Designing effective and successful products for human beings is a complex task. We are all different. And for digital designers, there has to be a deep understanding of why a person, or a group of people behave in the way that they do, what motivates, what they like, what they dislike, and how they interact with their environment. And as more companies are placing importance on the personalization of user interaction and user experience, the need to understand people on a deeper level becomes more imminent. The User Experience space encompasses a wide and diverse range of professions and tasks, from visual and interaction designers, developer, and product professionals. However, with companies shifting towards creating more personalised user experiences, the future points towards a UX field with a deeper and better understanding of human behaviour applied to design.

Behavioural psychology provides a guide into better understanding human behaviour and studies how motivation, perception, and other cognitive processes occur in a person. This provides better information to create thoughtful and meaningful designs. No two people are motivated in the same way, and it is important to know how and why these motivations happen; as well as their thoughts, needs, and blockers; and how all this can affect the way in which a person will interact with a product or service. It also gives insight into processes implicated in rewards and learning from a neurological level to better understand how features like notifications can work as cues that reinforce user routines and increase engagement.

Designers can then take this information and apply it to UX Design. Behavioural Designers combine Psychology, Design, Technology, and various creative methods to find out why people behave in the way that they behave and why they do the things they do. Understanding this allows them to better figure out how to change behaviours. Behavioural design goes beyond understanding what drives a user and aims to define their motivations and what rewards or validation they are seeking to create designs that cater or alter this.

Behavioural design is a human-centric framework that uses a set of ideas to explain and predict how and why people behave the way they do. This framework is rooted in behavioural experiments and observations that merge areas of neuropsychology and behavioural economics. However, behavioural design does not aim to violate or threaten to change people’s behaviour. It provides ways that have been proven and tested that are likely to increase the changes of a certain behaviour to change.

There are various techniques and ways that Behavioural Design uses to change user behaviour, from persuasion techniques to reinforcement, or methods to discourage behaviour. 

• Reward learning, for example, focuses on how a habit can be induced by controlling the consequences of an action
• Cues are triggers or prompts for people to perform a certain action and reinforce routines. 
• Optimal Challenge is based on the notion that at a given moment and for each person there is an optimal amount of challenge or push that will cause a person to perform an action. Push too much and it will lead to burnout. Push too little and no change will happen. The key is finding the sweet spot to generate an optimal change in behaviour. 
• Ambient Communication requires an understanding of the brain processes non-verbal information and uses that in order to make the user understand the environment of a product, web, or application using features like fonts, icons, sizes, shapes, etc
• Cognitive load balance studies the ability humans have to juggle multiple tasks and to remember various chunks of information. The idea is to fragment the simultaneous interaction to limit the mental load of a user and increase their ability to interact with the product. 

Why is UX Design important?

Shifting to a user-centric design changes the scope of how users interact with products and services. An app or a website will stop being a one-size-fits-all and will now become adaptable to people’s various needs, interests, thoughts, motivations, and contexts. Therefore, the need to have a better understanding of human behaviour is more important.

Savant is informed by market research and has a specialised Digital Design team with extensive experience and expertise in UX/UI talent solutions. If you are looking to build or expand your Design function, we can support you with the best talent in the industry with experts and market leading onboarding advice and consultation. To find out more about how we can assist you, please reach out to us at technology@savantrecruitment.com.