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Designing for Behavior

Change Book Review
Nir’s Note: This guest post comes from Marc Abraham, a London-
based product manager. In this article, Marc reviews the recently
published book Designing for Behavior Change by Stephan Wendel.
Follow Marc on Twitter.

Behavioral economics, psychology

and persuasive technology have proven to be very popular
topics over the past decade. These subjects all have one aspect
in common; they help us understand how people make
decisions in their daily lives, and how those decisions are
shaped by people’s prior experiences and their environment. A
question then arises around what it means to change people’s
behaviors and how one can design to achieve such change.

Stephen Wendel, a Principal Scientist at HelloWallet, has written

Designing for Behavior Change, which studies how one can
apply psychology and behavioral economics to product design.
In this book, Wendel introduces four stages of designing for
behavior change: Understand, Discover, Design and Refine (see
Fig. 1 below):
 Understand – The process starts off with gaining an
understanding of how people make decisions and how our
cognitive mechanisms can support (or hinder) behavior
change.
Discover – The second stage is about a company working out
what it wants to accomplish with the product, and for whom.
Design – The actual design stage can be broken down into
two subtasks: (1) designing the overall concept for the
product and (2) designing the specific user interface.
Refine – Analyzing data to generate insights and ideas for
ongoing improvement of the product.

Fig. 1 – Stages and outputs per stage of the designing for behavior change – Taken

from: “Designing for Behavior Change” by Stephen Wendel

Stage 1 – Understand
This stage is all about understanding how people make
decisions and how the mind decides what to do next. There is a
clear distinction between the deliberative and the intuitive
mind. Our deliberative or “conscious” mind tends tends to be
slow, focused and self-aware. In contrast, when people are in
an intuitive or “emotional” mode they are likely to act on “gut
feeling”, fast and unaware. Most of the time, we are not
consciously deciding what to do next. Instead, we often act
based on habits. Even when we do think consciously about
what to do next, we actively try to avoid hard work.

Designing for Behavior Change stresses the importance of

being very clear about the type of behavior one is trying to
encourage: a conscious choice or an intuitive response. Wendel
proposes a simple but powerful model – “Create” – which helps
to understand what products need to do to get users to take a
particular action:

Cue – A cue for users to think about what to do can either

be internal or external. External cues happen when there is
something in our environment triggering us to think about
a certain action. Internal cues are the result of our minds
thinking about the action on its own, through some
unknown web of associated ideas.
Reaction – Once the mind has been cued to think about a
potential action, there is an automatic reaction in response.
This reaction tends to be intuitive and automatic.
Evaluation – After an initial intuitive response, there might
be room for a more conscious evaluation of the action and
of potential alternatives. This happens especially when we
are facing novel situations, and we do not have an
automatic behavior to trigger.
Ability –Assuming the choice has been made to act, the
question arises whether it is actually feasible to undertake
the action. Wendel suggests that the individual must be
able to act immediately and without obstacles.
Timing – When should you take the action? The decision
when to take action can be taken based on a sense of
urgency, and by other, less forceful factors.

These five mental events can be best summarized through the

“Create Action Funnel” (see Fig. 2 below). The main point to
make with respect to this funnel, is that people can drop out
out at each stage. A person will most probably only continue
through the funnel if the action is more effective or better than
the alternatives.

Fig. 2 – The Create Action Funnel – Taken from: “Designing for Behavior Change” by

Stephen Wendel, p. 40
“Strategies for Behavior Change” is the third and final output of
the Understand stage. The book suggests three possible
strategies to consider:

Cheat – If what you really care about is the action getting

done, and it is possible to all but eliminate the work required
of the user beyond giving consent, then do it.
Make or change habits – If the user needs to take an action
multiple times, and you can identify a clear cue, routine, and
reward, then use the “habits” strategy (see Fig. 3 below).
Support conscious action – If neither of the two
aforementioned strategies is available, then you must help
the user consciously undertake the target action.

