The Design with Intent Method: a design tool for influencing user behaviour

Using product and system design to influence user behaviour offers potential for improving performance and reducing user error, yet little guidance is available at the concept generation stage for design teams briefed with influencing user behaviour. This article presents the Design with Intent Method, an innovation tool for designers working in this area, illustrated via application to an everyday human–technology interaction problem: reducing the likelihood of a customer leaving his or her card in an automatic teller machine. The example application results in a range of feasible design concepts which are comparable to existing developments in ATM design, demonstrating that the method has potential for development and application as part of a user-centred design process.

Web-based museum trails on PDAs for university-level design students: Design and evaluation

This paper describes the development and evaluation of web-based museum trails for university-level design students to access on handheld devices in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. The trails offered students a range of ways of exploring the museum environment and collections, some encouraging students to interpret objects and museum spaces in lateral and imaginative ways, others more straightforwardly providing context and extra information. In a three-stage qualitative evaluation programme, student feedback showed that overall the trails enhanced students’ knowledge of, interest in, and closeness to the objects. However, the trails were only partially successful from a technological standpoint due to device and network problems. Broader findings suggest that technology has a key role to play in helping to maintain the museum as a learning space which complements that of universities as well as schools. This research informed my other work in visitor-constructed learning trails in museums, specifically in the theoretical approach to data analysis used, in the research design, and in informing ways to structure visitor experiences in museums. It resulted in a conference presentation, and more broadly informed my subsequent teaching practice.

Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour

User behaviour is a significant determinant of a product’s environmental impact; while engineering advances permit increased efficiency of product operation, the user’s decisions and habits ultimately have a major effect on the energy or other resources used by the product. There is thus a need to change users’ behaviour. A range of design techniques developed in diverse contexts suggest opportunities for engineers, designers and other stakeholders working in the field of sustainable innovation to affect users’ behaviour at the point of interaction with the product or system, in effect ‘making the user more efficient’. Approaches to changing users’ behaviour from a number of fields are reviewed and discussed, including: strategic design of affordances and behaviour-shaping constraints to control or affect energyor other resource-using interactions; the use of different kinds of feedback and persuasive technology techniques to encourage or guide users to reduce their environmental impact; and context-based systems which use feedback to adjust their behaviour to run at optimum efficiency and reduce the opportunity for user-affected inefficiency. Example implementations in the sustainable engineering and ecodesign field are suggested and discussed.

Exploring design patterns for sustainable behaviour

Products and services explicitly intended to influence users’ behaviour are increasingly being proposed to reduce environmental impact and for other areas of social benefit. Designing such interventions often involves adopting and adapting principles from other contexts where behaviour change has been studied. The ‘design pattern’ form, used in software engineering and HCI, and originally developed in architecture, offers benefits for this transposition process. This article introduces the Design with Intent toolkit, an idea generation method using a design pattern form to help designers address sustainable behaviour problems. The article also reports on exploratory workshops in which participants used the toolkit to generate concepts for redesigning everyday products—kettles, curtains, printers and bathroom sinks/taps—to reduce the environmental impact of use. The concepts are discussed, along with observations of how the toolkit was used by participants, suggesting usability improvements to incorporate in future versions.

Designing motivation or motivating design? Exploring Service Design, motivation and behavioural change

Motivation researcher Edward Deci has suggested that if we want behavioural change to be sustainable, we have to move past thinking of motivation as something that we ‘do’ to other people and see it rather as something that we as Service Designers can enable service users to ‘do’ by themselves. In this article, Fergus Bisset explores the ways in which Service Designers can create more motivating services. Dan Lockton then looks at where motivating behaviour via Service Design often starts, with the basic ‘pinball’ and ‘shortcut’ approaches. We conclude by proposing that if services are to be sustainable in the long term, we as Service Designers need to strive to accommodate humans' differing levels of motivation and encourage and support service users' sense of autonomy within the services we design.

Design for sustainability: making green behaviour easy

Design can enable sustainable behaviour by understanding everyday needs rather than treating people as the problem.

Design for repair: empowering consumers to fix the future

By understanding how everyday devices work, individuals can – with the help of a growing online community – enjoy extending the life of products and drive socially responsible design.

