Over two days, we shared GRID Impact’s behavioral research and design process with Inter-American Development Bank staff.
My role: As a member of the GRID Impact team, support the design and facilitation of two 2-day behavioral design workshops with Inter-American Development Bank, Invest team, staff.
Overview
If you were to illustrate “behavioral science”, what would you doodle?
Process
Introduction to behavioral science: Behaviors are hard! Humans are influenced by their context! How might we work with this knowledge to build products that work with what we know about human behavior?
Work-relevant behavioral diagnosis: Examining a case study relevant to their work, teams worked together to identify biases that may be interrupting a target audience’s desired behavior.
Design of behaviorally-informed solution: Building on their knowledge of the context, teams worked together to create concepts that make it easier for a given target audience to perform an intended action.
Prototype + presentation: Teams build initial prototypes that demonstrated their behaviorally-informed solution, and shared this concept with the group.
Reflections
How do you define a behavior: As a behavioral scientists, we know that the journey between and intention and an action can be long, and sometimes may never be realized. Dissecting this process and realizing that we are all influenced by our context is important.
Critique was key: At the behavioral diagnosis and design phases we, as facilitators, worked with each group to refine their concepts. This close probing and collaboration was an important step for groups to refine their ideas before they built out their prototypes.
Prototyping is fun: As a researcher or economist, how often can you manipulate physical materials? Building out concepts into physical prototypes was fun and watching groups demonstrate their prototypes was beautiful — groups developed a deep sense of ownership and pride of their concepts.