Stage 2 – Discover
The second stage of Wendel’s designing for behavior change
process is the Discover stage. The main goal is of this stage is
to figure out what it is that one wants to accomplish with the
product. Wendel identifies five distinct steps with regard to
discovery:

1. Clarify the overall behavioral vision of the product.

2. Identify the user outcomes sought.
3. Generate a list of possible actions.
4. Get to know your users and what is feasible and interesting
for them.
5. Evaluate the list of possible actions and select the best one.

When thinking about “target outcomes,” you can think about

what both the company and the user aim to accomplish with
the product. You can then clarify this outcome by asking
yourself some of the following probing questions:

Which type? – Does the product ultimately seek to change

something about the environment or about people?
Where? – What is the geographic scope of the impact?
What? – What is the actual change to the environment or
person?
When? – At what point should the product have an impact?

Within the Discover process, a lot of emphasis is placed on

finding the “Minimum Viable Action.” This is the shortest,
simplest version of the target action that users must take so
that you can test whether your product idea (and its assumed
impact on behavior) works.

At the end of the Discover stage, you should have detailed

observations about your users, a set of user personas, and a
clear statement of the target outcome, actor and action.

Stage 3 – Design
Wendel then explores the Design stage. The purpose of this
stage is to create a context that drives action. There are three
key aspects to this process:

1. Structure the action – To ensure that an action is feasible

and inviting for the user. Creating a “behavioral plan” can be a
good way to outline the different steps users should take from
what they are doing now to using the product and completing
the target action. This can be a simple flowchart or a written
narrative; the key objective here is to think about the sequence
of real world steps a user needs to take to complete an action.
2. Design the environment – To ensure that the environment
is constructed in such a way that it supports the action. When
talking about “environment,” Wendel means two things. Firstly,
the product itself. For example, a web page or smartphone
where a user takes an action. Secondly, the user’s local
environment, which can be both physical and social. Wendel
then goes on to identify a number of ways in which products
can construct an environment, e.g. by increasing the motivation
for people to act or by generating a feedback loop.
3. Prepare the user – How does one prepare the user to take
action? Wendel suggests three tactics which can help to prepare
the user to take action, now or in the future: “narrate” (change
how users see themselves), “associate” (change how users see
the action) and “educate” (change how users see the world).

Stage 4 – Refine
Refine is the fourth stage of the behavior change process. This
stage is all about learning about how people actually use the
product, its behavioral impact and identifying areas for
improvement. There are three main components of this stage:

Impact Assessment – Measure the impact of the product,

based on clear target outcomes and well defined metrics for
each outcome. Here it is important to set clear thresholds for
success and failure.
Identifying obstacles to behavior change – Discover problems,
develop potential solutions and generate additional ideas for
how to make the product better. One can start this process
by watching real people using the product (direct
observation) and by gathering usage data. We can thus start
getting a better insight into how people use the product, what
the bottlenecks are, where the product is having the most
impact on people, etc.
Learning and refining the product – Determine what changes
to implement through (1) gathering lessons learned and
potential product improvements (2) prioritizing potential
improvements based on business considerations and
 behavioral impact and (3) integrating potential improvements
into the appropriate part of the product development
process.

Designing for Behavior Change offers insight into how to build

products and experiences to impact human actions. Not the
easiest of topics, Wendel provides clear frameworks for
constructing products and experiences to improve the lives of
our users.

NOTE: This guest post is by Marc Abraham

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Devora Decker5 • 2 years ago

Helpful suggestions . For what it is worth , if your company is looking for a

service to merge two images , my employees stumbled across presentation
here

http://goo.gl/7NcLY9

Lyn Bowker • 4 years ago

You totally inspired me with this Marc. Thanks so much. Am now looking into
how I can apply these insights to my own business and how my clients can
benefit greatly. Thinking laterally about this has given me at least one idea I
will expand on.
About NirandFar

NirandFar is about the intersection of psychology, technology,

and business. I call it "Behavioral Design."

I write to help companies design consumer behavior while

educating individuals about behavior change and digital
distraction. Feel free to read more about me here.

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