We all seem to be talking about changing behaviour through good design…but changing behaviour is actually really hard.  Working as a psychologist in a detox unit at the start of my career has admittedly shaped my view of what it takes to change someone’s behaviour; and whilst I learnt it certainly isn’t impossible, it often takes time. Combine this with the fact that most human behaviour is not considered to be overly planned, with ‘conscious thought’ playing, at best, a small role in shaping our choices…things start to become a little tricky for us as designers.  So how do we start to make sense of what influences someone to change their behaviour, given we are often charged with creating designs that are ultimately intended to encourage, if not drive, some form of behaviour change?

Behaviour Change, One Step at a Time(r)

An egg timer – the catalyst of change

Can you recall when you last changed your behaviour and maintained that change for an extended period of time?  The last time I can recall was triggered a few years ago when I received a four minute egg timer in the post.  Our state was then in the height of a drought, and a local government agency (Melbourne Water) had sent the egg-timer out to encourage sustainable water use.

When I first opened the envelope I promptly put it next to our bathroom sink in the hope it would make my young children brush their teeth longer than their current ten second swill.  Not surprisingly, it didn’t.  So it sat near the sink for several months until one day I looked at it and thought, “how about I actually put this in the shower…”.

Almost immediately some things happened.  Firstly I had to learn to shower within the four minutes it allowed.  This took a surprising amount of time and effort.  However, once I had mastered that, I felt incredibly guilty if I stayed in the shower for any longer than the time it allowed, and so was compelled to the timer. (Now, for the few rare times I am under the shower for longer than four minutes, I have a mental bank of time in credit so I can justify the extravagance.)

What’s fascinating is that while it took a while for the device to find its way to the intended context, once it was there the initiative to change was almost immediate, and the result easy to maintain.  The presence of such a small thing, positioned in the right context, made such a huge impact on my behaviour.

Why It Matters to Designers

Design has always facilitated change in behaviour, especially in the area of technology, but it seems lately that design for behaviour change is in the forefront of people’s awareness.  Part of the challenge is understanding what actually influences someone to change their behaviour in the first place.

As experience design researchers we quite often focus on what people do, and why they do it, so we can incrementally design better products, services and systems to ultimately improve the customer perception of a client’s brand.  However, one of the most important things we need to be mindful of when designing for behaviour change is that we must also focus on the ‘future’ view of how we want people to behave with what we create.  We need to consider the end-state behaviour ideals that we are aiming for when we are designing.

As Henry Ford says, “if I had have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”: people can’t project beyond their current experience to meet a future need.  That’s the designer’s job.  The following models of behaviour change are useful to consider when working on projects.

The A B C of behaviour

The most basic tenet of behavioural analysis is to view behaviours as a function of a person and their environment.  That is, something happens to precede behaviour (the antecedent) which in effect causes or influences the behaviour, resulting in a consequence.  We can’t change a person, but we can influence the way they behave by shaping the environment they function within.

What this model shows us is we can shape behaviour, and generally the easiest way to do this is through some form of positive reinforcement or removal of a negative.

As designers, the important part of this basic model when applied to behavioural observations is that your design is the positive reinforcer, or the negative affect; meaning the behaviour you are observing is quite often a direct result of your design.

This shows us through good design we have the ability to shape and influence someone’s behaviour. (Unfortunately this is true for bad design too!)

We can’t change a person, but we can influence the way they behave by shaping the environment they function within … through good design we have the ability to shape and influence someone’s behaviour.

The Theory of Planned Behaviour

The Theory of Planned Behaviour, proposed by Icek Ajzen, (and a modification of Ajzen & Fishbern’s earlier model called the Theory of Reasoned Action) explains the link between attitudes and behaviours; it essentially proposes a model for how human action is guided.  Today, it is thought to be one of the most predictive persuasion theories.

The Theory of Planned Behaviour by Icek Ajzen

The model highlights what influences a persons decisions, and attempts to reveal why we might make certain choices. The model suggests that in order to predict whether a person intends to do something, we need to know:

• Whether the person is in favour of doing it (attitude);
• How much the person feels social pressure to do it (subjective norm);
• Whether the person feels in control of the action in question (perceived behavioural control).

