of what your team calls these phases, you probably have a similar process that you use. The labels matter less than what you do during each phase. Behavior change designers typically perform a specific set of activities to accomplish phase objectives. Sometimes these are familiar activities that other design professionals also use, like research interviews or prototype sketching. Other times, the activities are more closely tied to behavior change, such as doing a literature review of previously published interventions or creating an outcomes logic map. What’s important is that you are doing the groundwork to understand your target users and their needs, coming up with reasonable hypotheses about how to change target behaviors, and testing the efficacy of your designs.
The tactics and activities in this book occur across the entire product development process. You’ll learn about ways to research and understand target users; identify product features to help them accomplish goals and overcome barriers; specify requirements so they can be brought to life in product development; and investigate whether and how a product works to support user outcomes.
The Upshot: You Can Do Behavior Change Design
Behavior change design is the application of psychological science to the creation of products or experiences in order to influence specific behaviors in users. Behavior change designers work to incorporate science to the inner workings of an intervention to maximize how effective it is at producing target behaviors, the things they want their users to do. At the same time, psychology can make any digital product more engaging by supporting users’ basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Behavior change designers follow a process that includes research, translating findings to product features, and measuring outcomes.
In this book, I use a specific psychological theory called the self-determination theory of motivation to talk about how to engage users with a digital product. Self-determination theory’s main premise is that the strongest types of motivation come from people’s deeply held goals and values. Engaging experiences help connect people’s behaviors with what really matters to them. Designers can create those connections by supporting users’ needs of meaningful choice (autonomy), learning and growing (competence), and belonging to something larger than themselves (relatedness).
PERSPECTIVE Heather Cole-Lewis and Building Toward Value
With a combined background in epidemiology, biomedical informatics, and public health, Heather Cole-Lewis is one of the most rigorous thinkers I know when it comes to integrating behavior science with product design. Heather specializes in health, but her advice about subject matter expertise holds true across all fields of practice.
What does it take to do behavior change design?
I like this field because there’s always an opportunity to learn more. We sit at the intersection of a lot of different worlds. One person might have all of these different areas of training; however, to get the work done at the rate at which it needs to be done, we have to work together. So we can come to the table with our existing knowledge and skill sets acknowledging that there are other pieces of the puzzle that have to come together in order for us to build engaging, successful, cost-effective solutions. You have to be willing to teach and to learn from other people at the table that are just as skilled in their particular areas.
What do people misunderstand about behavior change?
We all are humans and we all behave, so a lot of behavior science feels intuitive. But there is a true science when it comes to understanding behaviors, contextualizing them, figuring out what to do about them, and ultimately measuring the effect. That’s where the skill set of a behavior scientist comes in. A lot of times people expect behavior science to happen overnight. The challenge is getting them to understand the rigor that it takes to get to a great solution. The results of health behaviors often take some time to see. But a great behavior scientist can incorporate innovative research methods into a design process to help the team move quickly and cost-effectively.
With health behavior, there are a couple of different levels of engagement.6 The first thing that has to happen is that someone has to use your solution. Next, once you get them to pick it up and use it, the clicking and swiping has to be toward a very particular end—exposure to the techniques that address barriers and facilitators of health behavior. Finally, you have to ask “Did their health behaviors improve or change?” Once people have a better understanding of engagement with the technology versus engagement with the health behavior, they start to have more hope for better outcomes that could happen with engaging technology that has great science built into it.
Also, people have to realize that health behavior science is about choice, not tricking people into doing things they don’t want to do.
What is your behavior change design process?
Start by building a theory of change or logic model.7 When you build for behavior change, you start with the challenge that needs to be addressed and then the behaviors associated with it. Go backward until you get to the actual behavior that needs to happen. Then you categorize the world of reasons why a person does or does not do a behavior, determinants of behavior, and see which ones are most important for this particular group of people. Once you’ve got behavioral determinants mapped out, it helps you understand which behavior change techniques to use.
The logic model is going to help you understand how everything you add to this intervention represents a behavior change technique that goes toward one of those determinants to ultimately change behavior. As long as you’re laying out your assumptions in the logic model, then you’re well set up for understanding if your solution is going to work or not. In order to build a great intervention, you have to think about how you’re going to measure it from the very beginning. Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to analyze how it works in the end.
What is the business value of behavior change design?
One reason you build a logic model on the front end is because then you can understand where to spend your budget first. A behavior scientist can help you evaluate and build out your solution in an iterative fashion to understand if you’re moving in the right direction before you build out the whole thing. They can also help to make sure that if the product is digital, you build the data framework that will help you evaluate it.
Some behavior scientists are still learning how to articulate behavior science in business terms. That communication should happen with an eye toward value, or whatever the ultimate end point is. If you’re working in a commercial space, why does this behavior science matter? Is it because you’re getting people to improve their health in the long term? In the short term, is it about building awareness of a health issue and showing that the brand cares about the consumer’s experience with that health issue? The science is not always enough. It has to be about the science and the business case.
Heather Cole-Lewis, Ph.D., MPH, is Director of Behavior Science at Johnson & Johnson Health and Wellness Solutions. She holds a Ph.D. in epidemiology from Yale University, an M.A. in biomedical informatics from Columbia University, and an MPH from Emory in behavior science and health education. The opinions expressed are Heather’s and not endorsed by Johnson & Johnson.
CHAPTER 2
Pictures of Success
Measurement and Monitoring