Defining behaviour change
When people talk about ‘behaviour change’ they’re usually referencing two things at once:
- Interventions to try and change behaviour
- The models that inform those interventions.
Behaviour change can focus on an individual, a group of people, or society. The change might be to:
- Stop unhelpful or damaging behaviours
- Encourage positive behaviours
- Change current behaviours for the better.
The term is often used in relation to public health, psychology, education, and development. For example, a public health campaign might use behaviour change interventions to get people to stop smoking, walk more, or recycle. It’s used in relation to UX and marketing too, as people look for evidence-based ways to approach their work. For example, a price comparison brand might use ideas from behavioural science to encourage people to compare car insurance prices, rather than just auto-renewing.
Based on that last example, you might be thinking ‘well that’s just marketing’. But what sets a behaviour change-informed approach apart is the focus on understanding what levers to pull to influence people’s behaviour — the model that informs the intervention.
Insight from psychology and social sciences underpins behaviour change interventions. The models help us understand the different things that influence human behaviour – like beliefs, social influences, environmental factors, capabilities, and more. With that insight, you can better target and shape your interventions.
Content and behaviour change: user-focused BFFs
Content strategy and content design both have a big focus on the user, and creating content that meets their needs. We use user insight, research, and testing to help us plan and create the right content and make sure it reaches them in the right place and at the right time.
Behaviour change models can add a valuable extra layer to the work we’re already doing in understanding user needs. They can help us to:
- Understand what information users need by providing insight into the capabilities/abilities they may lack
- Sharpen our focus on accessibility and inclusion by providing more insight into the opportunities users might lack due to inequality
- Create messaging that lands the right way by providing insight into mental models, beliefs, impulses, and social norms
And of course, all of that can help us to meet our goals and targets, whether we’ve been charged with generating sales or donations, creating awareness, providing education, or something else.
AIM: a behaviour change framework for content
Natalie Shaw’s article Designing content for behavioural change sparked my interest in behaviour change and content. I found her framework really useful, and it inspired me to go away and do more research.
I wanted to distil some of the things I found most useful and relevant to content from what I learnt. So I developed a simple behaviour change-based framework to use for content. I use this model to help me structure insight and research into a format that I can keep on hand as I plan and create the content.
The model is AIM:
- Attention: find the user and get them thinking
- Information: tell them what they need/want to know
- Motivation: help them take action
Attention
Before you can influence someone’s behaviour, you need to get their attention. To do this, you need to know what people are thinking, feeling, and doing in relation to the topic. For this part of my behaviour change model, I make sure I’m clear on:
- What will the user be doing in relation to the topic? How can you be there when they do that?
- Will they be searching for something related to the topic? What keywords might they be using?
- Will they understand that behaviour change is desirable or possible?
- How will they be feeling? How can you reflect that in a way that makes them feel seen and get their attention?
- Is content even the right solution? Content isn’t the right approach to every problem and every stage of the user journey.
Capturing attention needs a multi-channel approach, and should use both push and pull content. You have to meet people where they are.
Information
Once you have the person’s attention, it’s time to give them the information they need to change their behaviour. As part of this, you should consider:
- Subject matter: What information will help them solve the problem/change their behaviour? For example, is there a step-by-step process they should follow? Are there tools they can use? What signposts might be useful?
- Clarity: How can you make the information straightforward and accessible, and break down the info into understandable chunks that they can put into practice?
- Capability: Does the person have any psychological or physical barriers to making the change?
- Psychological capability means things like knowledge, skills, and commitment.
- Physical capability means physical skills and strength. For example, how might this issue be different for someone with a disability or impairment?
- Opportunity: Are there any external factors that might help or hinder someone?
- Physical opportunity means the environmental elements and resources that are necessary for the behaviour. For example, how might this issue be different for someone with a low income, or with very little free time?
- Social opportunity means cultural norms and social cues that can affect the behaviour. For example, how might this issue be different for people from different cultural backgrounds?
These factors will influence what information you provide, and where and how you provide it.
Motivation
The final part of the framework is motivation. This means encouraging the user to take action by appealing to their values and emotions, and showing them the benefits. Motivation can be:
- Reflective: This is their conscious reasoning, where personal goals and evaluations influence behaviour. This is things like: the plans they make, how they evaluate things, and what they believe is good or bad.
- Automatic: This is the more innate stuff like desires and impulses, influenced by emotions and deeply ingrained habits.