Without going too deeply into the cognitive side of things, it’s important to keep in mind that behaviour is often not intentional or controlled at all.   With conscious thought believed to play a small role in the decision making process.

Nevertheless, we need to keep this model in mind, because if we can understand the attitudes of customers and what influences the choices they make, we are better able to use this information to design solutions that will resonate with their belief system, and ultimately, have a greater chance of influencing them to change their behaviours.

The Stages of Change Model

Another useful model is the Stages of Change Model proposed by Prochaska & DiClemente, which is arguably one of the most dominant models of health behaviour change.  This model outlines several steps in the behavioural change process, and assists to gauge an individual’s readiness to act on a new healthier behavior, and provides strategies or processes of change to assist someone move through the stages of change toward action and long-term maintenance (i.e., sustained change).

The model broadly suggests that people can cycle in and out, and around several times before sustained change is realised, then maintained for the long term.

Stages of Change Model by Prochaska & DiClemente

The stages in the change cycle are broadly noted to be:

• Pre-contemplation
• Contemplation
• Preparation or determination
• Action
• Maintenance
• Termination (100% self efficacy)
• Relapse (cycle back to an earlier stage).

Taken together, the models can help us as designers understand how people might make certain choices (Theory of Planned Behaviour), and consider ‘where’ in the cycle of change an individual may be (Stages of Change Model), in order to assist them move through these stages toward a new behaviour.

The Models in Real Life

The Models can be tied back to my egg timer experience. An environmental trigger (the water crisis) was accompanied by social norms of the time around saving water in Melbourne, so my senses were highly attuned to this and my motivation to comply was high.  I thought I was incredibly conscious of the amount of water I was using, however, the real game changer was the arrival of the egg timer in the post; this tool forced me to see how long I actually took when I was in the shower.

Applying the models to my situation of behaviour change

Once this tool was placed in the correct context I observed a dramatic change in my water conserving habits, so clearly I was ready for ‘action’, according to the Stages of Change model.  What is more, internalisation of this behaviour has resulted, and behaviour change has been maintained across a substantial period of time.

So looking at basic behavioural analysis – or the ABC of my behaviour – the tool was the Antecedent, and the Consequence was that I felt better about having a shorter shower and saving water…less guilt if you like.  So the result was that I adjusted my behaviour to shower in less time, and quite rapidly too.

What else can influence behaviour change?

Don’t Forget Rules …

Melbourne Bike Service

Rules undoubtedly affect mass behaviour change.  However, the change they make may not always be what is expected.

One example comes from Melbourne’s new bike share service – and the problems caused by the government’s laws requiring users to have and wear a helmet while using it. From a behavioural perspective, how about considering the behaviour the government were hoping to change with the introduction of helmet laws in the 1990’s, and how it’s fared?

Helmets laws were first introduced as a way to assist lower the level of head injuries sustained by cyclists.  And as with many behaviour change initiatives, we are now – some time down the track – in a position to assess if the laws assisted, by comparing injury rates before and after the laws were introduced.

Graphs of cyclist hospital injuries in Victoria with and without head injuries (1995) show that while head injuries were reduced, so were non-head injuries – so perhaps all they did is reduce the number of cyclists?  If anything, the peaks and troughs show that seasonal variation (i.e., winter), appears to have had the greatest impact of all, and that helmet laws have done little, if anything, to improve safety.

Cyclists hospital admissions in Victoria with and without head injuries

Today we want to design services and provide infrastructure that encourages use of bikes, and unfortunately, when we reflect on it from a behaviour change perspective, having to wear helmets appears to have caused a decline in the number of cyclists.

The assumption that all cyclists would adopt helmets because it was the law appears to have caused behaviours within the wider population that were very different from those initially expected.

… Or Fun!

Fun – children understand it!

But what if there are no rules (the world most of us work within)?