Digital Humanities Research Through Design

Humanities Computing gave rise to the Digital Humanities, which brought considerations of a wider scope of the digital turn to humanities research. Increasingly, the area is understood to include the field of design, exemplified by definitions that describe the Digital Humanities as a “generative enterprise”. We suggest that design contributes not only to the making of digital artefacts. Design practiced with the aim to generate new knowledge constitues a research method. Design research contributes to the Digital Humanities expertise in addressing complex problems and methods for making the knowledge that is generated during a design process explicit.

Exploring problem-framing through behavioural heuristics

Design for behaviour change aims to influence user behaviour, through design, for social or environmental benefit. Understanding and modelling human behaviour has thus come within the scope of designers’work, as in interaction design, service design and user experience design more generally. Diverse approaches to how to model users when seeking to influence behaviour can result in many possible strategies, but a major challenge for the field is matching appropriate design strategies to particular behaviours (Zachrisson & Boks, 2012). In this paper, we introduce and explore behavioural heuristics as a way of framing problem-solution pairs (Dorst & Cross, 2001) in terms of simple rules. These act as a ‘common language’ between insights from user research and design principles and techniques, and draw on ideas from human factors, behavioural economics, and decision research. We introduce the process via a case study on interaction with office heating systems, based on interviews with 16 people. This is followed by worked examples in the ‘other direction’, based on a workshop held at the Interaction ’12 conference, extracting heuristics from existing systems designed to influence user behaviour, to illustrate both ends of a possible design process using heuristics.

Models of the user: designers’ perspectives on influencing sustainable behaviour

Influencing more environmentally friendly and sustainable behaviour is a current focus of many projects, ranging from government social marketing campaigns, education and tax structures to designers’ work on interactive products, services and environments. There is a wide variety of techniques and methods used, intended to work via different sets of cognitive and environmental principles. These approaches make different assumptions about ‘what people are like’: how users will respond to behavioural interventions, and why, and in the process reveal some of the assumptions that designers and other stakeholders, such as clients commissioning a project, make about human nature. This paper discusses three simple models of user behaviour – the pinball, the shortcut and the thoughtful – which emerge from user experience designers’ statements about users while focused on designing for behaviour change. The models are characterised using systems terminology and the application of each model to design for sustainable behaviour is examined via a series of examples.

Making instructions for others: exploring mental models through a simple exercise

This article introduces the idea of asking people to create instructions for others, as a way of exploring their mental models of designed systems. An example exercise run at the 2012 Brighton Maker Faire provides context. Article part of the 'On Modelling' forum edited by Hugh Dubberly.

Research in practice: Bringing behavioural change from lab to studio

Design influences behaviour, whether it's planned or not. Service Design has a great opportunity to lead the emerging field of design for behavioural change, helping guide and shape experiences to benefit users, service providers and wider society. In this article, presented as an evolving conversation between research and practice, Nick Marsh (EMC Consulting) and Dan Lockton (Brunel University) discuss and explore design patterns for influencing behaviour through Service Design, and how Service Designers and academics can work together for social benefit.

“Digital Diagnostics and Communication (DDC) system” Redesigning the Emergency Ambulance

During the development of a new treatment space for the UK emergency ambulance participatory observations with front-line clinicians revealed the need for an integrated patient monitoring, communication and navigation system. The research identified the different information touch-points and requirements through modes of use analysis, day-in-the-life study and simulation workshops with clinicians. Emergency scenario and role-play with paramedics identified 5 distinct ambulance modes of use. Information flow diagrams were created and checked by paramedics and digital User Interface (UI) wireframes were developed and evaluated by clinicians during clinical evaluations. Feedback from clinicians defined UI design specification further leading to a final design proposal. This research was a further development from the 2007 EPSRC funded “Smart Pods” project. The resulting interactive prototype was co-designed in collaboration with ambulance crews and provides a vision of what could be achieved by integrating well-proven IT technologies and protocols into a package relevant in the emergency medicine field. The system has been reviewed by over 40 ambulance crews and is part of a newly co-designed ambulance treatment space.