It’s 8 months since the Design with Intent Toolkit v.0.9 went online and I’ve had incredibly useful feedback from a whole range of people who’ve tried it out on different kinds of briefs and problems. As mentioned a couple of months ago, the toolkit poster PDF (which has 12 ‘headline’ design patterns, compared with the 47 in total online) reached a very high number of downloads from Brunel’s research archive website (before the admins removed the statistics package!), which is immensely pleasing and kind of humbling. If you downloaded it and found it useful (or not useful), please do get in touch and tell me why.

Latterly, a few people have been trying out an IDEO Method Card-style card deck version of the toolkit (as pictured here), including all the patterns, colour-coded by lens, with a simplified bit of text about each one. I haven’t made these available publicly mainly because the quality isn’t great (most of the images are only 72dpi, coming from the website, and poorly cropped for the card format), and I’ve been trying a couple of variations of text, card size, etc. Initially I put these together primarily for quick card-sorting exercises as part of the workshop trials I’ve been running, but they ended up more popular than the poster format. Thanks to brainstorming sessions at IDEO London and the RSA, exercises with Brunel’s MSc Integrated Product Design and BSc / BA Design students (as part of the Sustainable Design and Environmentally Sensitive Design modules), and a trial as part of Design for Conversion kindly organised by Arjan Haring, I now have a better idea of what would make the cards more useful. In parallel, I’ve also been trying to ‘patternize’ some additional design techniques which have been used to influence behaviour, to increase the scope of the toolkit.

The DwI cards in use at Design for Conversion – photos by haijeson on Flickr (1, 2)

Inspired partly by Crumlish & Malone’s Designing Social Interfaces which is a great book (a neat companion to Jenifer Tidwell’s incredible Designing Interfaces, also from O’Reilly) with a companion wiki, I’ve decided to go down the route of producing v.0.95 of the toolkit as a Creative Commons-licensed set of 100 downloadable cards, with a printed version available to buy, and an accompanying wiki with a page on each pattern, serving as an evolving, referenceable container for new examples, tips on implementation, data on effectiveness, and so on, as they come to light, as well as new patterns, new ways of grouping them and new uses for this kind of approach.

The cards will be relatively simple, with each pattern posed as a question, as used in Nedra Weinreich’s DwI-based worksheet. The intention is that the cards can actively provoke innovative behaviour change design ideas, with a single (hopefully photogenic) example on each, while the wiki can act as a kind of ‘further reading’ resource. A future version (v.1.0?) of the cards will include this extra information on the back of each card (and then binding the cards together would pretty much produce a book), but at this stage – if I’m ever going to get this PhD finished in time – the extra info will be added to the wiki over time rather than being on the v.0.95 cards themselves, to reduce the time pressure on getting it all done.

As v.0.95 more than doubles the number of patterns in v.0.9 – a mixture of splitting up existing patterns into more finely-grained variants, and adding ideas which people have suggested or pointed out since I put v.0.9 together – there are quite a few where I don’t (yet) have a very good example or image. As such, there are opportunities for anyone with good photos or suggestions for examples to have an input and be involved – as the next post will explain in more detail.

A version of the card deck I (rather laboriously!) spray-mounted onto Post-It backing, so the cards could be used to annotate sketches or ideas recorded during a brainstorming session.

The RSA’s 2009/10 Design Directions competition has been launched, which means up and down the country there are design students and new graduates working on one of the pretty wide selection of briefs. Given the RSA’s aim of ‘removing barriers to social progress’ – with a significant commitment to using design to do this – the briefs are themed around design for social benefit, addressing issues ranging from helping an ageing workforce to helping new architecture graduates apply their skills in other contexts.

A couple of the briefs are explicitly about design for behaviour change, and thanks to working with Jamie Young of the RSA’s Design & Behaviour project on some ideas for briefs earlier this year, the Design with Intent toolkit is explicitly referenced as a ‘resource’ for the Independence Days brief on ‘reinventing assistive technology’ (sponsored by the Technology Strategy Board) and A matter of life…, a brief about improving patient compliance with taking prescribed medication (sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline). Both of these are very noble causes and I hope the Design with Intent patterns are useful inspiration in some small way; I look forward to seeing some of the results!

Design Approach worksheet

Nedra Kline Weinreich, author of Hands-on Social Marketing, has created a fantastic Design Approach for Behaviour Change worksheet based on the 12 design patterns from my Design with Intent toolkit poster.

By re-framing each of the patterns as a question – e.g. “How can you provide a cue to action at the appropriate time?” for kairos (discussed by BJ Fogg in his original book, Persuasive Technology) – Nedra turns the patterns more directly into cues for action themselves for a design team to brainstorm or think about. After working through the questions, asking each of them about the behaviour problem you’re working on, you pretty much end up with a set of possible solutions: this is a very clever way to structure the idea generation process. (As such I’ve added a link to Nedra’s worksheet to the DwI intro page of this site.)

Inspired by Nedra’s thinking, the next version of the DwI toolkit, which I’m putting together at present, will have a question element to each of the patterns.

Design for Persuasion conference, Brussels

At the beginning of October I was honoured to be invited to speak at Design for Persuasion, a new conference taking place at the impressive Belgacom Surfhouse in Brussels, organised (very well) by Christel de Maeyer and BJ Fogg.

The event was mainly directed towards ‘new media’ persuasion and design, focusing on practical applications rather than academic studies, and featured some great presentations from people such as Richard Sedley (who kindly took the above photo for me!), Amy Shuen, Bart de Waele (whose excellent ‘Addictive Websites’ slides you can see here), and other expert practitioners. Many of the presentations are on Slideshare; there are also some very nice photos on Flickr from Katrien Degreef.

Here’s my presentation (below) with a transcript here and image credits here. The handout (picture above right) I refer to is here [PDF].

Many thanks to Christel and BJ for organising this, and to the great people I talked to, including Nynke, Marijn and Arjan.

A pleasing statistic

Thanks to readers of this blog, the DwI toolkit v.0.9 poster [PDF] I originally posted back in April is at time of writing, the most-downloaded document ever from Brunel University’s institutional repository, BURA. (Much, much more than any of our other papers, too!)

With 28,000 downloads since it went on BURA, plus another 5,000 or so directly from the blog before I changed where the link pointed, and probably a few directly from Google Books (as well as a handful of at-cost sales of the physical printed poster) it gives me an incredibly warm feeling to think that so many people all over the world have found it interesting enough to read (and hopefully – in at least some cases! – use) it. Please do let me know (in the comments, or by email) if you’ve found it useful (or useless), what problems you’ve applied it to, how you think it could be improved, and so on, or have a go at the survey.

The next version (v.0.95) will take a different form (cards – which some of you will have tried out in a couple of workshops) and include some new patterns, as well as ‘question’ phrasing as mentioned above. I hope to have this available to download (or buy as a card deck) by the end of 2009.

Thanks again for making the DwI toolkit a success!

Things which slipped by without me writing about them much here

The last few months have been very busy for me as I rush to progress the PhD in sufficient depth and breadth while still doing other things, and I’m aware that I haven’t talked much about all this on the blog. I’ve been to the DiGRA conference and had great discussions with Ian Bogost and Sebastian Deterding; I’ve been to dConstruct and talked to Adam Greenfield; been to Greengaged and blogged about it for the site; been to a conference on Naturalistic Decision-Making and got some incisive advice from Gary Klein himself; and am about to present this paper [PDF] at Sustainable Innovation ‘09. With the help of some great participants (including Frankie who interviewed me here!) I’ve also managed to complete a series of Design with Intent workshops in which we’ve addressed a range of behaviour change briefs. The results of these workshops will be reported on here at some point soon, I promise!

