We know how hard it is to design social programs, whether you’re working in global health, the American foster care system, or the Fijian legal system. We’ve been in that 60-hour workweek where it feels like you’re simultaneously putting out fires and waiting for things to happen. Where you know something isn’t really clicking with your program, but you’re not sure why. And on top of numerous meetings and late nights, add funding issues to the mix. Yep, been there.
All that stress can lead to a feeling of frustration that your clients just aren’t following your great ideas and great program. And it’s easy to fall into a mindset of thinking that they don’t care, that they’re lazy, or that they don’t want the benefits that your program can provide. In my work as a behavioral designer, I’ve talked with health workers, social workers, and program managers around the world who share this feeling - that people don’t care about their health or livelihoods enough.
But we can all point to examples in our own lives when we haven’t done something that’s good for us. (I can point to thousands of examples in my own life if I go back far enough!) And there was probably a program designer or policy maker out there who would have been annoyed at us in the moment and thought that we didn’t care - that we didn’t care about our diet when we had a few extra cookies or that we didn’t care about our cholesterol when we didn’t say no to that side of bacon at breakfast last weekend.
So just like you can sometimes get frustrated at the clients (or beneficiaries/users) of your program, people who design programs for you can get annoyed at you for not being perfect.
That’s our starting point - that none of us think or act “perfectly”. And that’s exactly where behavioral economics, human-centered design, and data come in. Design to Amplify Behavior Change works you through an innovative methodology to help you design better programs from the onset and to improve existing programs.
