Impact-driven design: getting the results you want
Tools and learnings from the intersection of social entrepreneurship, product strategy, and behavioural design — a digital healthcare example.
Design thrives in change, and often, it creates that change. This is exactly the most fascinating side of it: all the powerful tools design has to influence and rewire our behaviour, decision making, organisations or understanding of the world around us. Yet, more often than not, change-making design projects tend to dream big and achieve little, because, well, getting that change actually happen is just very hard: the issues are both complex and deep, people are hard to reach, there is a lot of resistance and hurdles all around. It takes a lot of energy, perseverance, and advocacy, so you better make sure no effort is wasted.
This article will walk you through 3 sets of tools that can help you build a clear strategy, better understanding of context, and take effective steps towards reaching your goal — whether you are building a stress management app or aiming to reduce global carbon emissions.
Commercial product design x social impact = ?
Despite its change-making potential, commercial product/service design is not exactly an impact-driven industry. Our work usually targets KPIs tracking business or experience goals, leaving societal changes, environmental footprints, nasty supply chain issues or just good-old accessibility in our strategic blind spot. (I hope you do it better, though.)
Yet, working with an impact mindset adds value to commercial design work in a number of ways:
- Sharper strategic focus: clear up what exactly you want to achieve and how exactly you will get there;
- Tackle complexity more effectively: use the tools created for complex issues in your design work, whether it is changing behaviour or understanding stakeholder networks;
- Improve product footprint for a better impact on community and planet;
- Improve brand resilience by reducing social and environmental impact risk.
Taking a digital healthcare example
To better illustrate the tools presented below, I will be using a generalised version of one of the recent projects I worked on. OneHealth, let’s call it like this, is a health behaviour app that helps people adopt a healthy lifestyle addressing individual and community behaviour.
Digital healthcare makes a great example, because it is a fast-forward, highly competitive market with a clear and direct impact on social and individual well-being, fundamental to a good quality of life. However, these tools are easily applicable to any other field of change-making, whether it is environmental activism, cultural interventions, or economic behaviour.
Toolkit #1: Theory of Change
Clearing up strategy and understanding why we take certain actions is a fundamental step in building successful products or services, so let’s see a great tool for this step first.
What is it?
A widely used and very flexible strategic framework, the Theory of Change is just what it says: it describes the change we want to achieve and how we want to do it. It is an analytical map outlining causes and effects, from resources and actual activities through direct outputs, until the final outcome(s) and our impact in general.
It is a great tool to get clear about design strategy as well: the goals we want to achieve matched with activities (features, service offering, etc) are both at the center of product development — and a Theory of Change.
How to use it?
In its final form, it looks like a map (more like a mind map than a diagram, see a simple OneHealth example below), but you can take it to any level of detail. Usually, you want to work backwards, going through steps like:
- Outcomes/impact: what is the final result, the change you want to see happening? Be ambitious but concrete, create a tangible vision.
- Access points: how does your target problem space work? What are some of its key factors that you can effectively influence? What are some that you cannot?
- Choose the right activities that are both within your scope, sustainable for your organisation to pursue, and have a meaningful effect on your goals.
- Measure (your activities, output, and, if possible, outcomes), stay critical, and don’t forget to check your footprint on the input side.
This clear and easy framework does not only help us create a shared understanding of activities and outcomes, but it is also an excellent base for building a system of KPIs or to link up several layers of strategy, from operations to broader systemic context.
On the other hand, the Theory of Change concept has its limits and one should not be deceived by its linearity and distinct categories.
Social impact is not a linear chain of causes and effects, but rather a complex system with interlinked issues and endogenous relationships. Here is a more realistic graph with related fields or tools you might want to consider when working with complexity:
What are some of these additional points, approaches or tools to consider? I strongly advise you to involve field experts and do your own research, but you can start with:
- Systems thinking (or design for systems change): an emerging approach in social innovation. Start with this RSA paper or this recently published framework from the Design Council.
- Scenario analysis/planning: a good old strategic tool to craft solutions for a variety of possible, divergent future states; could be useful when a few external factors can substantially alter your activities.
- Mapping networks and partnerships: a great way to increasing your impact when aiming at hard-to-influence goals.
- Be strategic about activities: this might be a no-brainer, but many organisations fail to build a strong communication/product/go-to-market strategy. Make sure your activities serve your goal and serve it in the best way possible (also see tool #2).
- Iterations and changes: due to the high level of uncertainty, it might be worth planning for short iteration cycles (test, measure, evaluate, change) or various scenarios. Often, outputs of one year affect the activities of another, so your ToC might look different 3 years from now.
- Measure, measure, measure: you might just use a standard business metrics approach (like OKRs or even a balanced scorecard) or, if interested in measuring social impact, you can start learning from the comprehensive entries of Sopact (for example) and look at the UN SDG framework (e.g. here) or, on the investment side, GIIN’s IRIS tool.
How does it work in practice?
When our design team joined, OneHealth has already had a well-developed concept and their investors were pushing for results. We were hired to work out the details, but there was a challenge: way too many features planned already. We used a Theory of Change framework to understand which features were core to achieve the product’s USPs and which areas could use further functionalities — and which features should have been phased out.
We worked from both ends of the graph to match activities with outcomes. As a result, we saw something like this:
This approach helped to visualise how OneHealth thinks about improving health (it targets several health-related lifestyle areas, such as physical activity, nutrition, sleep, etc), but it also revealed challenges like:
- Its secondary USP (community and commitment) was weakly supported by activities, clearly needing more effort for effective actions.