So, stay tuned: as winter approaches, and sitting in front of a warm, glowing rectangle becomes more appealing, I will endeavour to blog more often and about more real examples of design with intent in the wild, a bit more like the blog used to be. Thanks for sticking with me.

As part of my PhD I’m testing different variants of the Design with Intent toolkit with designers (and design students) to find out how well different configurations work when a designer’s faced with a brief about influencing user behaviour: how useful are the ideas in inspiring solutions, and how well does using it compare to not using it?*

For the latest round of workshop sessions, to take place in September, I need 6 people to take part – if you’re a practising designer, design student or someone interested in this kind of field, and are able to give up a morning or afternoon, please do let me know.

I hope they’re relatively fun sessions – you get a series of design briefs and the idea is to generate and explain (sketches, notes, discussion) some possible solutions quite quickly – some briefs will mostly suit product solutions, while others are suitable for service solutions too. There’ll also be a bit about how you, as a designer, visualise and model the users you’re designing for, and how different design choices relate to different ‘models’ of the user. If you’re working on anything to do with behaviour change, or design innovation methods, I hope it will be useful to you.

There are going to be 3 sessions, with 2 participants in each. The sessions will last around 3 hours each; for part of it, you’ll be working together, and for the other part you’ll be working on your own. They’ll be during the week, taking place at Brunel University (Uxbridge, west London, end of the Piccadilly and Metropolitan lines). The most I can pay you for your time/travel is £10, plus cake or doughnuts or biscuits and plenty of coffee / tea / water. If that still sounds attractive, please get in touch!

The exact dates aren’t decided yet, because it depends on who’s taking part, so if you’re interested, please email me – dan@danlockton.co.uk and suggest a few of the following dates when you’d be available and I’ll get back to you if / when I can pair up people around at the same time! Possible dates are: 7, 8, 9, 10, (not 11 or 14), 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 September 2009.

Thanks for your help!

P.S. If a team from your company or organisation would like to take part in a full / longer / tailored-to-what-you-need ‘Design with Intent’ workshop, please get in touch too. The more people use this stuff, find flaws and suggest improvements, the better it’ll get and the more useful it’ll be.

Photos from some workshop sessions earlier this summer. Doughnuts will be provided; racing car might not be there.

*The results, along with those from some of the other workshops I’ve run in the last few months, are going into an article to be submitted to Design Studies, and the results from part of the session may also be used in an article to be submitted to the International Journal of Design.

I’m trying to find out how designers and design teams (in-house or consultancies) who’ve worked on influencing user behaviour think about what they’ve done – which techniques and patterns do people recognise that they’ve used, or considered? Do the patterns I’ve identified in the toolkit actually make sense to people who’ve put this stuff into practice strategically? Or do people think about it differently?

So, if you’ve worked on persuasive technology, behaviour change design, or influencing user behaviour in general, across any field where you consider that you’re designing stuff (service design, product design, interaction design, social design, user experience, information architecture, HCI, social marketing, mobile interaction, web design, network engineering, pervasive/ubiquitous computing, transformation design, advertising, urban planning, human factors, ergonomics, built environments, healthcare, environmental, safety, crime prevention – anything, in fact), I’d really appreciate it if you could spare a few minutes to have a go at this survey. It shouldn’t take too long unless you have a lot to tell me about!

‘Designers thinking about the effect they can have on behaviour‘ is a growing theme. The idea with this survey is that if we can collect together some good examples of where and how companies are using these ideas, what’s worked and what hasn’t (and why) (where you’re prepared to talk about it!), it’ll be a useful reference for everyone, as well as (potentially) a series of great case studies to be included in a book (at some point once my PhD’s out of the way). In the meantime, I’ll of course try to feature some of the projects on the blog.

If you take part in the survey, your details will go into a draw to win a classic book on design and behaviour (I’ll do one draw for every 20 participants). I’m not sure what the books will be yet, but there’s a lot to choose from. The survey doesn’t really have a closing date at present – I’ll leave it open as long as it’s getting interest.

Thanks for your help!

UPDATE: Thanks everyone – 10 participants in just a few hours! The study’s closed now – congratulations to Ville Hjelm whose book is now on its way…

If you’ve got a few minutes spare, are interested in the Design with Intent techniques, and fancy having a 1/10 chance of winning a brand-new copy of The Hidden Dimension, Edward T Hall’s classic 1966 work on proxemics (very worthwhile reading if you’re involved in any way with the design of environments, either architecturally or in an interaction design sense), then please do have a go at this quick card-sorting exercise [now closed].

It makes use of the pinball / shortcut / thoughtful user models I introduced in the last post, so it would probably make sense to have that page open alongside the exercise. The DwI techniques will be presented to you distinct from the ‘lenses’ (Errorproofing, Cognitive etc) so don’t worry about them.

The free WebSort account I’m using for this only allows 10 participants, so be quick and get a chance of winning the book! Once 10 people have done it, I’ll draw one of the participants out of some kind of hat or bucket and email you to get your postal address.

The purpose here (a closed card-sort, to use Donna Spencer’s terminology) is, basically, to find out whether the pinball / shortcut / thoughtful models allow the DwI techniques to be assigned to particular ways of thinking about users – that make sense to a reasonable proportion of designers. There’s no right or wrong answer, but if 80% of you tell me that one technique seems to fit well with one model, while for another there’s no agreement at all, then that’s useful for me to know in developing the method.

Thanks for your help!

Cover photo from Amazon

Thanks too to all the people who’ve blogged about it, included it in a podcast, and spread it via Twitter. Your attention’s much appreciated and if anyone does try it out on some problems, please do let me know how you get on, what would improve it, and so on. And more examples for each of the patterns are, of course, always welcome!

Printed copies (A2 poster, 135gsm silk finish) are available – the nominal listing on Amazon is £15 including postage, but if you’d like one for much less than that, let me know! (In fact, if you’re willing to try it out on a design problem, fill in a survey about how you did it, and let me use it as a brief case study, you can have it free.)

Persuasive 2009

I say I’m just coming up for air briefly, as for the last couple of weeks, among some other major work (which could possibly bear some very nice fruit), I’ve been putting together my presentation* for Persuasive 2009, the Fourth International Conference on Persuasive Technology in Claremont, California, next week, and at present am desperately trying to finish a lot of other things before flying out on Saturday. It’ll be my first time across the Atlantic and my girlfriend and I will be having a bit of a holiday afterwards, so I hope a lack of updates and replies, while little different to my usual pattern, will be excusable. But while the conference is on, if there’s time and no hoo-hah with the wireless and it seems appropriate, I’ll try and do a bit of blogging, or more likely, Twittering about it (#persuasive2009 ?). There are some very interesting people presenting their work.

Anyway, if you missed the update to my earlier post, a preprint version of my paper (with David Harrison, Tim Holley and Neville A. Stanton), Influencing Interaction: Development of the Design with Intent Method [PDF, 1.6MB] is available. At some point soon this version of the paper will downloadable from Brunel’s research archive, while the ‘proper’ version will be available in the ACM Digital Library. ACM requires me to state the following alongside the link to the preprint:

© ACM, 2009. This is the authors’ version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version will be published in Proceedings of Persuasive 2009: Fourth International Conference on Persuasive Technology, Claremont, CA, 26-29 April 2009, ACM Digital Library. ISBN 978-1-60558-376-1.