It is possible to change someone’s behaviour, particularly through fun.

Ralph Koster’s book A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2004) looks into the meaning and significance of fun. He suggests that fun is the element of life that is enjoyable and frees us from the normal stresses of the everyday – and also the means by which we retrain our brain to learn new patterns of behaviour.

Fun is the means by which we retrain our brain to learn new patterns of behaviour.

The explosion of games and apps on mobile phones show that games present a real opportunity to change people’s behaviours and habits. Examples include Frog’s Tempt’d (resisting the temptation of unhealthy eating through leaning on your social network as DesignMind explains), and Runkeeper (a way to track, measure and improve your workouts).  I’ve also heard of great ideas for encouraging people to save money, water and energy  through a game-like applications.  Watch this space! The game explosion and their application for driving positive behaviour change is going to intensify.

Design for Behaviour Change? Yes We Can.

So, we can change behaviour through design of products, services and systems, and the best way to do this is to first consider the customers culture and context, before we even start on ideas.

However, if we hope to design behavioural change, we’ll need to focus beyond what is happening right now.  One way to ensure we are looking ahead is to be mindful of the behaviour we want to observe in the future. Set behavioural goals, just as you would set design goals, and let this guide your strategy and design process.

Here are a few takeaways to consider when you are designing solutions that need to drive behaviour change.

1. Define the desired behaviour change you want to observe;
2. Feed this into the business strategy and design process, let it guide these processes;
3. Define your target audience, then go a bit outside the norm.  You often learn more from those who don’t meet your assumed or expected specifications;
4. Conduct research and understand the behavioural predictors of the population (attitudes, norms, control, stages of change).  Qualitative and quantitative data is needed here;
5. Monitor, measure and modify.  Remember, changing a behaviour can take time, so let’s be patient!

References

• Stages of Change Model, Prochaska & Diclemente (1982).
• The Theory of Planned Behavior, Icek Ajzen (1985). [PDF]
  
• The Theory of Reasoned Action, Fishbein & Ajzen (1975).
• Evaluation of the bicycle helmet wearing law in Victoria during its first four years; D. Carr, M. Skalova & M.H. Cameron (1995).
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Ralph Koster (2004).
• Tempt’d (site, soon to be app). More information on the initiative on DesignMind.
  
• Runkeeper (app/site)

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Image Credits:

• Egg timer in shower –  Source: Jannygirl on Flickr.
• ABC blocks, Change Model and Theory of Planned Behaviour Model courtesy of Symplicit.
• Melbourne Bike Share System – Source: Mikael Colville-Andersen on Flickr.
• Head injuries [graph] – Source: D. Carr, M. Skalova & M.H. Cameron (1995).
• Girl – Source: Crackpotstudio on Flickr. © Royalty-Free/Corbis.

As UXers in the corporate world, my team have to focus on practical ways of doing things to get better results – in what is often a shorter time frame.  Take this, and the fact that users are often poor at relaying why they have behaved in a certain way, and we are under some pressure to make inferences from observed behaviour that may (or may not), apply to a broader context.   However, we’ve found that the process of priming our users before we see them – getting them to create collages as a homework activity – has amazing benefits with valuable results.

How do we get more from our users?

This is a big question for UX practitioners in the corporate world, as often we don’t get to see users in their natural settings as much as we’d like, due to the difficulty in selling the value to clients,and usually fall back to ‘standard’ UX methods (e.g., user-based evaluations, behavioural interviews and design workshops).

To assist, we have been setting our users homework as a ‘primer’ ahead of workshops, interviews or user-based testing sessions. We’ve found it performs a highly valuable role as an ice-breaker to kick-off and ground the evaluation session: participants were engaged to discuss a given topic, and more relaxed about the session overall. But more importantly,  it assists to anchor discussions and often reveals associations and subconscious links that the participant may not have thought to mention if they were responding ‘off-the-cuff’.

[Priming] performs a highly valuable role as an ice-breaker to kick-off and ground the evaluation session …. But more importantly,  it assists to anchor discussions and often reveals associations and subconscious links that the participant may not have thought to mention if they were responding ‘off-the-cuff’.

