Some of the most talented behavior change designers I know do not have a Ph.D.; in fact, some of them didn’t even study psychology in school. Work experience, reading, and on-the-job training can all whip someone into behavior change design shape over time. On the flip side, people like me with strong behavior science knowledge and research skills likely need the same kind of experience-based training to develop UX and design muscles. No one comes to behavior change design perfectly formed.
Whatever skills and background you bring to your work, I hope this book will add some new behavior change design tools to your repertoire. Take the things you learn, try them out, measure your results, and keep iterating until your designs do what you want them to do. Along the way, you’ll infuse your own style and ultimately develop your own tried-and-true flavor of behavior change design. I can’t wait to see it.
CHAPTER 1
A Kind of Magic
Psychology and Design Belong Together
What Types of Products Benefit from Behavior Change?
Where Does Behavior Change Happen?
The Behavior Change Design Process
The Upshot: You Can Do Behavior Change Design
Heather Cole-Lewis and Building Toward Value
In 2018, a team of researchers made headlines with the findings in their study of workplace wellness initiatives. The story that got me to click was titled “Study Finds Virtually Zero Benefit from Workplace Wellness Program in 1st Year.”
This headline is alarming on its face. Workplace wellness is a multibillion dollar industry in the United States. If it doesn’t work, that’s a lot of money and time wasted. More alarming for me personally, it’s where much of my professional work has focused in the past fifteen years. Was I tilting at windmills the whole time?
My nerd powers on alert, I downloaded the original research study that prompted the headlines. The Illinois Workplace Wellness Study is a multiyear examination of wellness programs for employees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At the end of the first two years of the study, the researchers found that although more people did health screenings once the program was put in place, it didn’t seem to have any effect on medical spending, health behaviors, productivity at work, or health status. Unfortunately, those non-outcomes are exactly what most workplace wellness programs are supposed to improve, so these results do look pretty bad for workplace wellness.
But here’s the thing. As I read the description of what the workplace wellness program at the University of Illinois actually consisted of, it became clear that of course it wasn’t having its intended effects. The program, called iThrive, consisted of annual biometric screenings, an annual survey called a Health Risk Assessment (HRA), and weekly wellness activities. Employees were given financial incentives for completing the screenings and HRA each year, and given paid time off to do the weekly activities, most of which were in-person classes. There was also an “online, self-paced wellness challenge”; however, no description was offered of how it was designed or what it included. Employees were encouraged to choose activities related to their HRA results. All of these features were pretty standard for workplace wellness programs, based on the information given, but none of them were designed for engagement.
If the program designers had adopted a behavior change design perspective, similar to the process this book lays out, iThrive probably would have looked a little different. For starters, most HRAs don’t provide feedback that would help people choose the right behavior change programs; a program built on behavior change would provide more structured guidance to match people to goals.
Then there was a lack of variety in the programs offered, with an emphasis on group classes. People who hate group activities were highly unlikely to enroll in one, even for a reward. And about those rewards: research suggests that linking repeated behaviors, like new health habits, to financial rewards is a great way to make sure that people don’t develop an intrinsic interest in doing them. Also, participation in the iThrive program was tethered to the workplace, which made it hard for people who valued keeping their health private from colleagues to participate without feeling uncomfortable. Finally, I don’t even know what was in the digital component of the program, but chances are, it represented lots of missed opportunities to engage users in a wellness process.
It’s not that workplace wellness programs can’t change behavior. It’s that workplace wellness programs are designed and implemented without a firm basis in psychology, so they don’t work effectively for the way that human beings actually behave.
Behavior change design as a discipline can help prevent headlines like the ones about the Illinois Workplace Wellness Program by helping designers create more engaging, effective programs. Behavior change design offers a toolkit to build products that actually work, while also supplying the evidence to prove it. Specifically, behavior change design includes:
• A process for designing and building products that incorporate research and evidence
• Access to frameworks and theories to help leverage proven techniques within products
• Tools to define and track product success metrics
Working within a discipline like behavior change design helps ward off huge investments in programs that don’t engage users or produce results for customers. The common language and process it offers sets expectations for potential investors and buyers that helps them assess whether a product is worth paying attention to. It also helps the product team do their work with rigor, detect and address potential problems early, and collect the evidence to either prove their worth or send them back to the drawing board. It’s not a panacea, but having a well-defined method sure helps keep people honest.
So what is this method? Behavior change design is the application of psychological methods and research to the development of products, services, or experiences. Almost everything designers make has some behavior change built into it. Any time you expect a person to interact with your product, you’re asking them to change their behavior from what it would be if the product didn’t exist. The complexity, longevity, and significance of those behaviors can vary widely. As each of those dimensions increases, the need to include formal behavior change considerations in your design does too.
What Types of Products Benefit from Behavior Change?
Some products, services, or experiences are intended to change people’s behaviors in the real world. Behavior change designers call those products interventions. That sounds very clinical, but an intervention doesn’t have to be dry or complicated. Some of the behavior change interventions you’ve probably heard of include MyFitnessPal, Runkeeper, and Duolingo, none of which feels like a heavy experience. But all three of them get people to do something differently on purpose: MyFitnessPal encourages users