The presentation will include many parts of the paper, but the nature of academic papers like this (submitted in December) is that they are out of date before anyone reads them. So, much of the presentation will be about the DwI toolkit and the reasoning behind bits of it, rather than just sticking to the state of the research six months ago – I hope that’s reasonable. Last year, presenting on the last day of the conference meant that I was able to spend many hours in a hotel room in Oulu editing and re-editing the presentation (mostly listening to the Incredible Bongo Band’s version of In-a-Gadda-da-Vida on repeat) to match what I thought the audience would like, and incorporate things I’d learned during the conference, but this time I’m on the first day so there isn’t that opportunity…

Interfaces article

Also this month, I have a brief article about my research in Interfaces, the magazine of Interaction, the British Computer Society’s HCI Group, in its ‘My PhD’ series (p. 20-21). Interfaces no. 78 is available to download here (make sure to click on the link below the cover image, as – at time of writing – the cover’s linked to the previous issue). It’s a great magazine – redesigned for this issue – with some really interesting features about aspects of HCI by some well-known names in the field. Thanks to Eduardo Calvillo and Stephen Hassard for making the article possible.

The table in the article was unfortunately truncated during editing so (if I get it in in time) there’ll be a brief addendum in the next issue with the full table, but I might as well make it available here too [PDF, 8kb] – it’s a brief, not especially exciting summary of some concepts for influencing householders to close curtains at night to save energy. (At some point I’ll do a full case study on this as there are some interesting ideas as well as some very impractical ones.)

*Taking Parkinson’s Law as an instruction manual seems to be a perpetual habit of mine, so the maximum time allocated to get the presentation done has been more than entirely taken up by getting the presentation done… it’s still not quite there, and I’m not sure whether the format of the auditorium’s going to allow an interactive element which I would very much like to include but probably won’t be able to. Also – while Prezi looks like it might be everything I’ve ever wanted in presentation software – the workflow of “doing a PowerPoint” for me has evolved into a long chain of “Photoshop – Illustrator – export – Photoshop – Save for Web – insert into PowerPoint” which I’m sure I could do more quickly, but lots of conferences and seminars want PPTs rather than PDFs, and the only Mac I have (which once – kind of – belonged to the Duke of Edinburgh [interesting story]) is too slow and old to run anything better.

Bonjour / Goeiendag to visitors from Design for Persuasion: while you’re here, you might also like to download a free poster [PDF] which has 12 of the Design with Intent patterns on it in a handy reference form. Thanks for stopping by!

The Errorproofing Lens represents a worldview treating deviations from the target behaviour as ‘errors’ which design can help avoid, either by making it easier for users to work without making errors, or by making errors impossible in the first place.

This view on influencing behaviour is often found in health & safety-related design, medical device design and manufacturing engineering. More commentary…

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Photos/screenshots by Dan Lockton except seatbelt warning image (composite of photos by Zoom Zoom and Reiver) and donor card photo by Adrienne Hart-Davis.

____________________
The Design with Intent Toolkit v0.9 by Dan Lockton, David Harrison and Neville A. Stanton
Introduction | Behaviour | Architectural lens | Errorproofing lens | Persuasive lens | Visual lens | Cognitive lens | Security lens

dan@danlockton.co.uk

Bonjour / Goeiendag to visitors from Design for Persuasion: while you’re here, you might also like to download a free poster [PDF] which has 12 of the Design with Intent patterns on it in a handy reference form. Thanks for stopping by!

The Cognitive Lens draws on research in behavioural economics and cognitive psychology looking at how people make decisions, and how this is affected by ‘heuristics’ and ‘biases’. If designers understand how users make interaction decisions, that knowledge can be used to influence interaction behaviour.

Equally, where users often make poor decisions, design can help counter this, although this risks the accusation of design becoming a tool of the ‘nanny state’ which ‘knows what’s best’.

Many dozens of cognitive biases and heuristics have been identified by psychologists and behavioural economists, a lot of which could potentially be applied to the design of products and services. The seven detailed below are some of the most commonly used; this selection draws heavily on the work of Robert Cialdini.

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Photos and screenshots by Dan Lockton, except Starbucks menu by Miss Shari on Flickr and water meter by Phatcontroller.

____________________
The Design with Intent Toolkit v0.9 by Dan Lockton, David Harrison and Neville A. Stanton
Introduction | Behaviour | Architectural lens | Errorproofing lens | Persuasive lens | Visual lens | Cognitive lens | Security lens

dan@danlockton.co.uk

Bonjour / Goeiendag to visitors from Design for Persuasion: while you’re here, you might also like to download a free poster [PDF] which has 12 of the Design with Intent patterns on it in a handy reference form. Thanks for stopping by!

The Architectural Lens draws on techniques used to influence user behaviour in architecture, urban planning and related disciplines such as traffic management and crime prevention through environmental design (see also the Security lens).

While the techniques have been developed in the built environment, many of the ideas can also be applied in interaction and product design, even in software or services; they are effectively about using the structure of systems to influence behaviour.

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Photos by Dan Lockton, except service station bathroom by Meagan Call, cigarette bin from a printed version of the New Pig ‘pigalog’, and Seven Dials photo by Cheedarcheez, used under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd licence.

____________________
The Design with Intent Toolkit v0.9 by Dan Lockton, David Harrison and Neville A. Stanton
Introduction | Behaviour | Architectural lens | Errorproofing lens | Persuasive lens | Visual lens | Cognitive lens | Security lens

dan@danlockton.co.uk

Enabling behaviour

Enabling ‘desirable’ behaviour by making it easier for the user than the alternatives

Motivating behaviour

Motivating users to change behaviour by education, incentives and changing attitudes

Constraining behaviour

Constraining users to ‘desirable’ behaviour by making alternatives difficult or impossible

 
This way of classifying the patterns can be useful to think about when you’re coming up with concepts and evaluating them. What are you trying to achieve in terms of influencing behaviour? How would you react, as a user, faced with the design? Would it influence your behaviour? Why?

Much work in Persuasive Technology has taken the approach of motivating behaviour, with attitude change usually a precursor, but BJ Fogg’s reduction and tunnelling (Fogg, 2003) are arguably also about enabling particular behaviours by making them simpler (see also Maeda, 2006). Buckminster Fuller’s ‘trimtab’ concept—“modify[ing] the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions” (Krausse & Lichtenstein, 2001)—also accords with the enabling approach and provides a link to the wider field of design for social benefit. Human factors strategies aimed at influencing behaviour in a health and safety context often employ a constraining approach.

The approach used in practice—and hence the patterns and concepts chosen for further development—may, of course, be dictated by the client or other stakeholders rather than being the designer’s decision.

P.S. If you can come up with better icons (the ‘Constraining’ one does look rather intestinal), or your own classifications, please do let us know in the comments below…

Next: the patterns

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Architectural lens

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Errorproofing lens

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Persuasive lens

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Visual lens

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Cognitive lens

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Security lens

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____________________
The Design with Intent Toolkit v0.9 by Dan Lockton, David Harrison and Neville A. Stanton
Introduction | Behaviour | Architectural lens | Errorproofing lens | Persuasive lens | Visual lens | Cognitive lens | Security lens

dan@danlockton.co.uk

■ How to influence user behaviour
■ 12 inspirational design patterns in poster form (plus 35 more)
■ Grouped into 6 ‘lenses’ giving different perspectives

Download the poster (it’s a 1.3 MB PDF) – now also includes A4 pages for each lens, for easier printing  [Alternative link]

Start with the problem

You have a product, service or environment—a system—where users’ behaviour is important to it working properly (safely, efficiently), so ideally you’d like people to use it in a certain way.

