Dan Lockton

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

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.

Making the user more efficient: design for sustainable behaviour

User behaviour is a significant determinant of a products environmental impact; while engineering advances permit increased efficiency of product operation, the users decisions and habits ultimately have a major effect on the energy or other resources used by the product. There is thus a need to change users behaviour. A range of design techniques developed in diverse contexts suggest opportunities for engineers, designers and other stakeholders working in the field of sustainable innovation to affect users behaviour at the point of interaction with the product or system, in effect ‘making the user more efficient’. Approaches to changing users behaviour from a number of fields are reviewed and discussed, including: strategic design of affordances and behaviour‐shaping constraints to control or affect energy‐ or other resource‐using interactions; the use of different kinds of feedback and persuasive technology techniques to encourage or guide users to reduce their environmental impact; and context‐based systems which use feedback to adjust their behaviour to run at optimum efficiency and reduce the opportunity for user‐affected inefficiency. Example implementations in the sustainable engineering and ecodesign field are suggested and discussed.

Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context

Persuasive technology can be considered part of a wider field of `Design with Intent (DwI) - design intended to result in certain user behaviour. This paper gives a very brief review of approaches to DwI from different disciplines, and looks at how persuasive technology sits within this space.

Influencing interaction: development of the design with intent method

Persuasive Technology has the potential to influence user behavior for social benefit, e.g. to reduce environmental impact, but designers are lacking guidance choosing among design techniques for influencing interaction.n The Design with Intent Method, a suggestion tool addressing this problem, is introduced in this paper, and applied to the briefs of reducing unnecessary household lighting use, and improving the efficiency of printing, primarily to evaluate the methods usability and guide the direction of its development. The trial demonstrates that the DwI Method is quick to apply and leads to a range of relevant design concepts. With development, the DwI Method could be a useful tool for designers working on influencing user behavior.

Models of the user : designers' perspectives on influencing sustainable behaviour

Influencing more environmentally friendly and sustainable behaviour is a current focus of many projects, ranging from government social marketing campaigns, education and tax structures to designers work on interactive products, services and environments. There is a wide variety of techniques and methods used, intended to work via different sets of cognitive and environmental principles. These approaches make different assumptions about what people are like: how users will respond to behavioural interventions, and why, and in the process reveal some of the assumptions that designers and other stakeholders, such as clients commissioning a project, make about human nature. This paper discusses three simple models of user behaviour - the pinball, the shortcut and the thoughtful - which emerge from user experience designers statements about users while focused on designing for behaviour change. The models are characterised using systems terminology and the application of each model to design for sustainable behaviour is examined via a series of examples.