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How do we unpack the levers for behaviour change? A simple framework

How do we inject some more science into our design process, to develop solutions that best fit with how people actually make decisions?

Over the past few years I’ve worked with a range of teams and companies operating in different sectors to better understand why their customers do what they do, and how we can engineer better experiences – for the user and organisation. And I’ve noticed that the growth in interest in behavioural science as a core part of a designer’s toolkithas been phenomenal. 

  

Concepts such as ‘people don’t do what they say’ or that our behaviour can be influenced by factors outside of our conscious awareness seem to be well accepted. In fact, more and more I’m finding that people are aware of researchers such as Daniel Kahneman or Dan Ariely , or can use terms such as ‘ System 1/ System 2 ’ and ‘ heuristics ’. 


The interest is there. The willingness to probe into the psychological levers of behaviour is there. Is something missing? 


From my experience, the challenge is in application – taking well-proven concepts and applying them in a systematic way as part of the design process. Done well, behavioural science can support a designer’s understanding of their user and lead to better, and even counter-intuitive, design solutions. 


But to take advantage of scientific fields such as psychology and behaviour economics (yielding 4 million+ and 3.3 million+ references, respectively, on Google Scholar), there need to be some guidelines. Guidelines that help guide your path without spoiling the creativity of designing for people.


For a view on why designers should be interested in bringing more behavioural science into their repertoire, see a previous article How can behavioural science contribute to better design decisions?


A simple framework for understanding behaviour change


When trying to understand why people do what they do, and how to design for behaviour change, there are a number of frameworks that can be utilised. One that I’ve found useful in a range of situations is the B=MAT (or B=MAP ) model developed by the behavioural scientist BJ Fogg from Stanford University. 


Figure 1: The B=MAT model for understanding behaviour change.


It explains “that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behaviour to occur: Motivation, Ability and a Prompt”. When someone is motivated (M) to behave in a certain way, has the ability (A) to behave in a certain way, and the right trigger (T) converges then a behaviour (B) can occur. It’s proven useful for understanding for what and why people are currently behaving in a given way, and what might be changed in the future.


The key benefit I find with this model is it stretches people’s thinking beyond what is immediately in front of them (e.g. what users claim to be important in interviews). As an example, in a recent project I used this model to help reframe the problem from one of awareness of the proposition’s benefits, to one in which the key trigger to make use of the proposition wasn’t cutting through into people’s awareness. Making the trigger more salient and obvious was a simple solution – and one which didn’t immediately surface in the team’s thinking.


An example: Understanding reluctance to wear masks in public


To illustrate how this approach can be applied, let’s take the issue of mask wearing in public spaces such as supermarkets and buses. In a recent project I’ve been involved with (The 2020 Vision Project) looking at how New Zealanders have responded to COVID-19 and the several waves of lockdown, people’s reluctance to wear masks in public settings proved to be an interesting challenge.


Why? Because most people accepted that it was a necessary behaviour, to help the ‘Team of 5 million’ combat COVID-19 – supported by frequent exhortations from people such as Jacinda Arden to “make it [wearing masks] a part of normal life”. But there were also plenty of people who were reluctant to wear them in public at first due to concerns about what others might think: “My theory is that the minute I want to shop … the mask should go on … but I look around at what others are doing”


This led to two challenges:


  1. We found broad support with the idea of wearing masks in public, but reluctance to wear them as it was a new and weak social norm coming up against a strong existing social norm. For example, data from survey research firm Dynata found that only 45% of Aucklanders during Level 3 in August 2020 reported always wearing a face mask in public locations
  2. There was a belief that retailers and supermarkets needed to control the safety of the store environment, including controlling the behaviours of other customers. Another survey conducted by Dynata found that 63% of people supported mandatory mask wearing in supermarkets and 64% at malls


So if you were a retailer caught in the middle, how might you address this issue, where people knew what they should be doing, but weren’t, and expected you the retailer to keep control of the store environment?


Here’s how you could unpack this using the B=MAT model, and come up with a range of different solutions:


Motivation: What are people motivated to do (or not do)?

  • Social pressure can exert a strong promoting and inhibiting pressure on how we behave
  • In this situation, could we highlight the desired behaviour, or make it the default behaviour to normalise it? For example, signs saying “Thanks everyone for wearing their mask” 


Ability: What are people able to do (or not able to do)?

  • Ability is more than just the skills and knowledge to undertake a behaviour, but also the capacity to perform the behaviour at that point in time. In this case, do people have a mask to wear at the point they enter the store?
  • Could we hand out masks to people on the way into a store, or have them on offer next to the entrance? This reduces expectations and effort on behalf of customers


Triggers: What triggers do people see (or not see)?

  • A trigger can exist to increase people’s motivation, raise someone’s ability or to remind people in the moment to change their behaviour 
  • Could we use visual triggers (e.g. shop displays and images with people wearing masks) to reinforce a new social norm? Or even a simple command as someone walks into the store (“Now’s the time to put your mask on”)?


Are these three factors aligning at the right time?

  • Quite simply, are the right messages and prompts occurring at the time necessary to impact behaviour
  • For example, signs saying to “remember your mask” might be too late outside the store, but might be a good reminder as people leave their car, assuming there is a mask in the glove box


This is quite a simplified example but is a nice way of demonstrating how taking a different lens on what people are doing and why that might be the case can yield different results. In practice, this approach tends to stretch team’s thinking when conducting user research and encourage them to come up with different types of solutions. 


Is this the one user behaviour model to rule them all? 
Unfortunately, not even close. There’s a range of models that are worth pulling out in different situations, that can yield different solutions and ways of thinking. But like my Master’s supervisor said: “All models are wrong, but some are useful”.