Or maybe you have a system where it would be desirable to alter the way that people use it, to improve things for users, the people around them, or society as a whole.

How can you modify the design, or redesign the system, to achieve this: to influence, or change users’ behaviour?

The design patterns

The Design with Intent Toolkit aims to help designers faced with ‘design for behaviour change’ briefs. The poster* features 12 design patterns which recur across design fields (interaction, products, architecture), and there are also 35 more detailed here on the website. Some of the names will be unfamiliar, but we hope the patterns and examples will be understandable, and inspire your own concepts.

Think about how you might apply the ideas to your brief, and what could work given what you know about the problem. If you get stuck, try combining ideas from different patterns: many real examples can be thought of as using two or more patterns.

The patterns are grouped into six ‘lenses’, each offering a different worldview on design and behaviour. The lenses allow you to ask “How might someone else approach the problem?” and ought to help you think outside your initial perspective (or your client’s):

Architectural lens

• Positioning & layout
• Material properties
• Segmentation & spacing
• Orientation
• Removal
• Movement & oscillation

Errorproofing lens

• Defaults
• Interlock
• Lock-in & lock-out
• Extra step
• Specialised affordances
• Partial self-correction
• Portions
• Conditional warnings

Persuasive lens

• Self-monitoring
• Kairos
• Reduction
• Tailoring
• Tunnelling
• Feedback through form
• Simulation & feedforward
• Operant conditioning
• Respondent conditioning
• Computers as social actors

Visual lens

• Prominence & visibility
• Metaphors
• Perceived affordances
• Implied sequences
• Possibility trees
• Watermarking
• Proximity & similarity
• Colour & contrast

Cognitive lens

• Social proof
• Framing
• Reciprocation
• Commitment and consistency
• Affective engagement
• Authority
• Scarcity

Security lens

• Surveillance
• Atmospherics
• Threat of damage
• What you have
• What you know or can do
• Who you are
• What you’ve done
• Where you are

A different approach: using the patterns as questions
Nedra Kline Weinreich, author of Hands-on Social Marketing, has created a clever Design Approach for Behaviour Change worksheet based on the 12 patterns from the Design with Intent poster, by re-framing each of the patterns as a question. This is a great idea, turning the patterns into cues for you to think about relative to your problem. After working through the questions, you pretty much end up with a set of possible solutions.

What sort of behaviour are you trying to achieve?

See the next page…

*Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. Design for Behaviour Change: The Design with Intent Toolkit v.0.9, Uxbridge: Brunel University 2009 (ISBN 978-1-902316-6-1 print; 978-1-902316-63-5 eBook), http://www.designwithintent.co.uk

____________________
The Design with Intent Toolkit v0.9 by Dan Lockton, David Harrison and Neville A. Stanton
Introduction | Behaviour | Architectural lens | Errorproofing lens | Persuasive lens | Visual lens | Cognitive lens | Security lens

dan@danlockton.co.uk

The brief series of posts from last summer about getting people to do things in a particular order, which more recently got some attention from Kati London’s ‘Persuasive Technologies: Designing the Human‘ class at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (with some very interesting student commentary) was based on a relatively early iteration of the method. At some point, I’ll draw up a comparison between the iterations of the method, even if simply for my own clarity of mind – it’s helpful to record why I changed different aspects along the way.

The initial plan had been for it to be almost TRIZ-like in terms of ‘prescribing’ relevant design techniques to help achieve particular target behaviours. The first few iterations of the method thus took the form of a kind of hierarchical decision tree. Live|Work’s very helpful advice to me last summer to reduce the prescriptive nature slightly by having a kind of illustrated ‘idea space’ led – in due course – to the version tested in the pilot studies carried out in late 2008 and earlier this year. What the studies showed, among other things (to be reported in the Persuasive 2009 paper!) was that many designers, when asked to come up with concept solutions, don’t really like working from categories and rules and hierarchies, even where they would be useful. Some do (and with impressively exhaustive efficiency), but many don’t: they preferred to use the method as a kind of well of inspiration, without necessarily using it in any kind of procedural way.

So – and there’s another reason for this, too, which I’ll be able to announce at some point – it seemed sensible to redesign the method to accommodate both modes of working: a ‘prescription mode’ for the more procedure-driven designer, and an ‘inspiration mode’ for the designer who prefers less bounded creativity (a bit more like IDEO’s method cards, but not quite as unstructured as the Oblique Strategies). The inspiration mode is essentially a very simplified, flattened set of design patterns loosely grouped into different ‘lenses’ representing views on influencing behaviour, but with no real structure beyond that. It’s more of a ‘toolkit’ than a method, and because of its relative simplicity it seems worth releasing to get some feedback without too much more work. The “eight design patterns for errorproofing” post from a few weeks back is a kind of preview of part of it.

On Monday morning, then, there’ll be a large poster available to download on the blog, and I’ll do a series of posts forming the online component of the toolkit. So please, feel free to comment, make suggestions for improvements or better examples, or pick holes in it!

P.S. I’m aware the blog needs a bit of housekeeping in terms of making the sidebar work properly again in IE, fixing the very out-of-date blogroll, and my appalling sloth in replying to people who’ve very kindly sent very interesting links and ideas. I will try to get round to it all soon.

© ACM, 2009. This is the authors’ version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version will be published in Proceedings of Persuasive 2009: Fourth International Conference on Persuasive Technology, Claremont, CA, 26-29 April 2009, ACM Digital Library. ISBN 978-1-60558-376-1.

——————

I’m pleased to announce that a paper I submitted to Persuasive 2009, at the Claremont Colleges, California (26-29th April) has been accepted, so I’ll be presenting ‘Influencing Interaction: Development of the Design with Intent Method’ on Monday 27th April.

The paper builds on the ideas I presented at Persuasive 2008 (the paper), detailing the development of the ‘Design with Intent Method‘, a ’suggestion tool’ for designers faced with briefs involving influencing user behaviour, and the results of a series of pilot studies to test the usability of the method.

At the time of submitting the paper (New Year’s Eve, 6pm!), the pilot studies were still going on (poor planning by me), so (as the reviewers noted!) the paper’s conclusions are fairly weak, and there are quite a few revisions I need to make before submitting the final version: the next couple of weeks are going to require some fairly intense work in that vein. But it’s great to have been accepted: Persuasive 2008 was fantastic, incredibly useful in terms of meeting people and getting feedback on the proposed research, and I’m hoping 2009 will be just as good. The big-name speakers include BJ Fogg, originator of the Persuasive Technology field, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (of ‘Flow‘ fame), and Brenda Laurel (author of Design Research: Methods and Perspectives, which I’ll admit I haven’t yet got round to reading, largely because of Nigel Cross’s review, but maybe I should find the time!). As always, though, it’s the chance to talk to and get to know other people working on similar problems, or offering a different point of view on the field, which is especially interesting.

The proceedings are going to be published by the ACM (last year’s were published by Springer), but I don’t have any more details at this stage. I’ll post a preprint version of the paper here once it’s ready, of course.

