Modelling the User: How design for sustainable behaviour can reveal different stakeholder perspectives on human nature

Copyright @ 2010 TU DelftInfluencing more environmentally friendly and sustainable behaviour is a current focus of many projects, ranging from government social marketing campaigns, education and tax structures to designers’ work on interactive products, services and environments. There is a wide variety of techniques and methods used—we have identified over 100 design patterns in our Design with Intent toolkit—each intended to work via a particular set of cognitive and environmental principles. These approaches make different assumptions about ‘what people are like’: how users will respond to behavioural interventions, and why, and in the process reveal some of the assumptions that designers and other stakeholders, such as clients commissioning a project, make about human nature. In this paper, we discuss three simple models of user behaviour—the Pinball, the Shortcut and the Thoughtful—which emerge from user experience designers’ statements about users while focused on designing for behaviour change. We characterise these models using systems terminology and examine the application of each model to design for sustainable behaviour via a series of examples

Cognitive biases, heuristics and decision-making in design for behaviour change

Copyright @ 2012 Social Science Electronic PublishingMuch human behaviour can be seen as decision-making, and so understanding and influencing those decision-making processes could be an important component in design for behaviour change. This paper examines the 'heuristics and biases' approach to modelling decision-making, and attempts to extract insights which are relevant to designers working to influence user behaviour for social or environmental benefit -- either by exploiting biases, or helping to counter those which lead to undesirable behaviour. Areas covered include a number of specific cognitive biases in detail, and the alternative perspective of Gigerenzer and others, who contend (following Herbert Simon) that many heuristics potentially leading to biases are actually ecologically rational, and part of humans' adaptive responses to situations. The design relevance of this is briefly considered, and implications for designers are summarised

Native Mobile Applications For Personal Well-Being: A Persuasive Systems Design Evaluation

Smartphone applications have shown promise in supporting people to adopt healthy lifestyles. Hence, it is critical to understand persuasive design strategies incorporated in native mobile applications that facilitate behavior change. The aim of our study was to identify distinct persuasive software features assimilated in twelve selected applications using Persuasive Systems Design (PSD) model and provide a methodical framework for systems developers and IS researchers to extract and evaluate such features. Further, this study aimed to provide deeper comprehension of persuasive design and strategies by learning from practice. Exhaustive evaluations were performed by four researchers specializing in persuasive information systems simulating users walking through the applications step-by-step performing regular tasks. The results disclose the need for improvement in designing and incorporating persuasive techniques in personal well-being applications. While self-monitoring and personalization were moderately exploited, tailoring, a key persuasive feature, was not identified among the evaluated applications. In addition, evaluated applications lacked features that could augment human-computer dialogue as well as social support. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: while it exposes weakness in persuasive design of native mobile applications for personal well-being, it provides a methodical approach for enhancing general persuasiveness of such applications for instance, through enhanced dialogue support. We propose that designers and IS researchers perform rigorous evaluations of persuasive features incorporated in personal well-being applications

Toward Deep Understanding of Persuasive Product Recommendation Agents

Product recommendation agents (PRA) are systems built to facilitate customers’ products purchase on e-commerce websites. Prior literature focuses on the “shaping” effects of PRA to customers’ decision making. More challengingly, PRA can be built to change customers’ product choice by combining with persuasive features. This paper explores this new type of PRA “persuasive product recommendation agents” (PPRA). In this paper, we make a distinction of PPRA with neutral and deceptive ones. The basic functioning principle of PPRA is stated and a classification of persuasive tactics is made. We propose the mechanism via which PPRA work by incorporating elaboration likelihood model, 4w and theory of reasoned action together. Despite marketing usage, the proposed PPRA can be used to benefit society by promoting green purchases or encouraging charity. The theory also has the generalizability to be used in decision making contexts like healthcare and education. Discussion and future research directions are made