Designing for Behavior Change (feat. Amy Bucher)

Amy Bucher, PhD, discusses her book Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change, and provides practical tips to UXers who want to incorporate these methods into their work.

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Transcript

Dan Berlin: 0:14

Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the 97 UX things podcast. Dan Berlin here, your host and book editor. This week, I'm joined by Dr. Amy Bucher, who will be talking about designing for behavior change. Welcome, Amy.

Amy Bucher: 0:27

Thanks, Dan. I'm really glad to be here.

Dan Berlin: 0:29

Thanks for joining me. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

Amy Bucher: 0:33

Sure. I am the author of a book called Engaged; Designing for Behavior Change, which came out a few years ago with Rosenfeld Media. So, really intended for a UX professional audience who want to incorporate psychology behavior science into their toolkit - whether they're researchers or designers, whatever UX role they play. I'm currently the Chief Behavioral Officer at Lirio, a company that uses artificial intelligence and behavioral science to get patients to take actions around their health. So for example, if someone's overdue for a cancer screening, or a vaccination, or hasn't seen their primary care provider in a number of years - we can really personalize messages that will speak to the reason why they're not taking action and drive them to get back into the medical office. Get the care that will help them be healthier. Prior to that, you and I worked together at Mad*Pow for a number of years. So, I was able to really learn a ton in the consulting world, working with all different types of organizations to apply behavioral science to the work that they were doing. I've also spent time at CVS, at Johnson & Johnson, worked for another startup early in my career - which is actually how I came in to be as part of Johnson & Johnson. So kind of worked all over the space, mostly in health. But really applying behavioral science to the design of interventions, products and services that are intended to change people's behavior.

Dan Berlin: 1:49

To start things off, before we actually dig into the the bulk of the content... Can you define that for us at a high-level? Behavioral science and deciding for behavior change?

Amy Bucher: 2:00

Yeah. You know, it's funny. Because I have actually felt like my own definition of behavioral science has gotten a little slippery in the last few years. My degrees are in psychology. So, kind of a traditional academic training. I really focused on social psychology as an undergrad - which is the focus of how systems, the environment, other people affect a person's behavior, perception, and experience. Then in grad school, I studied organizational psychology - which was really because the person I wanted to work with, as an advisor, was in that department. But it's just the same kind of thing - only contextualized to a formal organization, like a business or a school. As I've gone through my professional career, behavioral economics has been something that's on the rise for the last several decades. The book Nudge that came out, I think in 2010-ish, really pushed behavioral economics to the fore. So now, I think behavioral science very much includes economists, and particularly behavioral economists, who are thinking about the ways that choice architecture affects people's behavior. Then, I sometimes see the community including other social sciences as well. So sociologists, anthropologists, sometimes their perspectives are brought in. I will say I've taken courses in both of those areas, and found that their toolkits are very complementary and helpful. So, particularly think about something like ethnography. An anthropologist is very well-trained to do that sort of research. So when I think of behavior science, I think of it as rooted in the social sciences. But you'll see a lot of variation in the particular strengths and focus any individual has.

Dan Berlin: 3:24

Sounds very similar to UX - in that way rooted in the social sciences, but the strengths will differ based on the person. So, tell us more about that. So for the UX-ers out there, how can we dig into that for designing for behavior change?