Many thanks to my co-authors: my supervisors Professor David Harrison (Brunel) and Professor Neville Stanton (Southampton) for their help, and Tim Holley whose insights into improving and using the method were extremely useful. Thanks too to all the other pilot study participants, and also to the Royal Academy of Engineering, who very kindly awarded an international travel grant to help me attend the conference. I am aware of the hypocrisy of flying halfway round the world to talk (in part) about influencing more environmentally friendly behaviour, and the cognitive dissonance is headache-inducing. Why there aren’t more live, online academic conferences, I don’t know.

Here are the abstract and ACM meta-stuff for the paper:

Influencing Interaction: Development of the Design with Intent Method
Dan Lockton¹, David Harrison¹, Tim Holley², Neville A. Stanton³
¹Cleaner Electronics Research Group, Brunel Design, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, United Kingdom
²Product Design Programme, Brunel Design, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, United Kingdom
³School of Civil Engineering & the Environment, University of Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT
Persuasive Technology has the potential to influence user behavior for social benefit, e.g. to reduce environmental impact, but designers are lacking guidance choosing among design techniques for influencing interaction. The Design with Intent Method, a ‘suggestion tool’ addressing this problem, is described in this paper, and applied to the briefs of reducing unnecessary household lighting use, and improving the efficiency of printing, primarily to evaluate the method’s usability. The trial demonstrates that the DwI Method is quick to apply and leads to a range of relevant design concepts. With development, the DwI Method could be a useful tool for designers working on influencing user behavior.

Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems – human factors, software psychology. H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI)]: User Interfaces – theory and methods, user-centered design.
General Terms
Design, Human Factors.
Keywords
Persuasive technology, behavior change, sustainability, energy, interaction design, design methods, innovation methods.

On other matters, I’m proud to say that Planetizen, the urban design and planning community and blog has named Design with Intent one of its Top 10 Websites for 2009 – a nice accolade given how broad the scope here is beyond urbanism and architecture! Some of the other websites recommended are well worth a deeper read – On the Commons, Digital Urban, Infranet Lab and Gapminder stood out for me.

Adding that Planetizen accolade to Six Revisions’ inclusion of the blog in its ‘20 websites to help you master user interface design’, it’s clear that, if nothing else, the themes we cover here really do meander about over conventional disciplinary boundaries. It’s all about people interacting with designed systems, whether they’re concrete plazas, electric kettles or confirmation dialogues, and I’d like to think the similarities are worth investigating.

Photo of Claremont Graduate University by Katherine H on Flickr

For the last few weeks I’ve been setting up and running the first few trials of the ‘Design with Intent Method’, the design/innovation tool I’ve (embarrassingly sporadically) talked about on the blog over the last year.

It’s essentially an innovation method to help designers given a brief involving influencing user behaviour. Based on describing the ‘problem’, the DwI Method aims to suggest appropriate design techniques (with real examples from different fields) to inspire concepts with the potential to influence user behaviour towards the ‘target’. The techniques suggested range from those which really would help users to those which probably don’t: deciding which approaches are actually worthwhile is part of the process… I won’t go into it too much here (yet) but hopefully the method captures or will at least address most of the arguments and caveats that we’ve discussed here over the last 3 years.

As it’s developed from a fairly simple box structure through a giant hierarchical tree (as in the corner of this poster [PDF]), to the current ‘idea space’ iteration partially visible in the photo above, I’ve ‘tested’ it plenty of times with myself and informally with colleagues, applying it to different briefs, but the current programme of pilot studies is the first time it is being tried out by ‘real people’, mostly recent design graduates or final-year design students. These pilot studies are primarily about assessing the usability of the method ahead of larger group studies assessing its usefulness – if that makes sense – but they still involve the participants applying the method to particular design problems and seeing what kind of concepts it suggests. So far, the results have been extremely interesting – I can’t say any more yet.

At some point, there will be an online version in one form or another, but for the moment, if you’re in the London area, are a designer or someone interested in behaviour change, and would like to participate in an individual pilot study session in January, please let me know – dan@danlockton.co.uk. There are only going to be a few sessions; they take about 2½ hours each, during the week, taking place at Brunel University (Uxbridge, end of the Piccadilly and Metropolitan lines) and bear in mind half the participants will be ‘controls’ and so won’t actually be getting the DwI Method at all. The most I can pay you for your time/travel is £10. If that still sounds attractive, get in touch! I’ll update this post when all the slots are filled.

Equally, if your company or design team would like to participate in a ‘full’ trial of the DwI Method sometime in spring 2009 – trying out the method on real problems – then please do get in touch too.

Dan Lockton

Certainly when I was deciding whether a not a PhD was the ‘right’ thing to do after a couple of years of pretty diverse peripatetic freelancing, the efforts of other bloggers – especially this article by Tom Coates (and the appended comments) – and Rich Watts’ blog, were very helpful and gave me some great, and sometimes sobering, insights. More recently, these posts by the polymathic Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker have given well-justified discourse on moving on from academia, even more pertinent because of their design/art-technology emphasis. (The ‘disciplinarity boundaries’ issue, which vexes me so much, has been addressed in this context by Julian more than once; Roberto Greco has a comprehensive review of more thinking on this issue, too).

Anyway, here’s (mildly edited to remove some commercial and personal information) the report I prepared, rather hurriedly, on what’s been accomplished in the first year, and what’s still to come:

Dan Lockton, Cleaner Electronics Research Group
Start date: September 2007
Design for Sustainable Behaviour
Review, end of Year 1, August 2008

Summary: Design can be used to influence users’ behaviour.

By applying techniques from a variety of fields, it’s possible to design systems which help users to reduce the environmental impact of using them: effectively, making users more efficient by designing for behaviour change.

This project aims to develop and test a method for assisting designers to create behaviour-changing products and services in this area, and then run user trials with prototypes, to determine which approaches are actually most effective at changing users’ behaviour, and reducing energy or other resource use.

Background

As part of my Master’s degree, I researched the concept of architectures of control, ways in which systems have been designed to influence users to interact with them in certain ways, often coercively, to match political or corporate agendas [1]. Subsequently, alongside working as a freelance designer/engineer/researcher, I continued to develop this research independently, primarily via a blog [2] which has gained a fairly diverse audience across the design, technology, media and social science fields.

The scope gradually broadened, becoming more positive in the process, to encompass what I’ve since termed design with intent – strategic design intended to influence user behaviour, including helping users achieve their own goals as well as those of society. This last point is important, since many social problems – particularly environmental ones – can be seen as a result of user behaviour.

It was with this background that I discussed the possibility of a PhD investigating ‘Reducing the environmental impact of products by using design to change user behaviour’ (or, more succinctly, design for sustainable behaviour) with David Harrison, and was pleased to return to Brunel Design as part of the Cleaner Electronics Research Group, with funding from the Ormsby Trust, in September 2007.

Research phase 1a: Literature and practice review

The first phase of the PhD involved investigating, comparing and characterising ‘design with intent’ techniques via examples from a wide range of fields, including human-computer interaction, manufacturing engineering and urban planning as well as product design.

Many practitioners and theorists have touched on aspects of this area from different directions without describing its full extent, and indeed, to understand this, I’ve had to acquire at least some working knowledge of concepts from a wide range of disciplines, including architecture, ecological and social psychology, behavioural economics, human-computer interaction, communication studies, science & technology studies, rhetoric, information architecture, semiotics, security engineering and quality management, alongside a deeper education in the principles of interaction design and ergonomics, to which I’d only tangentially been exposed as an undergraduate design student.

