Behavioural Design Fundamentals: Part 2 of 3
The Behavioural Design toolbox of 20 ideas and techniques
A Behavioural Design starter kit for understanding and changing human behaviours
How can we design for human change? How can we influence people to make certain decisions yet in an ethical way? And how can we keep customers engaged and retained with products and services?
To design for change, first, we must understand more about human behaviours.
Behavioural Design is here to guide teams, such as Customer Experience, Data Science, and Product, in understanding how people think, feel and react. By practising the many ideas and techniques associated with the ever-emerging field, organisations can reach out to their customers’ intrinsic needs.
In this article, we’ll address some of the many ideas and techniques being used to build long term behaviours in everyday products and services. By doing so, we’ll unpack a special toolbox loaded with heuristics, methods, and frameworks which can help drive user engagement, crank-up retention, and cultivate healthy habits.
Behavioural Design thinking tools for human change
Before we unpack the Behavioural Design toolbox, we must remind ourselves of the key principles we learned from part one:
- Designing for behaviours is about persuasion, not coercion
- The ideas and techniques in Behavioural Design should not be practised like Dark Elixir! So that means no dark patterns nor tactics that go against the user’s best interest
- Customer needs and satisfaction should be the focal point of increasing engagement and retention
- The more you can learn about behaviours, then the more you can meet your target audiences’ intrinsic needs
Now let’s reveal the glorious contents of the Behavioural Design toolbox. Inside is a collection of thinking tools which can be used as a starter kit for understanding and shaping long term behaviours. Many of the ideas have, and still are, utilised by the products and services that have become part of our lifestyles.
Take searching for information, for example, before the Internet revolution we relied on using encyclopedias and books. Then we embarked a digital transformation of typing our queries into search engines. Nowadays, we’ve formed a habit of speaking to our smartphones and voice-controlled devices to retrieve answers. By adopting Behavioural Design ideas and techniques, organisations like Google, Amazon, and Apple, have engineered ways to make their products and services ingrained into our daily lives.
So where do we begin with the toolbox? For simplicity, our collection has been structured into two parts:
- Heuristics: ideas on how people think and behave
- Techniques: ideas and frameworks for designing for change
Heuristics
A heuristic is a rule of thumb. Whether we’re conscious or unconscious, mental shortcuts speed up our thinking and decision making.
Heuristics are commonly defined as cognitive shortcuts or rules of thumb that simplify decisions, especially under conditions of uncertainty — BehaviouralEconomics.com
Heuristics have been added as the first layer of the Behavioural Design toolbox to help us develop a deeper understanding of how people think. The following cognitive shortcuts (out of many) will provide us with insight on how people may think and behave…
1. Endowed progress effect
A phenomenon whereby people are motivated by an artificial headstart toward completing a goal. Let’s demonstrate with a simple example:
Which of the following loyalty cards will influence you to put in more effort?
A) An eight stamp card with no headstart
B) A ten stamp card with 2 free stamps
According to studies conducted by Psychologists Joseph C. Nunes and Xavier Dreze, the answer is usually B. Even though both loyalty cards required the same number of stamps (8), the hypothesis is that people will likely work harder and faster when under the endowed progress effect.
Take a look at Design with the endowed progress effect for more examples.
2. Social proof
A theory coined by Robert Cialdini whereby people adapt their behaviour according to the actions of others. For example, we might choose to dine at a certain restaurant because it was recommended by a friend.
As social creatures, we particularly exhibit the behaviour of social proof when we embrace the ‘reward of the tribe’ culture. For example, you might choose to match the response of others to a social media post, regardless of how you may truly feel about it.
3. Scarcity
The ‘only 1 room left’ message that lights up on a booking website page, or the sight of three bags of pasta in the shopping aisle, endows us with a scarcity perception. If you saw one cookie jar contains fewer sweet treats than another, would you perceive it as being more valuable?
4. Framing
The way how something is framed can influence us to build a personal reality that’s different from what’s really true. Take two bottles of wine, for example, one may be priced higher than the other to give the perception of having more quality and worth. The framing heuristic can also take place in the form of price, colour, and tone of voice.
5. Availability
Coined in 1973 by Nobel-prize winning Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Nathan Tversky, the availability heuristic allows us to draw a quick conclusion when we need immediate information. However, while the mental shortcut can be helpful, it can also lead to incorrect evaluations.
For example, after watching news reports on multiple plane crashes, you start to think that flying is an unsafe form of transport. When you next book your holiday, you decide not to fly because you believe the probability of a plane crash is high.
The availability heuristic is particularly important in Behavioural Design because people can easily create judgments based on the information they only have access to; whether it’s in the world or in their associative memory.
6. Representativeness
The representativeness heuristic was defined by Tversky and Kahneman in the 1970s. The mental shortcut helps speed up the decision-making process; however, it can also lead to poor choices, stereotypes, and errors.
For example, you’re waiting for a bus and you see a person with a threatening presence, scruffy face, and fierce eyes. Without having any evidence on what that individual might be, your initial judgment will likely inform you that they are a criminal and someone not to be trusted. What we perceive may not always be the true reality.
7. Anchoring
Another heuristic define by Tversky and Kahneman, anchoring shapes our behaviour in different scenarios, whether it’s shopping in a clothing store sale, or negotiating the asking price for a house.
When we’re hooked onto a piece of information, our decision making is likely to be influenced by that anchor. Studies prove that people are often drawn into something that is on promotion when in reality there are cheaper alternatives. For example, a stack of soup cans in a supermarket that is labelled “Limit 12 per customer” influences customers to buy more tins.
