There was a great feature published on the Design Council website recently about the potential for behavioural design to join up research and practice and to be used to have real impact on a range of social issues.
It recognised that many of the issues faced are governed by human behaviour. Therefore understanding that behaviour better must be key to finding solutions. In particular linking behavioural understanding with design thinking could provide new insights and new ideas.
We recommend you have a read...http://bit.ly/1lI9Gg7
We identified a number of key messages for our work. The first being the importance of understanding real people's needs. The critical factor being in understanding the range of needs of our users. To provide structure in a design process, the temptation is to simplify this and use crude stereotypes or user groups. These have their place but are often not rich enough to see the variety and can therefore design out the needs of lots of people.
The other key point for us is in understanding how people make decisions. For lots of our work, in particular around wayfinding and navigation, it is critical that we understand the different ways in which people make decisions at points in their journey. Without this understanding how we can hope to influence them with information, signage, guidance, etc.Labels: behaviour, design council, Design thinking, human behaviour, human factors, wayfinding