Behavioral Design: Design the Damn thing

Behavioral Design is all about determining how a user will interact with your thing. Thinking ahead and committing to a plan. You want peope to like, share and use a product in the way that the designer and engineer intended.

Dan Ariely wrote about the predictably irrational. In his book he mentioned examples of impscenario he offers you a half box of chocolates now or if you wait a week he would give you the whole box. In reality logic would state that people would want the whole box, but in studies most people will take the now, now, now scenarios.

There are other principals to behavior design that offer you opportunities to influence perception in behavior design or interaction. One example might be nail polish that tastes bade so that the user wont bite there nails.

At South by South West I have learned about multiple topics related to inteeraction design and behavioral design. It’s all about turning information and data into interactive knowledge that is vidually rich and applicable to telling a story. The first panel I made it to was hosted by CC Chapman on “The Power of Visual Storytelling.” During this panel the speakers offered advice and antidotes on the misuse of personal branding. Without directly calling there ideas personal branding these speakers mentioned stories where users and journalists told their own stories or other peoples stories and how/why it worked.

Visually rich data can be just as important as intellectually stimulating and well organized data. In short the speakers wanted us to think about how we portray ourselves online. If I had to sum up the talk in one paragraph it would be: “No one wants to just hear you say me, me, me and I’m so cool because… but if you can layout a story that interacts with the reader you will always eep them coming back for more even if you only talk about dirty bacteria or your food. It’s all about context.”

One speaker used a fun analogy that women shouldn’t wear rings on their right hand or left hand ring finder if they are single and on the prowl, because men are too dumb and drunk to figure out if they are married. In short think of the small details when you are trying to tell your own life story and every little thing builds up to tell your story. It’s the old addage that a picture can say 1000 words.

I thin moving from one panel on cognitive thinking and persuasive writing builds right into visual thinking in design. Chris Risdon also spoke on Applying Visual and Behavior Design. How can visuals and thinking effect end users? Think of what your original intent is for the end user. Chris used the example of an organ donor and getting them to opt-in. What if by default a user is opted in. So the intent is to get more organ donors, your not trying to conceil the explicit options but the funnel of the system leads the user in an indirect manner to get the user to do what you want them to. This makes behavior design sound manipulative, in a sense it is but good design doesn’t conceil the business intentions. Good design offers non-deceptive and transparent intentions. The opt-in example isn’t inherently bad it simply offers the user to opt-in without needing to think of the decision. Opt-out is where they need to think to click and make a decision. As long as it’s easy to understand and the constraints are not hidden this form of design shouldn’t seem like a gray area. However deliberate constraints in layout that are less utilitarian can move from persuasion into manipulation.