For me, this model continues to be a simple and useful lens on people’s behaviour in a range of situations.



Note: For anyone who wants to go deeper into this topic, I’d highly recommend visiting BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model site

Developing persuasive touchpoints

By Cole Armstrong • 15 Mar, 2024
How do we create persuasive touchpoints that make a difference? By considering how simple ways of reframing our messages, using insights from psychology and behavioural science, can create greater motivation to act.

The fallibility of memory

By Cole Armstrong • 19 Jul, 2023
If I asked you to think back about an event, maybe a holiday or your last plane trip, your last dinner out, or a shopping experience, what would you remember? If I asked you to describe the experience, chances are you’d feel pretty confident about your memory, or at least some of the key elements. It turns out though, that confidence you’re feeling - it doesn’t relate to the accuracy of your memory. Faulty memories You’re not losing your mind, it’s just that your mind is playing tricks... sort of. We’ve spent quite a bit of time using eye tracking technology through our client projects. It enables us to see a participant’s behaviour – what they actually see and engage with - and the journeys people take through a physical environment, like a mall or retail setting. One project saw participants navigating a store with eye tracking glasses, getting items off a shopping list. As soon as they’d completed their journey, we asked which way they’d walked. Participants confidently recounted their route, and yet despite having literally just finished their journey, consistently missed out details. In another project we asked focus group participants about an image we’d shown them 20 minutes earlier. This elicited quite a spirited conversation about skin colour and how the illustrator’s choice of using a dark skin colour for all of the characters pointed to the racism of the illustrator and client. The thing was though, the characters weren’t dark skinned. Not one of them. And yet all of the participants convinced themselves this was the case. We’re certainly not the first to have encountered this phenomenon. There’s quite an active scene looking into issues with eyewitness testimony, and under which conditions our memory maybe unduly swayed or prone to errors. As you can imagine, the consequences of this could be huge. How can we stop getting it wrong? We’re not saying that our memories are always wrong – clearly that’s not the case! But there’s a rhyme and reason behind how our memory operates – both for good and bad. Our brains are BUSY. It’s like a hamster wheel going full on 24/7. Even when sleeping our brain is taking stock of the day, filing away moments into short and long-term memory. In order to look after us, our brains have to prioritise its resources, and it essentially takes shortcuts wherever possible, driving the same way to work each day, ordering the same coffee and so on. Imagine the fatigue we would face if we had to make every decision and action consciously, rather than letting our brains run the show. Which moments matter? So when our brain – a lazy but efficient workaholic – is sorting through events and the happenings of our day, it throws out the mundane, peripheral information it deems unimportant. It instead focuses on creating a highlight reel, and takes the moment of the events and experiences that were the most emotionally intensive, and the final moment. The concept is known as The Peak-End rule, and comes from Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Donald Redelmeier. Their 1996 study, which I am very pleased to not have been a participant in, involved 154 colonoscopy patients rating their level of discomfort at 60-second intervals throughout the procedure, as well as being asked to retrospectively describe how uncomfortable the procedure was. The level of discomfort during the procedure had no correlation to the discomfort they reported retrospectively. As an aside, they followed-up this study with yet more colonoscopy patients, who were split into two groups. One group had the standard procedure and experience of the camera being somewhat painfully removed, and the other had an amended experience that lasted three minutes longer, but which the camera removal was more uncomfortable than painful. The second group – with a longer procedure but less discomfort in the final moments – rated the procedure as less painful than the first group and were more likely to return for subsequent procedures. What was relevant was the peak level of discomfort experienced, as well as the level of discomfort in the final, end moments of the procedure. So what does this tell us? Firstly, that our memory is more fallible than we’d like to realise, more often made up of a series of stitched together moments and thoughts that can be revised and reinterpreted after the fact. Here’s an example - one of the best flights I’ve had was on Air New Zealand to Sydney – the first time we’d flown with my then-infant daughter (you can imagine our nerves!). At the end of the flight we apologised to the man next to us who’d (somehow) been working the whole 3.5 hours. We were suitably self-conscious at the amount of screaming he’d been subjected to but were greatly surprised at how nice he was – telling us that she’d been great, and how his (now teenage) children had subjected him through worse. Then some of the other passengers near us congratulated us on surviving a flight with an infant and how good a flyer she’d been – alongside the cabin staff who were making faces at our daughter to get her to laugh. It's honestly one of the best flights I remember – but clearly it wasn’t that pleasant at the time! The Peak-End rule in action – our actual and remembered experiences diverting wildly. How to apply these learnings to your work Don’t rely on people providing an accurate testimony of their experience. It’s more important to look at what a customer does vs what they say they do. When reviewing a process, journey or customer experience, focus on the moments that matter – the peak emotional moment and the final moment. This provides direction, stopping you from spreading your resources too thin and helping concentrate efforts on the moments most likely to have an impact. Be creative when designing experiences. Because our remembered experience is more important than our actual experience, you have a unique opportunity where you can creatively leave customers with an experience perhaps better than what they had… If you know there’s a frustration or issue during a process, while working on a fix for that, make sure your final moment knocks their socks off.

What JCDecaux can do for your brand in 2 seconds

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JCDecaux is one of the largest Out-of-Home businesses worldwide; in New Zealand it specialises in high quality Large Format and Airport touchpoints. JCDecaux is committed to delivering research-led validation to its partners regarding Out-of-Home effectiveness and looks for partners who can deliver neuro or behavioural methodologies that can deliver on this objective.
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