Behaviour change interventions in content
While the AIM model can help you plan content, behaviour change interventions can help you to write and design it.
Behaviour change interventions are techniques you can use to prompt, support, educate, and motivate people.
Again, we can learn from psychology and social sciences. Some behaviour change models include behaviour change interventions, too. One of the sources I’ve found most useful is this taxonomy of behaviour change from the NHS (PDF).
If you’re working for a charity, nonprofit, government agency, or another similar kind of organisation, your stakeholders or subject matter experts are likely to use behaviour change interventions in their work. If that’s the case, speaking to these people will be an incredible source of insight for you. For example, when I worked on a content design project to help people who wanted to stop smoking, the smoking cessation nurses I interviewed had a wealth of evidence-based interventions that they used with clients. We found that lots of these could be reflected or reproduced in digital content.
Here are some useful behaviour change interventions to keep in mind. I’ve used stopping smoking as an example, to illustrate how they might work in practice:
- Instructions, processes, methods: help someone learn how to do something. For example: a guide to different nicotine replacement products and their pros and cons.
- Explanations: help someone understand possible reasons for an unwanted behaviour. For example: listing common triggers/habit loops that go along with smoking.
- Consequences: explain things that happen as a result of a behaviour, positive and negative, personal, social or environmental. For example: talking about the impact of second-hand smoke on friends and family.
- Social approval: remind someone of the approval they’ll get from the good behaviour. For example: talking about things like how happy and proud friends and family will feel, or no longer smelling like smoke.
- Comparisons/modelling: provide a comparison of different behaviours, or model what the positive behaviour looks like. For example: giving people a list of ways to refuse an invite to go out for a cigarette, or providing case studies from people who have quit.
- Prompts, cues, and triggers: help people understand and plan for providing positive prompts and avoiding negative triggers. For example, suggesting setting a reminder on their phone to use their nicotine lozenge, or listing common smoking triggers.
- Goal/commitment setting: prompt the user to set a goal or make a commitment. For example: prompting someone to sit down and really think about their goals in stopping smoking.
- Problem solving: prompting the user to analyse their behaviour and come up with solutions. For example: setting up an exercise for people to identify their habits and patterns with smoking and come up with ways to disrupt them.
- Feedback and monitoring: prompting the user to monitor their behaviour and feelings about it, keep records, journal, etc to keep track, but also to monitor positive changes. For example: suggesting people do a weekly review and explore what went well, what the challenges were, and notice any positive outcomes.
- Self-belief: reinforce self-belief and help someone see that they can change the behaviour. For example: include messaging to help the person believe that they can quit.
Ethical considerations with behaviour change
Behaviour change — like most things — can be used in a negative, manipulative way that harms users rather than helping them.
There’s a lot of justified concern about how behavioural science is being used to manipulate users in the digital design world. Harry Brignull’s work on deceptive patterns is a great resource for understanding what this can look like. Some key patterns that he’s identified include:
- Confirmshaming: emotionally manipulating the user into doing something they wouldn’t otherwise do
- Fake scarcity: making people think they have to buy now or they’ll miss out
- Fake social proof: using fake reviews and testimonials to mislead people
- Nagging: repeatedly interrupting someone to do something they might not want to do
- Sneaking: hiding or delaying important information
Find out more and buy the book on the Deceptive Patterns website.
Another risk is promoting personal responsibility when structural change is what’s needed. For example, shaming the public with carbon footprint calculators while oil companies destroy the planet with impunity.
But as long as your general approach is to respect your users, and treat them as active citizens rather than passive consumers, using behaviour change models doesn’t have to be manipulative. It should be a way to be more empathetic, more inclusive, and ultimately, more user-focused.
Reading list
- Designing content for behavioural change: a framework, Natalie Shaw
- Content design for behavior change, Anita Cheng
- The COM-B Model for Behavior Change, The Decision Lab
- COM-B and changing behaviour, Social Change
- The Fogg Behaviour Model, Growth Engineering
- Theory of Planned Behaviour, Newcastle University Theory Hub
- The Principles of Behaviour Change Communications, UK Civil Service
- Transforming content design: the role of cognition and decision making, Rich Prowse
- Applying Behavioral Science to Content Design, Vidhika Bansal and Larry Swanson (Podcast)
- Applying behavioural design to help people make more sustainable choices, Luca Piallini and Val Mitchell
Loosely related, but very interesting:
