Writing up things you’ve been doing over the last 3 years is pretty boring. The trite advice given so often is to “write up as you go along” and while that might be partly wise, I’ve found that realistically, what I wrote 18 months ago is simply not usable in the thesis without massive alteration. Things change. The linear format of literature review -> planning the studies -> method -> results -> conclusion is very artificial when the studies you do end up leading you back to the literature, learning something else, doing more studies, and so on. I’m (re-)writing the literature review last of all in order to make it serve as a foundation for the later bits of the thesis, but I’m not entirely satisfied with this approach. It doesn’t reflect how the work was actually done, which (to me) is an important part of science. But the need to produce a document which overall is a thesis rather than a story or collection of published papers (which is permissible in some countries) suggests that I need to put such concerns aside, at least for the moment. I suppose it depends on if your work falls neatly into sections or separate projects which are substantially independent, or not. Mine unfortunately hasn’t worked out that way. Everything depends on everything else, pretty much.

So the blog may be quiet for another couple of months. And when it comes back, I think it needs something of a 5th-birthday-restructure to fit better with how it’s actually used. In the meantime, thank you so much to everyone who’s downloaded the latest Design with Intent cards or bought printed sets so far. You keep me motivated!

It’s been a long time coming, but a year after v.0.9, the new Design with Intent toolkit, DwI v.1.0, is ready. Officially titled Design with Intent: 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design, it’s in the form of 101 simple cards, each illustrating a particular ‘gambit‘ for influencing people’s interactions with products, services, environments, and each other, via the design of systems. They’re loosely grouped according to eight ‘lenses‘ bringing different disciplinary perspectives on behaviour change.

The cards (Download them here)
The intention is that the cards are useful at the idea generation stage of the design process, helping designers, clients and – perhaps most importantly – potential users themselves explore behaviour change concepts from a number of disciplines, and think about how they might relate to the problem at hand. Judging by the impact of earlier iterations, the cards could also be useful in stakeholder workshops, and design / technology / computer science education.

Each gambit is phrased as a question, as used in Nedra Weinreich’s worksheet based on DwI v.0.9, in the hope that the cards can actively provoke innovative behaviour change design ideas, while the new accompanying Design with Intent wiki can, in time, act as a kind of ‘further reading’ resource.

You can download the card deck, either the whole thing (ISBN 978-0-9565421-1-3) or individual sections, free of charge, but bear in mind this initial version is still something of a draft (with some typos and a few ugly alignment errors) and there are a few extra introductory cards which will be added over the next couple of weeks. So do come back and get the updated version when it’s available.

Printed card decks (ISBN 978-0-9565421-0-6) will be available for mail order very soon, too: these will be sold at a price which just covers my costs (around £20-25 plus postage). If you’re going to UX London or Persuasive 2010 I hope to have some packs with me, so do let me know if you’d like me to reserve one for you. This isn’t a commercial venture: it’s part of my PhD and the more people who use the cards, the better (from my point of view). I will try to produce some alternative formats such as posters and worksheets, too, since I know cards aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.

The wiki
The wiki is inspired partly by Crumlish & Malone’s Designing Social Interfaces, a great book (and a neat companion to Jenifer Tidwell’s incredible Designing Interfaces, also from O’Reilly) with a companion wiki which acts 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.

At present, the wiki is pretty basic and while I get to grips with the nuances of Mediawiki (and, of course, writing up my PhD thesis!) it’s not open for general editing, but it will be in due course. I hope over time it will prove to be a valuable resource for people working in design for behaviour change, design for sustainable behaviour, persuasive technology, behavioural economics and other related areas. There are also a number of linked pages which I haven’t written yet, but by putting them in as red links, they’re a constant reminder for me to do them!

Your feedback
Your comments are incredibly important to this project. I’ll be putting a survey online very soon, but in the meantime, if you have any reactions, please do get in touch (dan@danlockton.co.uk). I’m aware that I haven’t yet replied to everyone who took part in the earlier survey, for which I apologise.

