HCD x SBC = Impact

Human-centred design adds to social & behaviour change projects

There is a growing understanding in social and behaviour change projects that people should be informing their behaviour change intervention design and be co-architects in their interventions. After all, Behavioural Scientists centre much of our work at the community level, where many vital decisions affect individual behaviours.

NGOs increasingly apply behavioural design and social and behaviour change (SBC) frameworks. They offer excellent guidance on analysing complex development challenges and structure in approaching the issues. But we need to expand our toolbox and broaden people's engagement in intervention design.

A recent publication by Empatika, Nutrition International, and Save the Children International (2021) describes their work using a method they call people-driven social and behaviour change:

"People-driven SBC design is a process which builds on some fundamental principles, probably the most significant being that engaging people in their behaviour change process builds their motivation and confidence to change."

Another publication by Breakthrough ACTION (2020) looked at agencies effectively using human-centred design (HCD) approaches in family planning programme design. Some of their key insights include:

• HCD helped create awareness and facilitate meaningful dialogue with policymakers and public-private partnership collaborators.
• The HCD process provided a fresh perspective on drivers of specific behaviours.
• Journey maps are an excellent tool for understanding and designing service delivery systems.
• HCD allowed the project to understand providers' challenges and opportunities better when delivering services.

In my practice, I've realised that while behavioural design and SBC frameworks bring rigour and focus to addressing challenges, they are not very good at including the direct participation of the target audiences to understand the challenges better or in intervention design. I've learned to value incorporating HCD approaches into the behavioural design and SBC processes. HCD tools have helped me make behavioural design more accessible to beginners in many cases. HCD techniques push us to include the people we are working for at all stages of the process, including intervention design.

So, how can we get better at being more people-driven in our project and intervention design? HCD has some great tools we can incorporate at each step of the behavioural design process.

HCD techniques push us to include the people we are working for at all stages of the process, including intervention design.

Definition phase

One of behavioural design's challenges is the limited tools we use in data collection. Surveys are great in helping us gather large amounts of data. Focus group discussions are great tools for offering insights on where we should focus on the problem. While these two tools are the most used in SBC problem-definition stages, they do not provide sufficient insights into how people make decisions at the moment.

We still face severe challenges in designing programmes that are not fully responsive to the needs of communities and individuals. It follows then that we need to immerse ourselves in their experience instead of relying on their recollection of events which will likely be incomplete. An HCD data collection method that provides a much better-quality understanding of lived experience is immersion. While immersion is time-consuming and difficult, it is worth investing in understanding complex problems that the people we work for experience. If we do not have time for immersion, we should at least use another HCD tool, observation (either directly or through peers), to gain insights into what is going on.

Diagnosis phase

We want to understand which factors/determinants make people do certain things at this stage. We are tempted as SBC professionals to do this with other experts in a closed room once we've collected some data. But we are more likely to gain valuable information in choosing the correct theories to guide our intervention design when we involve people walking us through their decision-making process.

Here we can use simple HCD exercises like card sorting and resource flows to gain better insights into barriers and how people make decisions. The data these tools collect will make us much better equipped to identify relevant theories and approaches and diagnose the problem more efficiently.

I believe moving towards a mindset of ‘the goal is to make something tangible that is good enough to get your idea across’ could be transformative for many NGOs.

Design phase

At this stage, an essential role for us as behavioural designers and SBC professionals is to ensure that we use evidence-based tactics to address the barriers we identified. We can now use an extensive array of HCD tools to generate intervention ideas aligned with the tactics we identified, including How Might We, storyboards, co-creation sessions, role play and most importantly, prototyping.

Incorporating HCD principles in the intervention design stage will increase the likelihood of getting fresher ideas. These ideas are more likely to work in the communities they serve because the audience generates them. It helps us pull back from talking at people and instead talk with people.

Many NGOs face a crucial barrier to the fear of preliminary testing preliminary because they didn't vet it across the organisation or consult a full array of staff. I believe moving towards a mindset of 'the goal is to make something tangible that is good enough to get your idea across' could be transformative for many NGOs.

Testing phase

SBC practitioners can also learn from HCD methods at the intervention testing stage. One of my favourite HCD tools is live prototyping, which is essentially piloting the intervention at a small scale for some time. An older, underutilised version of live prototyping is trials for improved practices (TIPS), which offers more detail on what live prototyping looks like in development settings. Again, some of the challenges that NGOs will face at this stage is feeling that they need to complete a complete baseline study or census first. And again, 'this is good enough to test' needs to come into play.

Conclusion

HCD has so much to offer SBC practitioners. If we use HCD tools carefully and in conjunction with upholding the rigour and science behind SBC, we are likely to design more impactful projects.

Have you used HCD techniques in a recent SBC project? Please share your insights with me here!

References:

Breakthrough ACTION (2020). Leveraging Human-Centered Design for Family Planning: Lessons and considerations.

Empatika, Nutrition International & Save the Children International (2021). Study Brief: People-Driven SBC Design in BISA Project Formative Research.

IDEO (2015). The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design.

Manoff Group (n.d.). Trials of Improved Practices (TIPS): Giving Participants a Voice in Programme Design

Originally published at https://www.osmanadvisoryservices.com.

Sarah Osman

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I am a cognitive psychologist and global development specialist applying behavioural science to health, migration and development, and children's rights.