Design for Behavioral Change

The aim of this course was to design and support a change in behavior by applying many behavior techniques and theories. With my group, we decided to focus on the topic of financial mismanagement and design to support young adults in better managing their budget. Young adults often move out of their parents’ homes without having ever been solely responsible for their own personal finance. Therefore we designed an educative financial goal-setting application. With this application, we aimed to support young adults in making and keeping their budgets. Educational tips and tricks are prompted in the application to train a user to behave more fiscally responsible. It also tries to persuade the user to believe the benefits of the intended behavior through the tracking of expenses and monthly overviews of all categories. In the design especially the goal-setting theory was used and more were tried to incorporate. The first design of the mobile application was developed and is ready for a first validation study to see which elements work and which do not. There are ethical considerations, such as the use of financial data, which need to be taken into account when implementing such a concept.

In this elective, I learned to thoroughly link theories, such as the goal-setting theory to a specific design case. I also think the workshop about the com-b analysis was a very useful method to extract valid evaluation goals for future designs. With that, I now feel confident to pinpoint key elements in my design which help to develop a design to change behavior. By applying theories to a design case and by testing evaluation goals I feel I can more efficiently evaluate and thus design for behavior change.