I can hear some cry ‘bias’ and ‘influence’ – but these techniques have been used in psychology within a clinical setting for a long time – for the same reasons – to get more from interviews or family / group sessions because users are often poor at recalling what they do and why they do it.

How It Works

We first trialled this method in May 2007 for the redesign of an online education and training website.  We decided to run design workshops as one of the initial stages in the process in order to explore users’ decisions around education and training, but we wanted to understand what triggered their choices in a broader sense; so we asked users to complete a homework activity.

We instructed them to “…think about their education and training choices up to today” and make a collage – using images and words from newspapers and magazines – about their experiences and the path they had chosen and what it meant to them in their careers now.

The purpose of the homework collage was to understand the participant’s emotions and feelings around the selections they had made in a ‘broad’ sense; using an activity that would tap into right-brain thinking – the emotional and creative side of thought processes.  As a recap, left-brain tends to focus on logical thinking, analysis, and accuracy; whereas right-brain focuses on aesthetics, feeling, and creativity.

The focus on right-brain and emotions was particularly important, as this gave us the chance to tap into ‘subconscious’ thought processes; as it is surprising how often we ‘think’ we are making logical decisions (or accurately relaying what we do and why), but often these are just artful rationalisations of decisions we have made on emotion, behavioural triggers, or habits.

The key for us was to encourage free association by providing minimal, focused instruction in an activity that incorporated a visual medium which enabled users to tap into their emotions and sub-conscious mind, in order to understand why they might think or behave in certain ways.

Collage outlining meal planning, food preparation & shopping habits, from a busy working mother

The Method Behind the Method

The approach we chose was a mélange of methods borrowed mainly from brand / design research and family psychology.

• We drew on brand / design research methods that often focus on clients creating collages in a workshop session, that assist design agencies to develop design concepts (e.g., voice and image mapping, brand personality, etc).  The collage is a great activity that actually helps agencies and the client form a shared understanding of the types of images and words that will best represent the brand; so they can construct the visual design treatment from there.
• In the case of family psychology, we borrowed from homework activities that clinical psychologists often get parents and children to complete together and bring into family counselling sessions.   The purpose is to get families to engage in an activity that teases out deeper insights regarding how they are functioning at home and in their day-to-day lives, in a way that interpersonal interviewing and discussions alone might not uncover.

We were somewhat surprised with the level of enthusiasm we got from users in this original workshop session when their homework was brought out; and we also discovered that participants were no longer displaying anxious or stressed reactions as they spoke about their thoughts and feelings.   They were open and more willing to disclose information, something that can only be seen as a real plus.

Collage of personal relationship with banking, from a busy mother of eight

The Homework Process

Generally we prepare instructions for the homework activity for the participant at the same time as we create the recruitment specification, and this is sent to the participant the minute they agree to take part in the research. Depending on the topic, we’ll ask users to consider a broad question that speaks to this topic and how it applies to them.  For example, the collage above and the one directly below were based on research we conducted in the Banking and Finance sector.

The broad question ‘what does banking mean to you?‘ was positioned as the homework question that users needed to think about when preparing the collage they would bring to sessions.  We tend to offer a few additional prompts for users to be guided by when completing the exercise; such as, to consider their thoughts and feelings, think about how, when, and why, banking touches their lives, and what impact this has on them.

What we were researching was a lot more focused and specific than this question would indicate. However, the value of the process to us is to gain a broader perspective of what influences our users’ lives. It also means we are relying less on a user remembering what they do, or why they do it. The broad nature of the questioning also leaves it to the individual to interpret and relay what matters to them; as you can see from the examples, responses are personal and relevant to that individual.

We then generally spend the first 20 to 30 minutes of that session letting the user talk us through their collage and explain what it means to them.

It is interesting to note that we have never had anyone not complete the activity and many suggest how much fun they had putting the collage together and how they were often surprised at the things that it brought up for them.

