Design for Choice Architecture
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define choice architecture.
- Explain why choice architecture is a powerful behavioral lever.
- Apply choice architecture to behavior change.
What shirt to wear? What to do first? What chair to sit in? Our brains must make tens of thousands of decisions each day. They’ve learned to rely heavily on shortcuts and repetitive behaviors in order to minimize the amount of mental effort it takes to navigate all the choices we need to make in a single day. Despite our relative unawareness of these shortcuts, they influence the majority of our daily decisions and actions.
You can increase the likelihood of desired behaviors if we understand these mental shortcuts. For example, we’re likely to choose a default choice rather than spending the effort to thoroughly consider other options and risk deviating from the status quo.
Changing the conditions under which we make decisions is a powerful lever for behavior change. Choice architecture is about changing the context in which such choices are made.
Make the Sustainable Choice the Default Choice
Purchasing energy that comes from renewable resources is one of the seven behaviors with the biggest impact on climate change. It’s also more expensive. Researchers ran a test in Germany to see how changing choice architecture affected people’s energy purchase decisions. For one set of new customers, they defaulted to the selection of this more green and more expensive type of renewable energy source. In the sign-up processes, this set of customers would have to do the work, logistically and morally, to opt-out and choose the cheaper option.
The result? New customers presented with this green default selected the more expensive renewable resource at nearly 10 times the rate of customers who had to choose to opt into the green option!
Design for Choice Architecture
The idea is to design the manner in which choices are framed and presented. It’s a matter of increasing the cognitive ease of choosing the desirable behavior, while still ethically allowing for the opportunity for choice.
Four tactics include:
| Choice Architecture Design Tactic | Best Practice |
|---|---|
| Direct attention. | Make the desired behavior the default option, or draw attention to the desired behavior by making it the most relevant. For example, make carbon offsets the default choice in a UX dropdown for all customers (giving them the chance to unselect it) instead of just marketing it to green consumers. |
| Simplify messages and decisions. | Streamline complex decisions to focus on key information or actions. Provide shortcuts for a behavior using the least amount of steps and options as possible. For example, determine your users location and precalculate the most local source for their offset choice. |
| Use timely moments and prompts. | Target moments of transition and habit formation. Also provide prompts and reminders about the desired behavior. For example, include a prompt to offset energy usage in the moment of paying an electric bill online. |
| Encourage planning and goal setting. | Provide support in making a plan to achieve the desired behavior. Consider use of commitments to lock in or limit the need for future decisions. For example, allow people to add a consultation on offsets to their calendar. |
In the next unit, you learn how these behavior change practices we've been discussing fit within your design process.
