Designing for Behavior Change

Chapter 10. Reviewing and Fleshing Out the Interface Designs

Once there is something real and tangible that the product team can look at—wireframes or mockups that convey the interface design—you can review them from a behavioral perspective and give feedback. Two different types of review should occur:

• Looking for gaps in the overall user experience across the product

• Looking for opportunities to apply specific tactics

Look for Big Gaps

The product design process is necessarily one of translation—converting concepts and intent into designs of something users can actually interact with. Along the way, the core aspects of the behavioral plan—the behavior change strategies used, the sequence of steps, the structuring of the environment and preparation of the individual—may change. Those changes can be highly beneficial from a behavioral perspective, if the designers were inspired to come up with new ways to meet the same ends. They can also be detrimental and miss key aspects of the application’s intended psychology.

Think of the interface design as a new behavioral plan, one that should be evaluated on its own merits and run through the design wringer we employed in Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8. That way, the interface designs are not judged too literally against the original functional requirements if the UX designers came up with innovative behavioral solutions.

What You’re Looking For: The Create Action Funnel

At the end of the day, the product needs to help people change their behavior. ...