Amy Bucher: 3:38

When I wrote my book, I put a lot of thought into how to set this up. Because people had come up to me a lot, especially after I got more involved - like in the UXPA Boston community and UXPA International. I think that was really where I started to realize that UX-ers were very interested in the skill set. I have accidentally crafted a career that had one foot in behavior science and one in design. But a lot of people want to do it deliberately. So, I ended up focusing on two different frameworks in my book that, I think, lend themselves very nicely to design. And are not overly complicated for people to understand and start to use. Although I do think at some point, most people will run into a place where they feel like they need expert help. One of them is the COM-B framework, where it's an acronym. B stands for Behavior, and C O M is Capability, Opportunity, Motivation. It's a lens that we can use to understand why people may not be taking action. Then, it includes linkages to research that says... If we can identify the set of problems, what is the right set of solutions to build into our designs, to help people overcome those barriers? Then, the other is a Self-Determination Theory (SDT) of motivation, which is a really long name for something that is pretty straightforward. Most people know the Deci and Ryan extrinsic and intrinsic motivators. This is actually Deci and Ryan's work, but a little more detail. There's kind of a range of motivators between extrinsic and intrinsic. The idea is... The more we can get people to do things for their own internally-generated reasons... The more likely they'll stick with them, the more interested they'll be in the behaviors that you're asking them to do. There's all kinds of ways that we can do that with design. So by supporting people's needs for making their own good choices, feeling like they're learning, growing through their experience, and helping them feel like they really belong to something bigger than themselves... So I chose those two frameworks for my book, because I use them a lot myself. But like I said, I also think they're very friendly to people who are trying to pick up new skills. There's bits and pieces of wisdom that you can grab from them, and kind of bring them in alongside the expertise that you've already developed as a UX-er.

Dan Berlin: 5:32

You can make an assumption that sounds like that would be initially incorporated in the research portion. When we're doing this research, we should be approaching in a certain way, in order to uncover what these capabilities and so forth are. How can we do that?

Amy Bucher: 5:49

Yeah, and you're absolutely right. I think that all good behavioral design does begin with research - and ideally, at least some primary research. To use comedy as an example, I like to ask people to tell me stories about the behaviors that we're trying to affect. I say stories because we're natural-born storytellers. That's how we're built. So, people usually have a reasonably easy time telling you a story about a time that they've done something, if they've done it before. Then, your role as a researcher is to be a really active listener. Try to hear whether they're talking about these capability, opportunity, or motivational factors. You can dig in more on any one of them. I actually have a spreadsheet that I keep of starter questions that allow you to dig in on those three areas. Of course, going in, you might have hypotheses about some of these being more of a factor than others. So, you can prep your moderator guide to be heavier in one area than another. The other thing that I've gotten great mileage out of from a research perspective - and there was a project that I did when I was at Mad*Pow that was really instrumental around this is... Combining the interview with observations, and especially if it's a behavior that has a lot of social desirability factors. People know that there's a right way to do things, and they don't want to admit to doing things the wrong way. So, I worked on construction worker safety, and why construction workers take risks. They know they shouldn't, they're very well trained. They go through a lot of training about all the rules, regulations. One of the things that was so interesting is... In the interviews, most of them wouldn't really talk about that. But walking around the jobsite, you could see that almost everybody was taking, at least, very minor risks. I saw a lot of people standing on the very top rung of the ladder, for example- which is obvious to me, a non-construction worker, that you shouldn't be doing that. So first of all, seeing the discrepancy between what people described and what they were doing was really helpful as a researcher. But secondly, it gave me some opportunities when I was doing the interviews. What I found worked really well is actually to say, "Not you. But when I was walking around the construction site, I saw some people doing XYZ. What do you think's going on there?" I found that tended to be a really good way to start to get people to talk about the reasons why people do those things. A lot of people, I think, without even realizing it... Transitioned into talking about their own experiences. But again, that whole time I'm listening for"what are the barrier types?" Are they talking about not understanding? Or a big thing with construction workers was behavioral regulation. So lots of noises, lots of things happening at once. Not only do you have to remember your own complicated task, but you have to adjust it based on what people in your environment are doing. So that was an issue at times.

Dan Berlin: 8:18

Yep, and that speaks to the importance of using mixed methods. Approaching a problem from different angles allows us to uncover something, and then hopefully probe on something meaningful. I love what you said about doing the observations, and then the interviews in order to probe on what you saw.

Amy Bucher: 8:37

Yeah, I also think it's just more interesting as a researcher. That's one of the reasons why I got into psychology initially, and then the line of work that I do - because people are interesting, and I want to see what they do. I want to hear their stories about why they've approached life the way that they have. And I think mixed methods - if you're a curious person, and most UX authors are - it's just going to give you that much wider of a lens into other people's worlds.

Dan Berlin: 9:02

You mentioned just getting back to the tactical in terms of accomplishing this. So, you mentioned some starter questions in order to get at the capabilities and so forth. In the analysis, are you quoting them by capabilities, opportunities, and motivations?

Amy Bucher: 9:17

Yeah, we absolutely are. I will say there's sometimes a little bit of debate, because those three things - it's a taxonomy, but they are not discrete categories. They relate to each other. So sometimes, it won't be clear whether this is something that... Say, a social opportunity - which is about the social environment that the behavior's done in. Or automatic motivation, which is about mental models. But those, of course, are very heavily shaped by the environment that you're in. So, we're coding according to that. But what we're ultimately doing with that coding is... We're trying to bridge into solutioning. And part of what is great about COM-B is that... When the researchers who initially built out this taxonomy did so, they also identified the types of solutions that are most effective for each of these types of barriers. There's a overlap in the solutions as well as in the barriers themselves. So when I'm confronted with a situation like, "I have this barrier. I'm not sure if it's social opportunity or automatic motivation." I'll make a note, and I'll look at the solutions. There are some solutions that overlap those two categories of barrier. That tells me that when I get into the design phase, I need to highlight those shared solutions - if that makes sense. I'm sort of kicking the can down the road on the coding, if my purpose is really designing something that works.

Dan Berlin: 10:28

Yep. I think that's fascinating - that there is this directory of solutions available. Where's that coming from? What's that based on?

Amy Bucher: 10:36

So, it's based on a massive literature review. The team that built this initially comes out of University College of London. I think their earliest publications were based on something like 1300 different research studies that they had reviewed and classified. It's a really active research community, which is another... both of the theories that I mentioned, part of why I use them as they have very vibrant research communities around them. So the evidence tends to be fresh. There's people who are constantly probing on them, and making sure that they fit the world that we live in. There's a tool online called the "Theory and Techniques Tool" that actually somebody, some researchers took all of this evidence and put it into an interactive tool. So, we use that a lot in our design. We've actually created our own internal version that uses evidence from our programs, which is has been very, very cool. But it just shows where there is a linkage in the research, between certain types of solutions and problem sets. So what we use it for... So first of all, if something already has a strong linkage, that tells us we want to use that in our design. But we also will deliberately sometimes pick areas where there is not a lot of evidence. But we have a strong hypothesis that that might work, because we see that as an opportunity to generate new knowledge.

Dan Berlin: 11:42

It almost sounds like this is a huge support to what a lot of people are attempting in terms of building research repositories... Building repositories of what they learn with their user interviews. But then often enough, the question comes up is, "Alright, what can we do with this?" That sounds like a wonderful next step in order to actually take some next steps there?

Amy Bucher: 12:04

Yeah, I think it is. And it's relatively new too, I should say. I think the "Theory and Techniques Tool" was developed four or five years ago. It feels like the sort of thing that people are really just starting to pay attention to in the last year or two. But yeah, it's a great way to share this knowledge that we're generating as a field. I know the more advanced I get in my career, the harder time I have keeping up with new findings. Like, I can't read papers the way I used to in grad school, right? So to be able to go to this kind of consolidated database, this aggregator - and be able to see where the evidence is strongest, and where we could build upon it... Has been a real gift.

Dan Berlin: 12:39

What else were you hoping to convey here today?

