Behavioural ?design ?: our approach, tools and recent projects

Welcome back to The Behaviouralist’s newsletter on LinkedIn! This month’s edition focuses on behavioural design – a practice crucial to our work at The Behaviouralist. In this edition, we interview Rahel Kiss , one of the two behavioural designers at TB, who discusses behavioural design and how we integrate it into our projects. We also shine a spotlight on choice screens, a hot topic in the field of online consumer protection.

Interview with Rahel

Hey Rahel, would you mind telling us about your role at The Behaviouralist and introduce the concept of behavioural design?

Sure! I’m still perfecting my pitch for when friends ask what I do for work, so this is good practice :) Behavioural design – in my experience – is about taking insights about how people think, feel and act and translating them into actionable strategies to encourage a desired behaviour. People often respond by asking “so basically, you do UX/CX/marketing?”? And while there are certainly overlaps, there is more scientific rigour and testing to our projects, and the desired behaviour is not limited to better usability or increased sales. Nowadays, behavioural design typically refers to a method of designing interventions to achieve a target behaviour, which could be reducing waste contamination, increasing vaccine uptake or reducing online fraud. Having said that, I think the best designers have always had an intuitive understanding of what makes people tick; as a behavioural designer, I get to combine that intuition with the rigour of behavioural science.

How is your work different from behavioural scientists’ and how does behavioural design fit into the projects undertaken by The Behaviouralist?

While behavioural science strives to understand why people behave the way they do, and discover underlying patterns and principles of behaviour, behavioural design incorporates these insights into the development of services, tools, or products? - recognising that how an intervention looks, and how people interact with it is just as important as its content. Most of our projects at TB follow our D-BIAS methodology of Diagnose Behaviour, Intervention design, Assess, and Scale-up. Iranzu Monreal and I are the two behavioural designers at TB; whilst we often work on projects as end-to-end as consultants, our “behavioural design expertise” is mostly applied during the “Diagnose Behaviour” and “Intervention design” phases of the project cycle.?

What exactly does this “behavioural design expertise” involve? It seems like there are a lot of activities that fall under the umbrella term of behavioural design?

Yes, absolutely! Behavioural science (with its models like COM-B) and design methods are often complementary. As both disciplines solve problems, perhaps it was inevitable that these fields would converge and start sharing tools. Some of the activities we routinely employ include:?

1. Qualitative and mixed-methods research: the dominant method in behavioural science so far has been rigorous quantitative research. Luckily, my Economist and Data Science colleagues are more skilled in this area than I am! I focus more on qualitative research methods, like conducting interviews or focus groups, and analysing long open-ended questions. For example, in a recent project with the Leukaemia and Lymphoma Society, we interviewed physicians to understand the barriers they face in referring cancer patients to clinical trials.?
2. Behavioural journey mapping: we use this research tool to describe and visualise the relationship between a service provider and an end user over time, incorporating various levels of influence on the behaviour. It can be an effective tool to increase sign-up rates, design onboarding processes, or understand drop-outs of programmes.?We recently worked with a large video game company to create a behavioural journey map of its users' experiences.
3. Designing/re-creating digital environments: this is a novel method we have developed to run large-scale trials in the digital space, and test digital choice environments in a realistic way. We have used this to understand how online fake reviews affect consumer decision making, as well as to inform policy, such as how to design effective browser choice screens.?

Speaking of choice screens...

The EU Digital Market’s Act, which came into force earlier this month, seeks to enhance consumers’ autonomy when interacting with digital services and products, and to promote competition in digital markets. Choice screens, which provide users with a range of options as opposed to shepherding them towards a default, are a tool to help achieve these goals. A well-designed browser choice screen, for example, should make users more aware of the range of browsers available to them, thereby enhancing their freedom to choose, and promoting competition between browser providers, which will encourage greater innovation in the long-run.?

However, an understanding of behavioural design is key to designing effective choice screens; poorly designed digital interventions can easily fail to achieve their intended purpose, or worse, cause counterproductive effects and become a deceptive “dark pattern.”

The Behaviouralist recently worked with Mozilla to test the impact of the design, timing, and content of different browser choice screens on consumer choice, having 12,000 participants interact with recreations of Windows and Android operating systems. This project involved:

• Recreating the user interface of the entire Android and Windows set-up process, so that participants would interact with the browser choice screen as part of the 10-15 minute process of setting up a new device, just as they would in real life.?
• Designing various choice screen interfaces, varying the number of options and amount of information presented, and making strategic decision regarding other visual elements such as the the salience of the “next” button or the framing of the message (e.g. “select” versus “pick” versus “choose” a browser).?
• Complementing the “setup journey” with a pre- and post-journey questionnaire and segmentation questions for nuanced data, and finally, piloting and testing the experiment in several rounds.?

Testing revealed that the order in which options are presented, how much information is provided about each option, and when during the device set-up process users are shown a choice screen all impact which browser users end up choosing. When asked what they would prefer, most people chose the choice screen with the greatest amount of information and the most browsers to choose from. Being shown a choice screen helped people to select lesser known independent browsers, and 98% of subjects stated they liked the ability to choose their default browser for themselves.

Read on

To read the full case study on our work with Mozilla on choice screens, and to learn more about behavioural design tools, click the links below.

Save the date

We will be hosting a?webinar on Tuesday 2 May! Join us to hear from Jesper ?kesson and Filippo Muzi-Falconi about The Waste Game that we created in partnership with the Irish Universities Association and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Ireland .

We hope you enjoyed this edition of our monthly newsletter. If you have any thoughts you would like to share with us, or ideas for us to work together, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!