- Some features they planned (here represented by a diary module) were not particularly supportive of the goals, so we suggested to deprioritise these over other, more effective activities.
Toolkit #2: Change roadmap (behavioural plan)
How exactly are we going to reach the goals we specified in our Theory of Change? What are the journeys, the interactions, the tactics that lead to our outcome? How do we monitor progress? — if you are working on product strategy, service interactions, or maybe even communication, these questions will be familiar to you.
Our possibilities for selecting the right tool are both endless and very much driven by our goals and challenges. So I picked a tool that I consider a great example for blending strategic, tactical and interaction design considerations: the behavioural plan, used for designing products or services that help the user (customer, participant) adopt a different behaviour, teach them a new routine.
What is it?
A behavioural plan, as described by Stephen Wendell in his hands-on (and tremendously useful) book, Designing for Behavior Change, is basically a sequence of steps that takes the user from their current state to the desired state or target action.
Similarly to user journeys, we consider what the user does and thinks throughout various phases, how they interact with our product, why they would continue (or get stuck) and what exactly we need to do to help them achieve the target behaviour. The key difference to user journeys is that changing behaviour takes changing habits and it is achieved through repeated loops of habit-forming interactions. The behavioural plan is a strategic tool, a high-level overview of how the various product modules, features, interactions act together to create these loops and bring the user to the desired outcome.
How to use it?
Of course, there are numerous books about behavioural design, so I can do nothing but encourage you to read into this excellent literature. Here, I will just draw your attention to a few essential steps:
- Know your users: this is the right time to do some of that good old user research, to understand their mindset, challenges, context, etc.
- Know the target behaviour: it is crucial to set the target right (what exactly do you want them to do?) and understand how this change is usually achieved (e.g. in therapy, communication or other relevant practices) and what are some smart tactics you might use to do this.
- Design for the uncontrolled: being effective means the change will work even if you are not holding their hands, in their everyday reality (i.e. a behavioural plan includes both your in-product interactions and what happens outside of that product).
- Repeat: as mentioned, when forming habits, we are basically building repeated interactions— consider which actions need to be repeated over time and which ones are one-off.
You might have already encountered the graph of the so-called habit loop, illustrating this ever-recurring cycle of habits being triggered and acted on — in our Theory of Change context, it might look like this:
To make this loop more tangible, it is a good idea to specify:
- Minimum viable action: what is the shortest, simplest version of the target behaviour your users must take, so that your product has an impact?
- Success criteria: when does your product (service) reach its goal? What are some operational/behavioural/usage etc targets or KPIs?
How does it work in practice?
In the case of OneHealth, we had to define multiple behavioural plans for each of the different health modules — in practice, we focused our efforts on 2 modules first. By understanding these 2 types of target behaviours and how we wanted to shape them, we started to outline key features and interactions.
It is a 2-way work actually: as a UX designer or product strategist, you certainly wish to have a clear structure, module hierarchy, design principles, key interactions (etc), while, from a behavioural design perspective, you will want to define:
- the loops of activities through which you change habits;
- the ways you will keep the user in those loops;
Finally, you will also want to translate strategy into requirements by defining and prioritising features, perhaps in the context of various scenarios, laid out as user flows, written in epics or whatever your method might be. To bring all these aspects together, we worked with a canvas like this one:
Toolkit #3: Leadership
Like I said at the beginning, the true hardship of designing for social impact is not so much technical, but it lies in the complexity of issues and the hurdles you will face. You need a decent understanding of the challenge, a pretty good idea for a solution, a precisely executed design project to make it ready for launch— and then you might still fail because there is just no one that can get your idea out to the market and make it grow.
Leadership is a fundamental asset in the business of change-making, whether you are a designer seeking to convince project stakeholders, or a social entrepreneur fighting on the open battlefield.
While entrepreneurs tend to have a special mix of dedication, skills and craziness, there is a lot that can be learnt by anyone and used in any project.
How to use it?
Yet again, there are so many great books and talks about leadership, which I do not wish to compete with. I have, however, spent more than 10 years working on innovation in and out of the social impact scene and can point out a few techniques that can work for both designers and other people behind social impact initiatives:
- The power of followers: when championing a new idea, you obviously want to be followed. Whether it is a first follower base (as we learn from Derek Sivers’ great talk) or wider traction, you will want to understand how your followers get devoted and how they might become activists of your idea.
- Collaborative (interdependent leadership): the best bit of advice in leadership is not to go alone. Collaborative leaders rely of teams and partnership throughout every stage of a decision-making process, even though it does not necessarily mean co-creation: goal setting, action plans and operations all take into account team resources and skills. Slack has a nice blog post about this approach, but I like the talk of Lorna Davis, too.
- Make no mistake, communication is key: okay, I know. But think about the last time you felt frustrated because your idea was not heard, your project was called off, stakeholders were ‘stubborn’. Did you do everything in your power to make yourself understood? I strongly believe in designers’ responsibility to be fierce advocates of the users and to lead stakeholders towards solutions that make our lives better. Excellent, polished, practiced, skilled communication is an asset to get ideas heard.
The author is a strategic designer for commercial design projects, and a co-founder of impact.design, a boutique agency working with mission-driven organisations to increase their impact through design.
All feedback, ideas, questions are warmly welcome.
