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Use the Behavior Change Design Process

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Explain how behavior change works during the design process.
  • Describe the steps of a behavior change design process.

Combine Design Innovation and Behavior Change Design

Now that you understand the individual behaviors that make the biggest impact on climate change, and the behavioral levers to influence those behaviors, it’s time to change your own behaviors as a designer to use what you’ve learned.

Cast your mind back to the design process described in Sustainable Design. If you apply what you’ve learned about behavior change design, this same process can be thought of as a behavior-centered design process.

Step What Why

a head with a gear inside

Empathize

Frame your sustainability challenge as an effort to change the behavior(s) of a target audience. Gain insights about the target audience’s relationship with the target behavior, including their motivations and challenges.

Successful behavior change depends on your ability to reach people in ways that are meaningful to them.

three circles connected by lines

Define

Organize insights about your target audience into behavioral motivations and challenges.

Developing a hypothesis about your target audience’s behaviors will lead to more effective behavior change.

lightbulb

Ideate

Generate, group, and prioritize behavior change ideas.

You have many creative ideas and limited time and resources. This step helps you decide among your behavior change ideas to choose the best one to pilot.

many circles, some connected by lines

Prototype

Select your best behavior change idea and develop a prototype that captures its essential features.

By creating a small-scale version of your behavior change idea, you can experiment and estimate its success without investing a lot of resources.

a flask with bubbles coming out

Test

Test your prototype with your target audience and make revisions based on their feedback.

Before launching your behavior change solution at scale, it’s valuable to get feedback from a few members of your target audience.

a ruler

Assess

After launch, assess the impact of your behavior change solution and reflect on potential improvements.

This step helps you know if behavior change is happening and to what degree.

Put It into Practice

Now that you’ve learned about some of the key levers of sustainable behavior change (emotional appeal, social influence, and choice architecture), how might you put it into practice? Here are some questions to get you moving in the right direction.

What are you designing right now? Are any of the most impactful behavior changes identified by Rare a part of that experience? If so, how might you use behavior change design to encourage them? 

If not, what choices are your users making? Have you thought about which of them are more or less sustainable? How might you introduce an emotional appeal to change behavior? 

How might you introduce sustainable social influences into your users’ choices? Can you design the context of the behavior such that the choice architecture reveals or simplifies the more sustainable choice? 

We have a suggestion: commit to getting the ball rolling by sending a note to your current team. Tell them you’ve just completed a short course on behavior change design and you’d like to put sustainability and behavior change levers on the agenda for an upcoming meeting.  

Adding behavior change design to your design toolkit is a key way to be sustainable by design. 

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