour. For example, we could design cities for greater social inclusion, design social campaigns that trigger people to make ecologically informed decisions, or design a car that you couldn't drive while drunk.
By influencing behaviour in a positive way for society, we can truly bring more and extra attention to positive change. If you think about it, everything is designed to evoke behaviour even without the conscious application of behavioural design. So, by designing with (ethical) behaviour in mind, we can design a better world.
Practical techniques and tips to include in your design
We can't leave you hanging with just the concept of behavioural design, so here are some practical tips to include in your design and a breakdown of how we include behavioural design in our design sprints.
To start things off, we strongly recommend two books and their methods: Dr Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and Nir Eyal's Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.
Cialdini elaborates on the 7 triggers of influence and how you can steer behaviour through these triggers. To find out more about this in detail, read our two-part blog series on Cialdini (Part 1 and Part 2).
Hooked is a book and model that talks about how to get people "hooked" on your products or a certain action by giving them an internal trigger that motivates them to use a product. You can get there in 5 easy steps:
- Offer an external trigger (e.g. some marketing)
- Make the potential user perform a certain action (e.g. input their email address to create an account)
- Follow up this action with a coupled reward (e.g. a 7-day free trial)
- Request another action after this reward, which is most likely an investment (e.g. ask for a purchase, to spend time with a product, or to take a complex action)
- Provide an internal trigger (e.g. feeling bored is a trigger to watch something on Netflix)
Once the circle is round, the internal trigger prompts towards the next action, thereby starting up the next cycle in the interaction.
The core factor that both Cialdini and Hooked drill down on is to understand your user and their needs – figure out what the pains, gains and jobs to be done are. At TPA, we take things a step further and try to understand who the user is and what the bias to our value proposition is. To understand how we can approach the potential user, we also identify what channels we have and what positive or negative link there might be between us and the user. These discoveries allow us to really understand the user and subsequently design their behaviour in as positive a sense as possible.
Want to discuss how we can change the world with behavioural design? We're always happy to chat, so hit us up!
