Designing for behavioral change
How might we support users trying to build a new habit?
UX Research, Behavioral Science and UX
2024
Process at a glance
The Problem
People with sedentary routines, such as students and desk-based workers, often suffer from chronic neck and back pain due to long hours of sitting. Despite experiencing pain and knowing the potential causes, many still struggle to build healthier movement habits.
Behavioral Science Approach
We approached the problem through the lens of behavioral science. Using decision-making and habit formation models, we explored why people stayed sedentary and what kind of interventions might help change the behavior.
The Outcome
Leveraging behavioral science principles and UX practices, we designed a system that encourages sustained, healthier movement habits through gamification.
Stage 1 - Understanding the problem
Why are so many people experiencing neck and back pain during work and study routines?
To understand the behavioral patterns behind prolonged sitting, we began with a literature review to help us explore physical, psychological, and social factors contributing to sedentary lifestyle habits. We started by mapping out what we thought we knew and explored what we didn't know about the behaviors and motivations behind neck and back pain experienced in the workplace.
Guiding our research plan using behavioral science
The decision-making framework based on Herbert Simon's bounded rationality, models our understanding how people make decisions based on their limited cognitive abilities. This model helped us understand the mental capacity of individuals as well as the elements of the environment that contribute to decision-making. We used the model as a guide to help inform our research plan and interview script.
Of our 8 participants, I interviewed 2 users about their daily habits, experiences with posture, and motivations to move at their workplace. Our interviews were then transcribed and individually coded based on the decision-making model. This approach helped us bridge established behavioral principles with real-world user insights.
Stage 2 - Analysis & Synthesis
What did we uncover about habits, pain, and motivation?
We leveraged behavioral science principles to guide our analysis, using decision-making levers and behavioral models to shape our approach.
We started with a preliminary framework based on the elements of decision-making. We first coded our transcribed interviews under these themes. Then in a second round of analysis, we were able to identify patterns within our data and code for these new themes. This process ensured that our findings stayed rooted in behavioral science.
Some key insights
This process helped us identify 5 emerging themes and a total of 12 insights. We refined these themes in a second round of analysis and supported our insights with frequency counts and representative user quotes. The following are some of our key findings:
What do people go through when trying to form a new habit?
To bring our insights to life, we created a user journey map that captured the behavioral patterns, motivations, pain points, and barriers revealed through our research. These tools helped us translate our findings into actionable opportunities for design.
Behavioral archetypes
In order to help prepare for our design strategy, we developed 2 behavioral archetypes to help us empathize with specific types of users through each step of the journey.
By mapping user barriers through a behavioral lens, we uncovered key moments of friction in the habit-building process. These moments informed our strategic direction, guiding us toward solutions that make use of decision-making levers to support a behavior change.
Stage 3 - Design strategy
Where in the user journey can design have the greatest impact?
We evaluated each stage of the user journey, mapping out opportunity areas, key stakeholders, relevant systems, and behavioral decision-making levers. Within each stage of the journey, we brainstormed different ideas that could help support long-term behavioral change for the users.
After reviewing all of the ideas, we decided on moving forward with the "Early Adoption" stage, since we believed that this stage would have the greatest impact on establishing a new behavior while costing the least amount of effort to implement.
This stage presented the highest potential for impact vs least amount of effort to implement, making it an ideal point for a behavior-based intervention. By reducing barriers and guiding early action, we could build early momentum and encourage long-term habit formation.
This led us to our central question guiding our design approach: How might we support users building healthy moving habits into their workflow?
How might we support users building healthy moving habits into their workflow?
Focusing on the early adoption stage, we brainstormed ways to help users build movement habits into their workday.
We applied decison-making levers like cues, goal alignment, and habit formation to generate ideas. We also considered external factors like social influencers to help boost motivation.
Our top concept was a system that aims to gamify taking breaks with the goal of making moving during the workday feel easy, feel rewarding, and feel naturally integrated into users’ daily workflow. With this in mind, we sketched a few ideas on how these features might be implemented.
Initial feature exploration
Stage 4 - Prototyping
Pilot design
We created a lo-fi prototype to test key features, encouraging movement breaks. This prototype helped us visualize user interactions and gather valuable feedback. We designed features that targeted specific decision-making levers to help encourage building the new habit.
Designing features using decision-making levers
Home Dashboard
Central hub where users can view their progress
Self-image
Customizable Profiles
Users can view their progress, achievements, and virtual avatars
Self-image
Break Notifications
Light cues to help remind users of new habit
Cues
Achievements System
Rewards for achieving different milestones
Goals
Leaderboard
Users can compete against each other and see other people's progress
Social factors
Rewards System
Users can unlock real-world and digital incentives for their consistent progress
Motivation
I focused on prototyping the user profiles, rewards system, and leaderboard features, applying behavioral science principles like cues and habit formation.
The features I focused on
User profiles
This profile card will open when the user clicks on their own avatar. The user can get a deeper view of their profile, achievements, and movement streaks. Seeing how far they've come on their journey can help motivate users to stay on track.
Rewards and Customization
Users can use points they earn from being consistent with the app to purchase in-game items to customize their avatars. They can also convert their points into redeemable rewards like gift cards, in partnership with other businesses.
Leaderboards
The leaderboard leverages a user's social network to help keep them motivated while staying on track. Leaderboards show the current "rank" users are in. Other users in the same rank compete against each other to move to the next league.
Our next steps…
We gathered feedback from other UX designers to critique our solution. The biggest concern was that our solution may receive pushback from the workplace, since employees may be taking breaks too often during their work. For any future steps, I would want to make this the top priority.
In our next step, I would have liked to explore new ways we can better seamlessly integrate regular moving habits into people's work and study routines.
Reflection
Takeaways
In this project, we approached a UX problem under the lens of a behavioral science problem. By grounding our research and design process in behavioral science, I was able to make sense of a complex, ambiguous problem and shape a solution with real potential to improve people’s movement habits. This project helped give me the experience of taking knowledge and evidence from an established field and applying it to UX design. I feel that this experience will be a great strength going forward.
Behavioral science & UX
Bringing behavioral science into UX helped us move beyond surface-level observations and uncover deeper motivations behind user actions. It gave us a structured lens to interpret our research, frame problems more clearly, and guide our design decisions toward real, behavior-based change.
I learned that behavioral science doesn’t just complement UX, but strengthens it by turning intuition into evidence-backed design strategy.
Bridging gaps between disciplines
Starting with the preliminary framework gave our team a clear structure for organizing our initial findings and interpreting them through a behavioral lens. It created a direct bridge between real-world behavioral models and our research data, helping us extract insights that were both grounded in evidence and aligned with proven behavioral principles.
This approach ensured that our analysis stayed focused, practical, and applicable by balancing our own synthesis with guidance from an established science.
Adapting to different teams
At the start of the project, our team had different work styles, schedules, and visions which caused some trouble. I’m used to stepping into leadership roles when needed, but in this case, everyone had strong initiative, which I hadn’t experienced before.
Once we realized this, we set expectations early on. We found our rhythm, and learned how to play to each other’s strengths. This experience showed me how important it is set expectations early, be flexible, and communicate openly in new teams.