The SPECIFII® Behaviour Design Sprint is an iterative and engaging design process which enables practitioners, developers and others to reach conceptual design solutions in 5 days, through a distinct focus on not only usability and user experience but also on behaviour design. The structured 5-days design process involves end-users and discussion regarding potential ethical issues to help avoid these. To spice up the process and to ensure that participants establish a mutual understanding of behaviour design principles, the sprint is centred around a game, making it fun and engaging to address even the more tricky challenges. This workshop allows the participants to try the SPECIFII® behaviour design game.
In this workshop, we wish to introduce the behaviour design sprint and to explore the potential as well as limitations of this approach to behaviour design. As such, we invite workshop participants to join an engaging and interactive workshop experience, in which they will get a chance to learn about the theoretical and methodological underpinning of the behaviour design sprint, and to get first-hand experience with the game and part of the process it supports. With this workshop we not only hope to share the process with peers, we also look forward to an opportunity to discuss behaviour design processes with practitioners as well as academic experts.
The SPECIFII® behaviour design sprint is inspired by distinct challenges identified both in academia and in practice – that behaviour design to some degree comprises an invisible layer of a design process, and that it consequently can be a challenge to actively engage practitioners in discussing this as part of a solution. Through years of collaboration with a broad variety of industrial partners, Specifii founder AnneKathrine Kjaer Christensen identified challenges in the design process and a distinct challenge in aiming to apply behaviour design tools and drivers in practice. While established methods facilitate users in discussing and contributing to the design of visual interfaces and usability, it appeared that a mutual language for discussing behaviour design was missing. Initial steps towards addressing this distinct challenge lead to the development of the SPECIFII® Behaviour design game. The game is developed in interdisciplinary cooperation between the award-winning game company Serious Games Interactive and Specifii. The game is designed to introduce behaviour design tools in an engaging way and to facilitate participants in relating these concepts to their own practice and needs.
In order to extend the game into a framework for behaviour design, the SPECIFII® behaviour design sprint is developed in collaboration between founder of Specifii Anne-Kathrine Kjaer Christensen and Assistant Professor, Sandra Gram-Hansen. The behaviour design sprint extends the theoretical and methodological underpinning of the design process, with the game comprising a central part of the activity. Consequently, the behaviour design sprint aims to facilitate stakeholders in the design process, in discussing and developing design concepts which are not only user friendly and attractive but also impactful and efficient. 2.
Anne-Kathrine Kjaer Christensen is facilitating the workshop and founder of SPECIFII®, SPECIFII® behaviour design sprint and SPECIFII® behaviour design game. She is working with companies on improving the customer experience. She is also a speaker at UX, CX and behaviour design meetups and conferences. She graduated her Master degree in Persuasive Design (cum laude) from Aalborg University in 2008.
Sandra Burri Gram-Hansen is Assistant professor at the Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, and a member of E-Learning Lab, Center for User-driven innovation. She is a behaviour design expert with several years of experience in Persuasive technologies, Usability Engineering, and User Experience Design. Areas of expertise include management and communication systems, designs for energy conservation, climate communication and digital learning resources.
Denis Damyanov is a Digital design expert and Information Architect who graduated his Master degree from Aalborg University in 2019. During his time at AAU, he has specialized in persuasive technologies and persuasive system design.
While the Persuasive Technology field has produced a wide range of theoretical and
methodological approaches to designing behaviour changing technologies, it remains a
challenge that these methods often require the users to have a more in depth
understanding of persuasion in order to distinguish between persuasiveness and usability, and
between different approaches to behaviour design
Design sprints have become a popular approach to creating and testing design
concepts fast to solve problems
With the Behaviour Design Sprint and through this workshop, we aim to not only facilitate design processes in a playful and thought provoking manner, we also strive to facilitate workshop participants in establishing a mutual understanding of designing for behaviour change and a vocabulary which enable them engage in discussions concerning persuasion, without necessarily possessing a deeper theoretical of the concept. The sprint is based on a participatory approach to design and as such has a fundamental focus on incorporating different levels of expertise and recognizing the values of different stakeholder contributions.
The workshop for Persuasive 2020 is designed to cover one morning or afternoon of introduction to the structured behaviour design sprint process, and an engaging and fun opportunity to try the SPECIFII® behaviour design game in practice.
The process can be applied for different domains. In this workshop, we introduce a case. We define target behaviour, the person, the situation and other fundamental information to start building a behaviour strategy to reach the target behaviour. In the process participants define the target behaviour, define the problem, select drivers based on an expert analyses, brainstorm and sketch concepts exploiting the drivers to reach the target behaviour. This is a fast edition of the first 3 days in the SPECIFII® behaviour design sprint. The game includes more than 70 drivers from psychology, behavioural economics and rhetoric. The participants will create new ideas and apply a selection of the drivers in sketches as part of structured ideation process to end up with design concepts to reach the target behaviour. How the drivers are selected and the facilitator role will be topics for discussion.
The game and the application of drivers such as reward will strive to make the workshop fun and help the participants engage more in the process, encourage teamwork and address even the more tricky challenges.
On our part, we welcome the opportunity to apply the Behaviour Design Sprint as a springboard into a more general discussion about methodological possibilities and limitation when designing for behaviour change.