Collage of personal relationship with banking, from a young single male

Creating a Positive User Experience

The benefits of this exercise are not limited to what we as practitioners get out of it; we have noticed that the participant’s experience of engaging with us in research has been improved too.

Understanding the influence of 'Set & Setting' on user research

Have you ever noticed someone get something wrong in an evaluation setting and then they try again and again – but this time with more effort? The tendency to repeat the same operation over again is most likely for those people who are anxious or stressed.  But the reverse is true too – when someone is relaxed and happy, their thought processes expand and they become more creative and imaginative.  There is a wealth of psychology resources on how positive affect (aka ‘happiness’ or ‘positive psychology’ research) influences decision making.

I think everyone can recall sessions where no matter how hard you have tried, you just can’t seem to allay users’ fears and concerns.

So how might our homework activity assist in creating a positive user experience for the evaluation?

Early brain researcher Timothy Leary suggested that the nature of an experience depends almost entirely on set and setting.  In this context, set refers to the individual, including their personality structure and mood at the time.   Setting is more physical and somewhat out of the user’s control; like the weather, the room’s atmosphere, the environment generally.

Basically we found that by completing a collage as a homework activity ahead of the workshop session; users were already engaged to discuss a given topic – and more relaxed about the session overall.  The homework activity pro-actively influenced the mind set of the user, and ameliorated the ‘test’ setting: anxiety was minimised and the user was primed to participate.

(Not) Lost In Translation

Collages created at User Friendly 2009, Shanghai, China

We’ve found this method to be successful across different cultures. I presented a workshop on this method at User Friendly 2009, in Shanghai China, and since then we have applied this method to a project that ran across six countries (Australia, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore).

Furthermore, we found that in cultures that traditionally tend to be thought of as reserved and ‘polite’ in their judgements, this activity was observed to bring out amazing honesty and high levels of engagement. Participants in these locations were just as excited to discuss and elaborate on the collage they had created as we have seen in Australia, and we were similarly able to gain a broader perspective of what might influence their decision making processes.

Collage from a small to medium business owner from China, showing their experience of enabling online payments via their website

Facilitation vs Empowerment

Would we have got the same value from conversation alone? Perhaps, as a skilled facilitator can gain a great deal from in-depth interviewing techniques.   However, the empowerment priming offers participants is something that I think is also critical when considering the benefits.

Users show ownership of ideas and a sense of mastery when being able to clearly verbalise their thoughts and impressions around a broad topic area; the value of this can’t be underestimated in the research setting as the time we have to engage with users is often limited.

Benefits to Clients

This task is a perfect vehicle for storytelling.  Not only have we observed that priming helps clients from a more traditional marketing background to understand the importance of User Experience Research.  We have found a range of stakeholders and from many different levels of an organisation love the artifacts created, because they bring a little bit of the user out of their world and into the boardroom.

We display the collages on walls and engage stakeholders with ‘actual product users’; and it really does offer some of the ‘empathy’ needed to consider that life often gets in the way of clear cut decisions around their company’s products.

It also allows business stakeholders to “walk in the users’ shoes” and gives them a perspective they might not have otherwise had.

Summing Up

So, based on our experience, the values of ‘priming’ your users are;

• To get users to think about a given topic in a broad sense,
• To get users to consider their emotions and feelings,
• Introducing images and a creative activity, so that their ‘unconscious’ mind is leading the way,
• Combating negative mind ‘set’ when users come to our ‘Settings’,
• Allowing us to tap into deeper thoughts and behaviours more rapidly (i.e., emotions, triggers, habits),
• Getting users to engage their right-brain for more ‘creative’ and ‘imaginative’ thinking and discussions,
• Getting a wider perspective of the users’ context of use than a normal ‘conversation’ or ‘interview’ might normally yield,
• Eliciting information from participants from different cultures or backgrounds that may not have felt comfortable to discuss some topics or issues in as much detail.

Overall, the great news is that the ‘priming’ method offers a tangible example of the value of the customer-centric approach that UX professionals offer to a client. Why not give it a go?