The picture book “Let’s Build a Bridge produced by the Design for Action team. The digital version is distributed free of charge on Kindle and Rakuten kobo.
Text by Reiko Imamura
Design for action is a design that supports individuals’ independent and spontaneous behavioral change. The book “ Nudge,” written by Professor Richard Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017, triggered a global boom, but Hitachi has been a pioneer in behavioral design research since 2015, led by our UX and UI designers.
What makes us unique is that we integrate behavioral science and design thinking. We understand the situation of each user from both quantitative and qualitative data, and design behavioral intervention measures that are appropriate for the characteristics of that person.
There is a lot of research going on in the field of healthcare, such as smoking cessation and dietary restrictions, but we also think that we can use the power of design to push people forward.
Hitachi developed tools and frameworks based on our own hypothesis and decided to conduct various experiments within the company. One of the examples is to make it a habit for employees to enter their work hours into the working hour management system every day. Some employees enter their information every day, while others do not.
The Behavioral Change Stage Model was used to solve this problem. People can’t suddenly change their behavior in a big way. This method moves up through the stages of behavioral change and eventually makes it a habit and maintains it.
The employees’ behaviors based on the data from the input system are analyzed and classified into five stages: “Indifferent,” “Interested,” “Motivated,” “Try to input,” and “Habitual” to daily input. Employees of each stage are interviewed to uncover the factors that inhibit them from moving up to the next stage, and behavioral intervention measures are implemented to remove them. There are various reasons why they do not enter; “busy,” “troublesome”, and “I have decided to do it every other week” are excuses, among others. To those employees, a message that takes into account cognitive bias (bias of human thinking and judgment) is sent.
For example, for those in the lower stages, it is possible to appeal to their loss aversion for someone close, by saying, “Your boss, Mr. ○○, spends this much time every month to follow up with you,” and for those in the higher stages, we can motivate them to enter information on a daily basis with a game-like UI such as stamp rallies or medals. While changing the content of the measures for each stage, and if we can eventually raise the level to the point where people realize that daily input has become a habit, then we will have succeeded. As a result of the experiment, more than half of the employees increased their input frequency.
The other experiment is to “increase the amount and balance of speech during meetings.” This aims to solve the situation where “one person keeps talking, and the others stay quiet,” which is common in fruitless meetings, with a real-time behavioral intervention measure.
First, the analysis of audio data and the interview survey revealed that the balance of speech among all participants is important in a productive meeting. We developed a support tool inspired by the computer game “Tetris” based on the following inhibiting factors: “There is no key person to act as a catalyst,” “I keep talking because I am afraid of silence,” and “I decide my own role and shut up.” We measure the amount of speech of the conference participants from the audio data from the microphones and represent it with blocks. When everyone speaks equally, the blocks disappear and the score goes up, and after 10 minutes per game we reset the blocks to keep creating opportunities for speech.
Behavioral intervention measures for this game include designating the person who spoke the most in the previous game as the key person, and encouraging them to solicit other members’ opinions, or visualizing the person who is not speaking and making them aware of it. For those who are not good at speaking by nature, even short speeches such as gestures are counted. In any case, efforts are made by all to create an environment conducive to dialogue. As a result, the difference in the speaking time among the participants of the meeting was reduced to less than half, eliminating the bias in the speech. We also see a tendency for the volume to be more than double, which may be contributing to the excitement of the meeting
An increasing number of clients are interested in the results of these experiments. For example, one local government is considering a project to encourage older reclusive people at home to go out and exercise lightly. There is also a possibility of incorporating behavioral design into issues such as improving employee productivity and knowledge sharing in other areas.
On the other hand, there are risks. Encouraging people to change their behavior may lead to controlling them, and some should feel challenged. This is why Hitachi has created and issued its own guidelines to ensure that behavioral design is done with an ethical perspective in mind.
We also produced a picture book “Let’s Build a Bridge,” in which animals in the forest work on a project to build a bridge over a river, and a clever hedgehog changes their awareness and behavior. Through the story, readers will hopefully understand what Hitachi thinks of design for action.
We will continue our further practice to accumulate knowledge to develop more patterns for effective intervention measures and make them more practical for various purposes.
