Methods

Sketching
High Fidelity Prototyping
Remote user testing

Behaviour change

Allowing designers to use a wide range of behaviour change techniques when designing digital products.

Clients

Dr Marion Lean (DCMS)
Dr Paulina Bondaronek (UCL)

There are over 350,000 behaviour change apps that all aim to influence the behaviours of their users in different ways. Research shows that they all use the same narrow range of techniques and that very few are successful.

The Behaviour Change Technique taxonomy features 97 different techniques that hold the potential to increase the effectiveness of digital behaviour change systems, but designers do not use them.

The aim of this project is to create a way to make these techniques more available to designers, to encourage them to use them, and to gather knowledge about how designers can incorporate them into their creative processes.

Ideation

It was clear that some form of information hierarchy was needed to navigate the 97 items in the taxonomy list. We created some early sketches to work out our ideas based on the need for a way to make choices about which technique to use when, and how to deploy it in a design process. We settled on three main ways of moving through the options, Step by Step, See All, and Randomise. Building in a randomise function helped to mitigate the risk of over determining the choices that can be made.

Prototyping

The design of a sorting function for a long list of items really only came alive when we started to make an interactive prototype. This revealed the affordances of how much information it is reasonable or useful to expect people to interact with in one view. Interactions are limited to choosing with sorting automated based on the techniques selected. During the prototyping phase we discovered the value of providing case studies for how to integrate the taxonomy into design work using examples.