The blog
In the light of the new wiki, and coming towards the end of my PhD, the blog will change a bit during the summer – nothing will be lost, but I intend to incorporate a lot of the examples into the wiki, preserving people’s comments. The various domain names and redirects need a bit of htaccess fun to sort out too! For the moment, though, it’ll stay as chaotic as it is.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped with the development of Design with Intent so far: I hope the wait for these cards has been worth it!

These aren’t original, by any means. People such as Amy Jo Kim (see her great presentation ‘Putting the fun in functional’), Sebastian Deterding, Francisco Inchauste, Jeremy Keith, Geke Ludden, and of course Ian Bogost have done work which explores this area from lots of different angles, and it also draws on decades of research in social psychology. Russell Davies’ Playful (which I really should have gone to!) looks like it was very pertinent here too. (Note, this lens doesn’t cover Game Theory-like patterns, some of which are indeed relevant to influencing user behaviour, but which I’ve chosen to group under a new ‘Machiavellian Lens’)

My main interest here is to extract the design techniques as very simple design patterns or ‘gambits’* that can be applied in other design situations outside games themselves, where designers would like to influence user behaviour (along with the other Design with Intent techniques). So these are (at least at present) presented simply as provocations: a “What if…?” question plus an example. The intention is that the card deck version will simply have what you see here, while the online version will have much more detail, references, links and reader/user-contributed examples and comments.

Challenges & targets

What happens if you set people a challenge, or give them a target to reach through what they’re doing?

« Whoever laid out this coffee tub as a target for throwing coins knew a lot about influencing people to donate generously and enjoy it

Unpredictable reinforcement

What happens if you give rewards or feedback on an unpredictable schedule, so users keep playing or interacting?

Arcade games such as this coin pusher usually employ a strong element of unpredictable reinforcement, to keep users playing/paying »

Scores

Can you give users feedback on their actions as a score or rating allowing comparison to a reference point?

« The ‘Brain Age’ score given by Dr Kawashima’s games for Nintendo gives users a clear incentive to keep using the software

Levels

Can you split your system up into achievable levels which help users feel like they’re making progress?

Easy-to-reach levels lower the barriers to participation and encourage continued engagement for games such as FarmVille »

Rewards

Can you encourage users to take up or continue a behaviour by rewarding it, through the design of the system?

« Kai’s Power Tools (pioneering visual effects software) revealed ‘bonus functions’ to reward users who developed their skill level

Playfulness

Can you design something which ‘plays’ with its users, provoking curiosity or making interactions into a game?

Spiral wishing wells turn giving money to charity into something actively fun for donors, and provoke curiosity of passers-by »

Storytelling

Can you tell a story via your design, which interests users and keeps them engaged?

« Dyson uses narrative booklets drawing customers (and potential customers) into the story behind the company and its technology

Leave gaps to fill

Can you leave deliberate gaps (in a design, message, etc) which users will want to fill, becoming engaged in the process?

Deliberate use of red links on Wikipedia, signifying articles which should be written, “encourage[s] new contributors in useful directions” »

Role-playing

What happens if your system gives users particular roles to play, or makes them feel like they’re playing a role?

« Tim Holley’s Tio encourages children to become ‘energy champions’ for their household, influencing parental behaviour

Collections

What happens if you encourage users to collect a set of things (friends, activities, places, objects, etc) through using your system?

UbiFit Garden encourages users to maintain a regular variety of exercise activities, in order to ‘collect’ different types of flower »

Make it a meme

What happens if you plan your design to be something people want to spread, and make it easy for them to do so?

« ShareThis and similar quick-access social sharing services can mean rapid ‘viral’ or ‘meme’ status for interesting or amusing stories

The text and examples aren’t quite fixed yet, so any comments and feedback on the above are very welcome.

Spiral wishing well photograph courtesy of Steve Divnick – see this video if you don’t believe the power of the well; UbiFit Garden images from DUB at University of Washington; ShareThis Chicken Poncho screenshot from this listing on Regretsy; Tio image from Tim Holley.

*I’ve decided to start using Bryan Lawson’s ‘gambit’ terminology [PDF], if only to recognise that at least at present, DwI is not really a proper pattern language, as Sally Fincher comments here.

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.

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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

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.

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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