Introducing behavioural design into our product design process
Why do people do the things they do?
As a product designer, we want to design the best and most aesthetically pleasing experiences for our users. We do our research, we look for inspiration and best practices, we design, we test and iterate. But what if we wanted to take it one step further? What if we wanted to add another layer to our design thinking and really understand why people do the things they do. Enter, behavioural design.
I started learning about the concept of Behavioural Design early last year and the more I looked into it, the more it sparked my curiosity. Working as a product designer in HealthTech, you have to navigate complex workflows and understand how to create more efficient flows. But even with the best design and all the testing in the world, if the environment doesn’t allow for change, there is very little you can do. So let’s move away from workflows and look at individuals, how can we as designers help them successfully do the things they really want to do?
With this question in mind, I signed up to Hyper Islands Behavioural Design course to learn about the fundamentals of Behavioural Design, understand what it is people want to do and how we can help them achieve this. Fast forward 6 weeks later and I had completed the course! Now armed with different behavioural frameworks to help us understand behaviour and design for positive change, I was ready to implement it with the team.
Intentional design
When it comes to behavioural design, everything we do as designers has to be intentional. We design with a specific behaviour in mind and drive the user towards it. We’re not just thinking about usability and aesthetics, we’re adding another layer to our design process to understand how we can positively influence people’s behaviour, what actions they have to take, how it makes them feel, what is happening around them and why they want to complete this action.
Applying the learnings
A couple months after the course, I really wanted to start applying these learnings to our HealthyYou products, so I organised and facilitated a Behavioural Design Sprint where we delved into the following sections:
Defining the problem in behavioural terms
First we needed to understand why someone acts in a certain way. This is influenced by their internal thoughts and feelings, as well as their external influences, such as the environment and people around them. By understanding the context of the behaviour, we can also identify their challenges and gain greater understanding of the user and their defining interests. Now we can define the problem we are trying to solve in behavioural terms, the behavioural objective of the sprint and, most importantly, define the exact behaviour we want to focus on.
Identifying what needs to change
Next, we have to be very specific about the behaviour we are going to focus on, which will be our target behaviour. To do so we need to ask ourself: Who, what, where, when, with whom and how often will the target behaviour happen.
Then, we identify the barriers that are blocking the success of actioning that behaviour and also the benefits of achieving it, this will help us drive motivation towards the success of the behaviour. As we’ve identified what needs to change, we can now define a hypothesis from which we can start ideating.
Lastly, we introduce the first behavioural framework into the workflow, the COMB-B canvas, in which we map the barriers and benefits to each component of the canvas. The combination of all the previous steps, informs the brief for the design phase.
Design strategies to achieve the desired behaviour.
Before diving into the design phase, we needed to spend some time understanding the theory behind the strategies to achieve a desired behaviour (intervention functions), and the behaviour change techniques (BCT) available.
Now it was time to start looking back at our findings, specifically the barriers. We followed the intervention functions matrix where we mapped every COM-B component to each barrier, then what intervention function would solve that barrier and lastly, what BCT we could use to apply that function.
After dedicating time to apply the behaviour frameworks, we moved into the ideation process were we did different ideation techniques like How Might We’s, brainstorming and storyboarding.
Lastly, we scored each feature idea generated based on the impact of behaviour change, ease of change and ease of measurement. This allowed us to discuss and reflect on the proposed ideas, so we could then focus on the most promising ones.
Ideation outcomes and testing
After converging all of our ideas, we agreed on our top 3 that were most likely to encourage the desired action from the user. We then split the work between the design team and the research team.
The design team focused on producing a prototype for usability testing, competitor analysis mood boards for focus groups and design assets to support the delivery of a 3 week diary study.
The research team lead and synthesised the outcomes on the usability tests, focus groups and the diary study, giving us a wide view on different aspects that we wanted to take forward.
To see the outcomes from our workshops and research make sure you read Part 2 from Abbie McLeod, where she’ll discuss how users reacted to our ideas and what findings we’ll be taking forward into the build of our products!
Learning by doing
Facilitating this workshop was big learning curve. It was challenging and I pushed myself out of my comfort zone but it helped me internalise my behavioural design learnings further, share them with my team and explore a new layer within our design process.
Ultimately, as a designer I love to explore, create and iterate. So I took this mentality into the workshop; I’m exploring a new discipline that I find very interesting, we’re creating solutions based on existing frameworks and now it was time to share these learnings. As we continue to learn more about this fascinating field, I’m sure this process will continue to iterate and so will the solutions we implement of the back of it.
So, what’s next?
With all our findings and ideas now being built into our roadmap, we’re keen to see how behavioural design can help us in more projects moving forward. I’ve also taken the next step in my behavioural design journey and started the 7 week Strategic Behavioural Design course lead by BehaviourKit.
What do you think of our process? Have you used these frameworks before or is this all new to you? Let us know, and if you want to discuss behavioural design and beyond, reach out to me on LinkedIn!