Amy Bucher: 12:42

I love what I do. I really... I can't state enough how much I love what I do. So, I'm always hoping to convey excitement to others around using behavioral science - you know, tools, perspectives in their own work. I think that it really is important if you're building anything that you're hoping will change people's behavior in a sustained way. So, there's certain types of products that people work on, where it might not matter that much. Like, maybe you want them to transact once, and as long as you make that an easy experience- that's enough. But for in healthcare, for example, where most of my career has been, we're really looking to engage people over the long term. Then, a series of behaviors that are oftentimes difficult, expensive, or unpleasant. I think it's really important that we try to understand what drives human behavior, and we're designing these experiences for people. So if I can interest you in picking up a book about behavior science, it doesn't have to be my book by any means. There's lots of great stuff out there. But just thinking about different ways that you can understand why people might be behaving a certain way or not, and building that into your approach that would that would make me very excited.

Dan Berlin: 13:43

Hopefully, it's a big goal of having you here on the podcast today. What are the resources can people refer to?

Amy Bucher: 13:50

I actually have a website, which I'm very poor about maintaining, AmyBucherPhD.com - I have a blog post on there. This may be about two years old, where I consolidated some books that I recommend to people that I think are good from a science perspective. But also approachable if you don't have your PhD and want to dig into the actual research. I also love the Habit Weekly community. So, it's a newsletter. There's a free and a paid version, I do the paid version. But even the free version is a great resource. They have a Slack community that goes with it. I find that to be a really diverse group of people, in terms of their backgrounds and perspectives. But they just share this passion for Applied Behavior science. So, I often recommend people who are interested in dipping their toes in the water - look there, and you'll likely find something that bridges your fields and ours.

Dan Berlin: 14:35

Yep. Great. One of the questions that just came to mind is about privacy, because you mentioned working in health care, right? So how do we bridge that gap between shoring people's privacy, but also giving them this personalized, I guess, nudges - for lack of a better term - for that change.

Amy Bucher: 14:55

Yeah, well. I mean, I think consent and opt-in are really, really important to think about. This actually comes naturally to me, as someone with the advanced training in psychology. Because anytime you do human-subjects research - I mean, I go through annual re-certification now to be able to do human-subjects research. A lot of what we learn is how to ensure that we have appropriate consent. That we're not coercing people. That people have the opportunity to withdraw from. I'm saying research here. But I think of it the same way with the commercial work that I do. That we make it easy for people to opt out of that experience. I can say that for us... We think about the permissions that our clients already have to communicate with people, and will often ask for an additional option on top of that... Depending on the topic that we're messaging and the type of channel. So text message, for example, is more sensitive than email. So, we will often ask for additional opt-in if we want to do a text-messaging campaign. But I think a lot of kind of typical UX things too - about not doing the evil UX. We make it easy to opt out. We don't try to bury the unsubscribe link, and a light gray font, and the bottom of a huge footer - actually honoring those requests. We do audit that to make sure that people are being successfully unsubscribed. So all that to say, I don't think that it's perfect by any means. I know that there are people who would probably be uncomfortable, knowing that their data is used to drive some of the health experiences that they're offered. But I also believe that if we can be as transparent as possible about what's going on - make it possible for people to withdraw from that. We're constantly operating with this idea of trying to be helpful to people. Trying to help them advance their own goals. That we've got the right start, at least.

Dan Berlin: 16:31

Yeah, 100%. Just setting those right expectations, right? That's what UX is all about. We set the expectations, and we meet those expectations. People are happy.

Amy Bucher: 16:40

I hope so.

Dan Berlin: 16:40

Yeah. Great. Well, my guest today has been Dr. Amy Buker, who has been chatting about designing for behavior change. Thanks for joining me today, Amy.

Amy Bucher: 16:48

Thanks for having me.

Dan Berlin: 16:49

Thanks for listening, everyone. You've been listening to the 97 UX Things podcast, a companion to the book 97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know - published by O'Reilly and available at your local bookshop. All book royalties go to UX nonprofits, as well any funds raised by this podcast. The theme music is"Moisturize the Situation" by Consider the Source. I'm your host and book editor, Dan Berlin. Please remember to find the needs in your community, and fill them with your best work. Thanks for listening.