Great examples of how behavioral insights have been applied to behavior change in India

case studies

original “jobs to be done“ article from 2008

So how is it done? We’ve found that all jobs have the same eight steps. To use job mapping, we look for opportunities to help customers at every step:

a curated list of resources to help you on your journey into the UX of VR

Behavioral Design Teams: A Model for Integrating Behavioral Design in City Government - open source playbook

The doors will soon open at Saskatchewan's first children's hospital, but some psychiatrists say the building is rife with safety and suicide risks.

There are a few enormous benefits to using challenge maps. First, challenge maps help teams surface the key decision points that will have the greatest potential impact, both for users and the business. Challenge maps also help teams get aligned and on the same page about the most impactful next step. Finally, and maybe most importantly, challenge maps help teams see where their thinking has been too limited, inspire fresh thinking, and unlock innovation.

In this randomized clinical trial of 602 overweight and obese adults from 40 states across the United States, gamification interventions with support, collaboration, and competition significantly increased physical activity compared with the control group during the 24-week intervention. The competition arm had the greatest increase in physical activity from baseline during the intervention; during the 12-week follow-up, physical activity was lower in all arms, but remained significantly greater in the competition arm than in the control arm.

1. Nudges do not respect freedom. 2. Nudges are based on excessive trust in government. 3. Nudges cannot achieve a whole lot.

If we want everyone to participate in public life, we must design and build an inclusive public realm that is accessible to all. Public life can’t just be available to the abled, young, or healthy. Everyone navigates the built environment differently, with abilities changing across a person's lifespan. The sizeable global population of people with physical, auditory, or visual disabilities, autism or neurodevelopmental and/or intellectual disabilities, or neuro-cognitive disorders will face greater challenges if we don’t begin to more widely apply universal design principles.

The small changes are often the ones that make a difference. Our guide presents effective, light-touch strategies to help your students get to and through college.

The Humanitarian Innovation Guide is a growing online resource to help individuals and organisations find their starting point and navigate the humanitarian innovation journey.

To do so, we drew on a theoretical framework which highlights that defaults operate through three channels: first, defaults work because they reflect an implicit endorsement from the choice architect—your company’s HR department, your city’s policy office, your credit card company, your child’s school. Second, defaults work because staying with the defaulted choice is easier than switching away from it. Third, defaults work because they endow decision makers with an option, meaning they’re less likely to want to give it up, now that it’s theirs. As a result, we hypothesized that default designs that trigger more of these channels (also called the three Es: endorsement, ease, and endowment) would be more effective. In our analysis, we find partial support for this idea. That is, we find that studies that were designed to trigger endorsement (defaults that are seen as conveying what the choice architect thinks the decision maker should do) or endowment (defaults that are seen as reflecting the status quo) were more likely to be effective. In addition, we find that defaults in consumer domains tend to be more effective, and that defaults in pro-environmental domains (such as green energy defaults) tend to be less effective.

html design templates

A free online course on behavioural insights for public policy from the Behavioral Economics Team of the Australian government

4 types of nudges/sludges and characters to represent them

Summary: Exposure to a stimulus influences behavior in subsequent, possibly unrelated tasks. This is called priming; priming effects abound in usability and web design.

In other words, it’s not a question of consumer choices being made that are bad, but of whether consumer choice exists. So when we ask why we ‘choose (or not)' highly energy efficient products, maybe we should ask instead if we're actually ‘picking (or not)' super energy efficient products. Picking vs. choosing. This is not a question of semantics. Far from it.

This idea, that five to eight users will reveal 85% of all usability problems, is an old myth. It’s not true. It’s never been true.

BETA hosted Australia’s first ever Form-a-Palooza on 28 June 2019. It was a one-day festival of forms, designed to share the latest in form design with public servants from across the Australian Government. Forms are the most common interaction between people and the government, and there are thousands of them—most still in paper. Improving forms is a simple but important way to improve service delivery and increase public satisfaction with government. Over 200 participants from 38 agencies came along to Form-a-Palooza to learn new techniques and put them into practice. We also launched a brand new framework to guide the development of good forms—the WISER framework. It’s based on the latest research, as well as our own experience working with government agencies on forms, letters and communication.

I’m often asked for my top tips for managing Human Risk. Over the next five weeks, I’m going to reveal the Five Rules of Human Risk, beginning, appropriately enough with the first: Rule 1: Human Risk can be managed but not eliminated On the face of it, this is a statement of the blindingly obvious. Yet it is fundamentally important; if we really want to manage Human Risk, then we need to accept that we can’t control every aspect of human decision-making. No matter how hard we try.

When people make decisions with a pre-selected choice option – a ‘default’ – they are more likely to select that option. Because defaults are easy to implement, they constitute one of the most widely employed tools in the choice architecture toolbox. However, to decide when defaults should be used instead of other choice architecture tools, policy-makers must know how effective defaults are and when and why their effectiveness varies. To answer these questions, we conduct a literature search and meta-analysis of the 58 default studies (pooled n = 73,675) that fit our criteria. While our analysis reveals a considerable influence of defaults (d = 0.68, 95% confidence interval = 0.53–0.83), we also discover substantial variation: the majority of default studies find positive effects, but several do not find a significant effect, and two even demonstrate negative effects. To explain this variability, we draw on existing theoretical frameworks to examine the drivers of disparity in effectiveness. Our analysis reveals two factors that partially account for the variability in defaults’ effectiveness. First, we find that defaults in consumer domains are more effective and in environmental domains are less effective. Second, we find that defaults are more effective when they operate through endorsement (defaults that are seen as conveying what the choice architect thinks the decision-maker should do) or endowment (defaults that are seen as reflecting the status quo). We end with a discussion of possible directions for a future research program on defaults, including potential additional moderators, and implications for policy-makers interested in the implementation and evaluation of defaults.

Lots of examples of behavioral science-driven interventions to drive environmentally friendly behavior