The output of this phase of the research was the paper ‘Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a wider context’ [3] (see below).

Research phase 1b: Initial development of the Design with Intent method

The intention of the review of techniques is to enable the development of a ‘suggestion engine’ –the Design with Intent method – for designers working in sustainable and environmentally sensitive design, integrating ideas from different fields to assist the selection and application of design techniques which influence user behaviour. The method itself can be applied to many social problems in which the design of systems (products, services, environments) affects user behaviour, but the focus of the testing will be (at least for this PhD!) on applying it to issues where user behaviour, particularly with energy-using products, affects the environment significantly.

The reasoning behind this, and discussion of its applicability to environmental problems, resulted in the paper ‘Making the user more efficient: Design for Sustainable Behaviour’ [4] (see below).

The approach taken is that certain target behaviours can be identified, and described in the abstract, with different design techniques being applicable to each one. A user behaviour ‘problem’ described in terms of one or more of the target behaviours will, using the suggestion engine, result in the designer being presented with a number of relevant techniques, with examples of each technique being applied in different contexts.

The initial development produced a rather TRIZ-like method, using a tree structure to match target behaviours to relevant design techniques, and my own paper-based run-throughs indicate that it seems to work in terms of generating new design ideas. This is described briefly in the poster I presented at Brunel’s ReSCon [5].

Research phase 2: Testing and refinement of the Design with Intent method (current)

The aim of testing the method is to determine: a) to what extent it is useful to designers addressing user behaviour problems in sustainable design; and b) how the method can be improved. In terms of a), the comparison is with an unstructured brainstorming-type method: does the Design with Intent method offer anything beyond this? Would it perhaps be better implemented as a reference book, a ‘design for sustainable behaviour manual’, rather than a ‘suggestion engine’?

As a precursor to practical testing, in July 2008 I explained and ran through the tree-structure method with two directors and the studio manager of Live|Work [6], a major service design consultancy in London specialising in socially beneficial design solutions for both public- and private-sector clients. The feedback – from exactly the kind of designers I envisage being the ultimate users of the method – was extremely useful, and resulted in a significant redesign of the way the method is presented, moving from a tree structure to a series of concentric rings which allow easier creative exploration of ‘related’ design techniques and target behaviours. This redesigned method, along with some revised (simplified) terminology, is what will be tested.

The testing programme is intended to involve both design students and design consultancies: this is the best way of assessing its usefulness both to existing designers in the context of commercial constraints, and the next generation of designers in an academic setting. The method will be refined as a result of the testing.

First, a pilot study is being arranged with individual design students/recent graduates, using a think-aloud protocol, with all guidance and assistance recorded, primarily to identify points that need clarification or potential problems that may arise. The plan for this study is being written at present (August 2008) and, subject to approval, should be reasonably quick to undertake.

The full study will take the form of workshop sessions in the Autumn term, probably with Level 3 Design students. Participants will be introduced to the method, and, in separate groups, assigned ‘sustainable user behaviour’ problems, with the method there to guide them in generating solutions. (The control will not have the method.) The group interactions and creative process will be recorded and assessed, as will all the output; the specifics of this study have not yet been decided.

A possibility has also arisen to apply the method to one of a consultancy’s client projects, in due course, which has significant potential for testing the method’s worth under more market-based constraints, in a real design consultancy. Other consultancies will also be approached.

Research phase 3: Application of the method

The usefulness of the method will best be tested by the quality of the concepts it generates, so the aim of this phase of the research is to build (prototype) and run user trials comparing products developed by applying the method to a particular problem (users overfilling kettles is a favourite, but there are many possibilities).

This will allow quantitative assessment of the actual energy used by different products, by representative users, in use, over a period, to provide some information about the effectiveness of different techniques in that context, as well as qualitative feedback on usability and other issues. This information can then be used to refine the method further, so that, for example, details of the relative effectiveness of different techniques can be incorporated.

Contributions to knowledge

The project will address these questions, reformulated as appropriate:

• How can users’ behaviour be changed, through redesign of systems, to reduce environmental impact?
• How significant are the impact reductions, and what technology and human factors issues affect the implementations?

It’s hoped that the process of investigating and answering these questions, will constitute an original, distinct and useful contribution to knowledge, and that the Design with Intent method — however it evolves — will prove useful to designers working in the field of behaviour change in society in general. Since the ‘suggestion engine’ of the method is effectively an ‘innovation engine’, it is envisaged that worthwhile intellectual property may also result.

Research output and academic development

Two papers (one journal article, one published conference paper) have so far resulted from the research, and thanks primarily to visitors from the blog, have achieved significant visibility on BURA (top paper and 3rd highest number of views in June, and still currently the highest average views per author):

Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. ‘Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour’. International Journal of Sustainable Engineering Vol.1 No. 1, pp. 3-8, March 2008 [3]

Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. ‘Design With Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context’. in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (Eds.): Persuasive 2008, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5033, pp. 274-278, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2008 [4]

As a result of the IJSE paper, I was asked to become a reviewer for the journal and have so far reviewed one submission.

I have presented at two external conferences, Persuasive 2008: The Third International Conference on Persuasive Technology, in Oulu, Finland, in June, the costs of which were partially funded by receiving a Vice-Chancellor’s Travel Prize (presentation: ‘Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a wider context’ [7]) and New Sciences of Protection: Designing Safe Living at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, in July (presentation: ‘Design with Intent: behaviour-shaping through design’ [8]). I also presented a poster [5] at Brunel’s ReSCon (and the Graduate School poster competition) which provided a good opportunity to try explaining the research to more engineering-focused visitors, and has (I hope) helped me understand how to improve the clarity needed to present research in poster form.

The invitation to present at Lancaster came as one of the organisers has been following the research via my blog; it’s hoped that this kind of visibility can help even further as the research progresses. At present I have an invitation to present at Design|Behaviour: Making it Happen at Loughborough in October.

I also attended a doctoral consortium organised by the Universities of Oulu (Finland) and Aalborg (Denmark) prior to the Persuasive conference, and the networking and discussion with other researchers working in similar areas of design, computer science and psychology were extremely useful and have dramatically expanded and sharpened the focus of my thinking. I now have contacts at a number of institutions and companies internationally who are interested in the research and some of whom may be, in time, potential collaborators. During the year I’ve tried hard to attend and participate in as many relevant events as possible, both to meet other researchers involved in related fields, and to learn more about how academia and practising designers work together – a partial list:

• Anthrodesign & UX Meetup, London, Sept 2007
• BSI Manufacture, Assembly, Disassembly, and End-of-life Processing standards meeting, Sept 2007
• EPSRC Network on Product Life Spans seminar, Sheffield Hallam, Sept 2007, with Alex Plant
• Sustainable Design Network seminar ‘Envisioning a Sustainable Future’, Nottingham, Dec 2007
• Meeting at University of Bath with Dr Elies Dekoninck and Ed Elias to discuss similar research areas, June 2008
• Attended meeting with Staffan Davidsson (Volvo Cars), Dr Mark Young and Stewart Birrell, June 2008
• Interviewed by Jamie Young (Imperial College) for behavioural change policy research, July 2008
• OpenTech open innovation & technology conference, London, July 2008
• The Affective in Sustainable Design, seminar, Central St Martins, July 2008
• RSA lecture by Richard Thaler, author of Nudge, London, July 2008

At Brunel, I also gave a seminar in June 2008 as preparation for presenting in Finland, and received some very useful feedback.

