Elsevier

Applied Ergonomics

Volume 41, Issue 3, May 2010, Pages 382-392
Applied Ergonomics

The Design with Intent Method: A design tool for influencing user behaviour

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2009.09.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Using product and system design to influence user behaviour offers potential for improving performance and reducing user error, yet little guidance is available at the concept generation stage for design teams briefed with influencing user behaviour. This article presents the Design with Intent Method, an innovation tool for designers working in this area, illustrated via application to an everyday human–technology interaction problem: reducing the likelihood of a customer leaving his or her card in an automatic teller machine. The example application results in a range of feasible design concepts which are comparable to existing developments in ATM design, demonstrating that the method has potential for development and application as part of a user-centred design process.

Introduction

Stanton and Baber's (1998a) editorial for this journal, ‘Designing for Consumers’ begins with the notion that “[t]here are varying degrees of success to which the designers' intentions regarding product use are realised. In designing products, designers are also designing user activity, which does not occur independently of the product.” Going further, it notes that “[i]n some way, consumer behaviour is shaped by products as much as products are shaped by consumer behaviour.”

Much human factors work on improving system performance by reducing user error (e.g. Baber and Stanton, 1996) and interaction design in general is effectively about influencing user behaviour, even if rarely recognised as such (e.g. Kolko, 2007). Herbert Simon's assertion that “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon, 1969) applies to designing behaviour as well as physical features: indeed, the concept of design explicitly intended to influence users towards particular behaviours recurs across a number of disciplines, from urban planning to reduce crime (e.g. Katyal, 2002) to human–computer interaction (e.g. Beale, 2007).

However, little work has been done to link ideas and techniques from these disparate fields, identify common themes, and present them in a form which can be applied during the design process to develop new products and systems, and improve existing ones. While there is growing recognition that “designers are in the behaviour business” (Fabricant, 2009), there is little general guidance available for design teams briefed with influencing user behaviour, particularly in contexts where social benefit would result: this facet of the design process is not explicitly covered by the variety of ergonomics tools available to designers (Stanton and Young, 1998). As Blevis (2007) puts it (in the context of influencing more sustainable user behaviour), “[i]t is easier to state the kinds of behaviours we would like to achieve from the perspective of sustainability than it is to account for how such behaviours may be adequately motivated.” While in some specific domains, ‘how-to’ guides have been evolved (e.g. Crowe, 2000 in architectural design against crime; Grout, 2007 in medical design errorproofing; Chak, 2003 in persuasive website design), there are no cross-domain guides applicable by designers working on ‘new’ problems, or new ways of addressing existing user behaviour problems.

The Design with Intent Method, introduced in this article, aims to address this deficiency, suggesting relevant design techniques for influencing types of behaviour, and providing examples of how similar problems have been tackled elsewhere. Defining ‘Design with Intent’ (DwI) as ‘design intended to influence or result in certain user behaviour’, the authors have reviewed examples from a variety of disciplines (Lockton et al., 2008a, Lockton et al., 2008b), supported by a blog website and more recently an ongoing survey of designers, receiving comments, suggestions and examples from readers around the world, and incorporated this analysis into a tool for designers.

Three presuppositions underpin the DwI research: (i) if certain design techniques have effects on user behaviour unintentionally, the techniques could also be applied intentionally; (ii) differences in design approach between environments, products (hardware/software) and services largely are due to disciplinary boundaries rather than innate incompatibility—all are designed systems, and many techniques, or analogues of them, recur across multiple fields of application; and (iii) it is therefore possible to abstract certain techniques from examples in one field, and use them in others, following Hendrick's (2008) argument that “the HSIT [human system interface technology] used in the designing of one system, product or built environment can be applied to other, very different ones.”

Examples of DwI in design, human–computer interaction (HCI) and architecture are often based on environmental and ecological psychology, from behaviour settings (Barker, 1968, Sommer, 1969) to Gibson's (1986) affordances, extended by Norman, 1988, Norman, 1999, Norman, 2008) and others (Gaver, 1991, Gaver, 1992, McGrenere and Ho, 2000). In parallel, the development of errorproofing, from Shingo's (1986)poka-yoke manufacturing quality control to the design of healthcare processes (Grout, 2007, Design Council et al., 2003, Lane et al., 2006) has promulgated often affordance-based techniques (Beatty, 2008) within organisational policy. Diverse practitioners are thus aware of the strategic use of affordances as ‘interventions’ influencing user behaviour, from forcing functions reducing vehicle misfuelling (Adams and David, 2007) to councils preventing the homeless sleeping on benches (Lockton, 2005).

