There’s no better way than direct research with people to understand why they do what they do, and how design teams can influence them to do differently. Yet, it’s rare to find research that directly accounts for psychological theories of behavior change. Using behavior change frameworks to structure research protocols and analyze data can help ensure that your research activities translate to effective, meaningful designs.
In this presentation, I’ll share the COM-B model of behavior change, which connects three broad categories of antecedents to behaviors: Capabilities, opportunities, and motivation. The COM-B framework considers both factors internal to the person as well as the environments in which they operate, so it lends itself well to many types of design. COM-B helps to reveal not just what people are doing, but why they do it, which then makes it possible to design interventions targeted at the true drivers of behavior.
Using examples, I’ll show how you can create research protocols and question sets that directly probe on capabilities, opportunities, and motivations as they relate to both desired and undesired behaviors. And then I’ll share examples of how the COM-B framework has been used to identify themes in data and connect them to recommendations for design teams. User experience research and psychology are natural bedfellows who spend too much time in artificial silos. The COM-B framework is an intuitive tool that anyone can learn to bring those fields back together again.