In terms of parallel activities at Brunel, as well as the Graduate School and SED induction training modules, I’ve completed the Graduate Training Assistant training, and the Graduate School’s Entrepreneurship Masterclass, and have helped assess Level 3 Environmentally Sensitive Design group projects. During the Spring term I assisted with the weekly Level 2 Electronics labs and also marked some of the final assignments, which has given me a good insight into how all this works. I’d welcome the opportunity to be involved further with Design teaching in the next couple of years.

I am excited and enthusiastic about the years ahead, and the opportunities they present, and would like to thank everyone who’s helped me so far.

[1] Available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=908493
[2] Architectures of Control / Design with Intent blog: http://danlockton.co.uk
[3] Available at http://hdl.handle.net/2438/2138
[4] Available at http://hdl.handle.net/2438/2137
[5] Available at http://danlockton.co.uk/research/poster_DL.ai.pdf
[6] Live|Work website: http://www.livework.co.uk
[7] Available at http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2008/06/09/design-with-intent-presentation-slide/
[8] Not yet available online

I passed the review OK, but it was made clear that I really ought to have a more formal, critical literature review, at least in draft, done by now, pertinent to the actual intended contributions to knowledge, and explaining the ‘hole’ in current knowledge and previous work that I’m aiming to fill. Of course, I’ve done plenty of reviewing what’s out there, but given the amount of new avenues and relevant theories I seem to come across weekly, it’s been difficult to draw it all together coherently, and I’ll admit I’ve been putting it off. Perhaps now it’s time to do it properly, along with a ‘contents page’ for the thesis, alongside organising the pilot studies of the DwI method (more on which on the blog in the near future). Yes, deciding what to leave out is going to be hard, but that’s part of the point.

Thanks again to everyone who’s helped this year: having the collective experience of hundreds of intelligent blog readers from many disciplines to draw on and inspire the research has really made the whole thing so much more dynamic, somehow.

This is a kind of exploration of some ideas I worked on a while ago as part of my research, and have only just come back to, in order to tidy them up a bit. I’m putting it online as a way – perhaps – to get some comments/criticism, and also to enable me to refer to it, if necessary, in future blog posts. If I’m honest, classifications and taxonomies fatigue me quite a lot; coming up with ideas and making and testing them is a lot more fun. But sometimes they’re useful. I hope this one is.

If we think about how products are used, it’s clear that changes can result from the products themselves changing, users changing their behaviour, or a combination of both.

At the University of Bath, Ed Elias, Elies Dekoninck and Steve Culley [1] have captured these possibilities with a 2 × 2 matrix (Figure 1), in which ‘new products’ and ‘old products’ are compared with ‘new user behaviour’ and ‘old user behaviour’.

Along these lines, it’s possible to consider technology change (via design) and attitude change (via education) as two routes to achieve overall behaviour change. Especially in the sustainable design field, the emphasis is often on one strategy or the other, even though the routes are by no means mutually exclusive, as the ‘Design for New User Behaviour’ title implies in the matrix.

Loughborough’s Debra Lilley, Vicky Lofthouse and Tracy Bhamra [2] describe three ’solutions to limit socially and environmentally undesirable behaviours’: Educational intervention – which corresponds closely to attitude change; Technological intervention – corresponding to technology change; and Product-led intervention – closely aligned with Elias et al’s Design for New User Behaviour.

Further consideration of the possibilities in this area, and how to represent them, led me to the development of a ‘Behaviour Change Barometer’. This diagram attempts to illustrate somewhat more nuanced ‘cases’ of behaviour change, and which factors are present or absent in each case. It ought to be applicable to many kinds of behaviour change with products, not just environmentally-related ones; equally, read ‘products/services/systems’ for ‘products’ to allow wider applicability. The barometer metaphor is stretched slightly, but it seemed appropriate given that the diagram’s mapping change.

The same information is presented in tabular form here: in essence, there are six variables involved, with the possibility space divided into quadrants.

The focus of my research is on the intersection of technology change and attitude change (Quadrant 3): the design of products (and systems) which, through new product behaviour, change user behaviour. Quadrant 3 will be discussed last here – before that, it’s useful to run through the other quadrants briefly.

Quadrant 1: Status quo

In the first quadrant, no overall behaviour change results.

It makes sense to describe case 1b first – this is the absolute ‘no change’ case, where there is no change in the actual functions of the products (they might be new products, but they don’t do anything different to the old products), people use them in the same way they did before, and users have no understanding or mindfulness of the issues around behaviour change.

Case 1a describes situations where the products’ functions have been changed, but users make no use of this, and have no understanding or mindfulness of the issues involved (e.g. a washing machine offers a new ‘eco’ mode alongside the other settings, but a user doesn’t use it). Therefore no overall behaviour change results, despite product improvement.

In 1c, users have an understanding of the issues, and may be mindful of their behaviour and its impacts, but nevertheless don’t change what they do, and continue to use products in the same way as before – e.g. someone who knows that leaving a television on standby wastes electricity, but doesn’t act on this understanding. Again, no overall behaviour change results, despite improved user understanding.

This quadrant encompasses much current behaviour with energy-using consumer products – improved education and improved technology have raised awareness of environmental issues, and allowed products to be operated more efficiently, but if users don’t act accordingly, there will be no overall change in behaviour.

Quadrant 2: New user behaviour with existing products

Educating users about the implications of their behaviour is generally done with the intention that users will follow through and actually change the way they use products (if they don’t change, this is 1c as described above). If this is successful – e.g. a campaign to persuade people to keep their car tyres inflated correctly to save fuel – then new user behaviour occurs with existing products, and no design or engineering changes are needed to the products. Overall, there is a change in behaviour.

The scope of this quadrant corresponds closely with much current government policy of using social marketing, public education campaigns and so on – employing persuasion and rhetoric to drive attitude change as a foundation for behaviour change. There are many ways that this quadrant could be subdivided into behavioural cases, but from the point of view of the current study, this won’t be explored further here.

Quadrant 4: Existing user behaviour with new product behaviour

Where new products themselves behave differently in use, yet allow users to maintain their existing behaviours, overall behaviour change results without users necessarily needing to understand the issues involved. No persuasion occurs. For example, compact fluorescent lightbulbs, from the user’s point of view, do not require any different user behaviour to tungsten filament bulbs, but in operation they always result in new product behaviour. A refrigerator door which automatically closes itself if left ajar does not, again, require the user to do anything different, but the product itself behaves differently to accommodate existing user behaviour.

This quadrant would include the major proportion of ‘eco-products’ available, most of which are designed to allow the user to change routines and behaviours as little as possible; there are many possible ways the category can be subdivided further according to various other factors.

Quadrant 3: New user behaviour with new product behaviour

In the cases described by this quadrant, both product behaviour and user behaviour change, resulting in an overall behaviour change. The behaviour change can be driven entirely by functional changes to the product, or by mindful user understanding, or by both, but the products are designed to lead to this. This is Design with Intent.

These are products that persuade, guide or force – influence – users to change the way they interact with them. A common factor is that there is a perceived affordance change with the product: it somehow indicates that a change in behaviour is needed (compared with quadrant 4 where there is no such indication). This quadrant is where my research is focused.