In behavioural economics, the ‘heuristics and biases’ approach pioneered by Kahneman et al. (1982) has recently taken a high-profile turn (Cialdini, 2003, Ariely, 2008, Thaler and Sunstein, 2008) towards influencing behaviour, and awareness of this approach among human factors practitioners appears to be increasing, e.g. Seva et al's (2007) use of the affect heuristic (Slovic et al., 2002) and a recent lead article in The Ergonomist (Richardson, 2008). It is therefore desirable that design methods for influencing behaviour include a treatment of these principles, in a form useful to designers looking to apply them.

Persuasive technology (Fogg, 1999, Fogg, 2003) applies elements of rhetoric (Kjaer Christensen and Hasle, 2007) and conditioning to influence behaviour, mainly (so far) in the context of social networking websites and mobile computing. This is one of the main bodies of current work pertinent to the DwI concept, but the criterion of persuasion—requiring attitude change as a precursor to behaviour change—excludes situations where attitude change is not required for changes in behaviour, especially in safety systems, where the designer does not necessarily care whether a user's attitude changes towards a behaviour, simply that the behaviour itself changes. The interlock on a microwave oven preventing operation with the door open influences user behaviour successfully without explicitly ‘persuading’ users of the need to operate the device safely, though that may also be a parallel effect.

It has been argued (Buchanan, 1985, Redstrom, 2006) that all design is intended to influence user behaviour, in the sense that the artefacts around us contain socially constructed ‘scripts’ for users (Akrich, 1992)—e.g. if we position a chair at a workstation, we are influencing a user to ‘follow the script’ and sit down. Nevertheless, systems intentionally designed to influence behaviour different from that usually associated with the situation, or in situations where a user would not otherwise have a strong idea of what to do (e.g. with an unfamiliar interface), represent a degree of designer intent beyond this. Any such products will, of course, always be used within a context involving users' own intentions: emergent behaviours, intuition (Blackler et al., in press), appropriation (Salovaara, 2008) or prior experience (Chamorro-Koc et al., 2008) mean that designers' intended use (or usability) is not always translated into user behaviour. The task–artefact cycle (Carroll et al., 1991) suggests that new artefacts will coevolve with behaviours (Walker et al., 2009), in turn offering new possibilities. Equally, as Kanis (1998) shows, users operate the same products in many ways and still achieve the desired results. In some fields, such as security or health and safety, user adherence to intended behaviour is more critical than in others—as Cairns and Cox (2008) put it, “in safety critical systems, like air traffic control or medical monitors… the cost of failure is never acceptable.”

The DwI Method has been developed primarily in response to the need of influencing user behaviour to reduce the environmental impact of products which consume resources during use: helping people use products and systems more efficiently. Users' behaviour and operational decisions can contribute significantly to environmental impacts (Elias et al., 2007, Wood and Newborough, 2003, McCalley and Midden, 2002), and the UK Government's Stern Review (Stern, 2007) identifies behaviour change as a priority in this field. Some design researchers (Lilley et al., 2005, Lilley et al., 2006, Elias et al., 2007, Lockton et al., 2008b, Lockton et al., 2009b, Wever et al., 2008, Rodriguez and Boks, 2005, Bhamra et al., 2008) have begun to develop the field of ‘design interventions’ applicable by designers as responses to user behaviour ‘problems’, particularly environmental, but also ‘pro-social’ behaviour generally. Within the ergonomics community, this work begins to answer the call of Flemming et al. (2008) for the application of human factors expertise to ‘the sustainability domain’.

Nevertheless, the DwI Method is intended to be generally applicable to the problem of influencing user behaviour, including but going beyond the ecodesign field; this paper thus illustrates its potential by application to an everyday human–technology interaction problem: reducing the likelihood of a customer leaving his or her card in an automatic teller machine (ATM).

Section snippets

The Design with Intent Method

The starting point of the DwI Method is the existence of a product, service or environment—a system—where users' behaviour is important to its operation, or where it would be strategically desirable to alter the way it is used. The goal of the design process is to modify or redesign the system to achieve this: to influence users' behaviour towards a particular ‘target behaviour’. The method is a ‘suggestion tool’, inspiring design solutions by suggesting techniques, with examples applicable to

Application: reducing ATM card error

An example application will illustrate how the DwI Method can be used, in prescription mode (Section 2.1.2). This is a simple and quick example, with the brief phrased in one of many possible ways. The choice of an aspect of ATM design is intended as a demonstration of the method, to illustrate how it can be used; ATMs also particularly suitable for analysis using ergonomics methods and concepts, and a number of improved interface designs have been tested by human factors researchers (e.g. Chan

Discussion and further work

This article has described the Design with Intent Method and applied it to a ‘user behaviour’ problem to illustrate its use. The example is simple and the full range of real-world constraints has not been applied, but a set of pertinent design concepts has been generated, which could be developed further. It is arguable that most of the concepts suggested would be obvious to experienced human factors professionals, particularly those with interface design expertise, but as Stanton and Young

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