8. Priming
A phenomenon whereby external stimuli, such as words or body language prime the idea of something without conscious intention. Take the following example: if you heard the word EAT, you would likely complete the word fragment SO_P as SOUP.
Kahneman, explains that priming is an activation that spreads through a small part of a vast network of associated ideas. However, the response doesn’t always work for everyone.
9. Sunk cost fallacy and loss aversion
We often over overestimate the value in someone or something because of our invested time, money, and energy. For example, the average person would rather not lose £100 than win £100. Sunk cost fallacy, or loss aversion, is the fear of wasting resources or losing sufficient investment in something, even if it holds little value.
The sunk cost fallacy heuristic particularly manifests in social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Users may feel reluctant in walking away from their profiles because of the amount of investment they’ve made.
Techniques
In the second layer of the Behavioural Design toolbox, is a collection of techniques and frameworks which can help us design for certain behaviours. Whether we’re looking to increase engagement for an app or increase retention for a service, the tools are here to make them happen.
For each tool and technique in the Behavioral Design Toolbox, there is a purpose — and for each purpose, a tool — Boundless Mind
Each tool and technique can be used to influence a specific change, such as helping people to quickly understand simultaneous information. They can be used as part of an experiment, an optimisation strategy, or as a framework for building long term behaviours.
10. CAR model
First up, is the cue, action, and reward — also known as the CAR model: a simple Behavioural Design framework that can help design for habit-forming products and long term behaviours.
- Cue: also known as a trigger or a prompt, is something learned from the self (thoughts, feelings), as well as from our environment (something we sense). Cues draw our attention, like a carrot on a stick, and cause us to take a particular action
- Action: the specific behaviour you want someone to perform more often, such as entering your daily calorie intake
- Reward: the positive consequence of performing the desired action. Receiving a reward for doing something increases the chances of us repeating the same behaviour. The more unpredictable the reward, then the more likely we’ll form a habit
Also, check out Nir Eyal’s Hooked Model: How to Create Habit-Forming Products Using the Hook Model
11. Reinforcement learning
Also known as reward learning, this design technique can help increase the frequency that someone performs a behaviour. By rewarding visitors with positive praise or tangible rewards such as points and badges for their development, can improve how often they’ll engage with the overall product.
12. Optimal challenge
Finding the ‘sweet spot’ for the amount to push someone to perform an action requires finding the right balance of difficulty — an optimal challenge. Make a task too easy for someone, then they may not achieve their goal; however, make it too hard and you might induce fatigue and burnout.
13. Cognitive load balancing
Helps limit how much mental work we must do when learning how to use something. Small fragments of information, progressively placed throughout a journey can help increase someone’s ability to properly perform tasks. For example, InVision utilises cognitive load balancing by spotlighting new areas of interest wherever appropriate.
14. Stimulus devaluation
Helps reduce a habit by introducing friction between an action and its associated reward. Stimulus devaluation techniques include adding a time delay to receiving the reinforcement; by doing so, the user can still perform their desired action and receive feedback without forming the habit.
15. Stopping rules
Controls the behaviours you either want people to increase or reduce. Instagram and Pinterest remove navigation cues as stopping rules to lock users into an infinite scroll. The intention is to influence people to consume more content without knowing when to stop.
16. Choice architecture
The practice of creating specific, intentional, default actions you want users to take. Choice architecture is a common supermarket technique, that includes placing perishable foods on the far side to expose people to the goods they didn’t consider buying.
17. Ambient communication
Complex information sometimes needs to be presented in an intuitive way to allow us to understand our environment faster. The Apple Watch Activity app makes use of ambient communication by displaying simultaneous data streams as small coloured rings which users can quickly glance at.
18. Optimal information flow
An appropriate sequence of steps and weight of information helps users to understand a process quickly. Optimal information flow can be found in a good checkout or signup experience where there is little friction. The fewer ideas people have to juggle, the more likely they’ll progress in their journey.
19. Personalisation
Machine learning can learn about what the user does and utilise the data to predict and change behaviour. When you signup to a Spotify or Apple Music account, the app asks for your preferences and then makes recommendations tailored to your tastes. Medium also drives personalisation by asking new members the kind of topics they’re interested in.
20. Gamification
Gamification is the adoption of characteristics and mechanics from games to make products more fun and engaging. The concept is to keep people hooked by incentivising them with tangible rewards, such as points, milestones, badges, and leaderboards. Products and services can be made more fun and interesting to use, even if it's for filling in a form or making a purchase. It is these types of experiences that will make users want to come back for more.
Takeaways
The Behavioural Design toolbox can be used as a starter kit for understanding and shaping behaviours. Heuristics can help us identify different thinking patterns, while techniques can guide us in designing for habit-forming products and services.
However, even though the list of ideas and techniques have helped some brands and organisations achieve customer engagement and retention, don’t be fooled into thinking they’ll have immediate success with your own audience.
Knowing whether your Behavioural Design strategies will have an impact on your customers requires testing and validation. In part three, we’ll be understanding exactly that — how to test and measure human behaviours.
So hold on tight — we’re nearly there.
Special mentions
- Behavioural Design toolbox techniques adopted from Boundless Mind, Digital Behavioural Design
- Heuristics from Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- As always, invaluable help and insight from Paul Humphrey
- Kawaii icons (used in all illustrations) from Freepik