In case 3a, the perceived affordance change does not reflect actual functional change to the product, yet it influences users to change their behaviour. For example, a washing machine which gives users an ‘estimated cost’ for each mode still embodies all the same functions as one which doesn’t – the user can choose to ignore the recommendation, but is influenced to choose the most economical mode, and thus a change in product behaviour is likely to result from the change in user behaviour. This is where much of the Persuasive Technology research seems to fit.

3c is the case where a user need not think about the issues involved, but will still behave differently due to functional changes to the product – e.g. a washing machine which automatically determines the most efficient settings for a particular load, and silently carries them out, doesn’t require the user to understand what’s going on, but does end up changing the user’s behaviour (removing inefficient decisions) and thus the product behaviour changes too. These products have the potential to be complex, especially where automation is required, but need not be. Something as simple as removing an option from a menu changes the user’s behaviour (prevents him or her choosing it) but doesn’t require the user to think about it.

Finally, returning to the centre of the quadrant, 3b describes cases where user understanding, alongside functional changes to the product and perceived affordance change, lead to user and product behaviour change in practice: these are the real core of what this study is about and where, I hope, I’ll be able to make advances in understanding useful to designers and anyone else working in the field of influencing user behaviour. These are interesting products, potentially involving lots of factors and effects but not necessarily complex in themselves.

[1] Elias, E W A, Dekoninck, E A, Culley, S J. The Potential for Domestic Energy Savings through Assessing User Behaviour and Changes in Design. EcoDesign2007, 5th International Symposium on Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing, Tokyo, 2007
[2] Lilley, D, Lofthouse, V, Bhamra, T. Towards Instinctive Sustainable Product Use. 2nd International Conference: Sustainability Creating the Culture, Aberdeen, 2005. Available here [PDF].

Continued from part 3

This series is looking at what design techniques/mechanisms are applicable to guiding a user to follow a process or path, performing actions in a specified sequence. The techniques that seem to apply with this ‘target behaviour’ fall roughly into three ‘approaches’, which if anything describe the mindset a designer might have in approaching the ‘problem’: i.e., the techniques suggested may well apply more than one at a time to many designed solutions, but each reflects a particular way of looking at the problem. In this post, I’m going to examine what I’ve called the Persuasive Interface approach, which draws heavily from the work of BJ Fogg, though applied specifically to this particularly target behaviour.

As noted before, a lot of this may seem obvious – and it is obvious: we encounter these kinds of design techniques in products and systems every day, but that’s part of the point of this bit of the research: understanding what’s out there already.

Persuasive Interface approach

The design of the interface (however loosely defined) of a product or system can be an important factor encouraging users to follow a process or path in a specified sequence. Interfaces can use a number of psychological persuasion mechanisms (outlined by B J Fogg) – a ‘human factors’ approach – in conjunction with the technical capabilities of the interface itself. Some mechanisms applicable to this behaviour, then, are – as well as the Interface capabilities themselves – Tunnelling, Suggestion (kairos), Self-monitoring and Operant conditioning.

Interface capabilities
What I mean by this – there is probably a better term for it waiting to be coined – is the choice of degree/type/format of information or feedback that an interface can provide a user. Clearly, an interface with few capabilities for actually providing the user with feedback, or worse, inappropriate feedback capabilities (e.g. a car speedometer only telling you your mean speed for the journey, rather than the instantaneous velocity), has a different (probably much worse) chance for affecting users’ behaviour. (Which is why having the electricity meter in a cupboard, and looking at it four times a year, is not very persuasive in energy-saving terms.)

Careful selection of what information, feedback and control capabilities are designed into a system, from a technical point of view, can have a major effect on user behaviour. To some extent, the addition of an interface to a system which did not previously have one may drive behaviour change in itself. Technical decisions about the types of interaction possible between an interface and the underlying system or product, and between the user and the interface – the capabilities of the interface – determine how the user experience will work: if a system is not designed with a function for monitoring progress through a sequence of operations, for example, then the possibility of indicating this via an interface is not possible, or far more difficult. Providing the infrastructure for a meaningful and useful interface for a system is a design decision which can shape or even determine the system’s use characteristics.

Self-monitoring
Self-monitoring, as defined by BJ Fogg, is an interface design mechanism which explicitly links feedback of information to the user’s actions: the user can monitor his or her behaviour and the effect that this has on the system’s state. As applied to helping a user follow a process or path in sequence, it makes sense for the self-monitoring to involve real-time feedback – so that the ‘correct’ next step can immediately be taken if the feedback indicates that this is what should happen – but in other contexts, ’summary’ monitoring may also be useful, such as giving the user a report of his or her behaviour and its efficacy over a certain period.

Even giving a user the ability to self-monitor where previously there was none can help change behaviour: for example, providing a home electricity meter in an immediately visible position is likely to be more persuasive at inspiring energy saving – by increasing awareness of consumption – than having the meter hidden away.

Example: LinkedIn’s ‘Profile Completeness’ indicator allows users to monitor their ‘progress’, driving them to follow a specified sequence of actions

Tunnelling
Tunnelling is a ‘guided persuasion’ mechanism outlined by Fogg, in which a user ‘agrees’ to be routed through a sequence of pre-specified actions or events:

When you enter a tunnel, you give up a certain level of self-determination. By entering the tunnel, you are exposed to information and activities you may not have seen or engaged in otherwise. Both of these provide opportunities for persuasion.

Applying this mechanism involves treating the user as a captive audience: presenting only the ‘correct’ sequence of actions, step by step, with any user choices being limited, and the commitment to following the process being a motivator to accept the advice or opinions presented. Fogg uses the example of people voluntarily hiring personal trainers to guide them through fitness programmes. Some software wizards provide an interface analogy, where the intention is not merely to simplify a process, but additionally to shape the user’s choices.

Example: This software wizard helps the user ‘tunnel’ through a file conversion process in the right order.

Suggestion (kairos)
Suggestion (kairos) involves suggesting a behaviour to a user at the ‘opportune’ moment, i.e. when that behaviour would be the most efficient or otherwise most desirable step to take (either from the user’s point of view, or that of another entity). In the context of helping a user follow a process or path in a specified sequence, this is very easily implemented: the system can simply ‘cue’ the desired next step in the sequence by alerting or reminding the user, whether that comes through indicators on the interface itself, or some other kind of alert.

Suggestions can also help steer users away from incorrect behaviour next time they use the system, even if it’s too late this time; when presented at the point where a mistake or incorrect step is obvious, advice on what to do next time may be more easily recalled. The key to this mechanism is that the suggestion is timed or triggered at the right point in the sequence, so that its effect is most persuasive. This may imply a system which monitors the user’s behaviour and responds accordingly via the interface, or it might be realised by an interface designed so that, by helping the user keep track of where he or she is in a sequence of operations, the suggestions only appear or are visible at the right point.

Example: This Gearchange Indicator light, fitted to certain Volvo models, suggests the most efficient moment to change gear, based on measurement of engine RPM and throttle position. Thanks to Mac MacFarlane for the image.

Operant conditioning
Controversial, certainly, but reinforcing target behaviours through rewards or punishment may be applicable where we want the user to perform a (perhaps complex) behavioural sequence repeatedly, so that it becomes habit, or successive iterations approximate the intended sequence. But it is unlikely to be effective in encouraging users to follow one-off sequences, where actual direction (e.g. suggestion, tunnelling) is far more useful. In general, punishing users for mistakes is an undesirable way of designing.

In part 5, we’ll review the approaches we’ve looked at, and see how one might actually go about choosing among them to design a new product or system with this particular target behaviour.