resources on diary studies

“The number of clean vehicles on our roads is increasing but we don’t notice, as it’s difficult to tell clean vehicles apart from more polluting ones. Green number plates make these vehicles, and our decision to drive in a more environmentally friendly way, more visible on roads. “We think making the changing social norm noticeable will help encourage more of us to swap our cars for cleaner options.”

This is the website for a PhD-level mini-course in behavioral public economics developed by Hunt Allcott and Dmitry Taubinsky. Through the lens of neoclassical economics, the role of government is to provide public goods, correct externalities, provide information, and address other market failures. In practice, however, some public policies are motivated by the concern that people do not act in their own best interest. For example, many countries ban drugs, tax cigarettes, alcohol, and sugary drinks, or subsidize retirement savings and energy-efficient appliances, all largely on the grounds that consumers would be better off consuming more or less than they do. Standard approaches to policy analysis rely on revealed preference assumptions to measure an agent’s welfare. Under these assumptions, the direct effect of any policy that changes choices is to reduce consumer welfare. However, empirical evidence from behavioral economics in a variety of domains suggests that people sometimes do make systematic mistakes. The field of behavioral public economics extends the theoretical and empirical tools of public economics to incorporate the possibility of consumer mistakes into questions about policy evaluation and design. This is a PhD-level mini-course in behavioral public economics. In this course, we’ll consider questions like the following: How can we do welfare analysis if choice does not necessarily identify utility? How do we empirically measure consumer biases? How do we set socially optimal policies in settings when consumers may not act in their own best interest? Nudges change behavior at low cost. Does that mean they are a good idea? What are the costs and benefits of tax complexity?

Great examples of how behavioral insights have been applied to behavior change in India

case studies

original “jobs to be done“ article from 2008

So how is it done? We’ve found that all jobs have the same eight steps. To use job mapping, we look for opportunities to help customers at every step:

a curated list of resources to help you on your journey into the UX of VR

Behavioral Design Teams: A Model for Integrating Behavioral Design in City Government - open source playbook

The doors will soon open at Saskatchewan's first children's hospital, but some psychiatrists say the building is rife with safety and suicide risks.

There are a few enormous benefits to using challenge maps. First, challenge maps help teams surface the key decision points that will have the greatest potential impact, both for users and the business. Challenge maps also help teams get aligned and on the same page about the most impactful next step. Finally, and maybe most importantly, challenge maps help teams see where their thinking has been too limited, inspire fresh thinking, and unlock innovation.

In this randomized clinical trial of 602 overweight and obese adults from 40 states across the United States, gamification interventions with support, collaboration, and competition significantly increased physical activity compared with the control group during the 24-week intervention. The competition arm had the greatest increase in physical activity from baseline during the intervention; during the 12-week follow-up, physical activity was lower in all arms, but remained significantly greater in the competition arm than in the control arm.

1. Nudges do not respect freedom. 2. Nudges are based on excessive trust in government. 3. Nudges cannot achieve a whole lot.

If we want everyone to participate in public life, we must design and build an inclusive public realm that is accessible to all. Public life can’t just be available to the abled, young, or healthy. Everyone navigates the built environment differently, with abilities changing across a person's lifespan. The sizeable global population of people with physical, auditory, or visual disabilities, autism or neurodevelopmental and/or intellectual disabilities, or neuro-cognitive disorders will face greater challenges if we don’t begin to more widely apply universal design principles.

The small changes are often the ones that make a difference. Our guide presents effective, light-touch strategies to help your students get to and through college.

The Humanitarian Innovation Guide is a growing online resource to help individuals and organisations find their starting point and navigate the humanitarian innovation journey.

To do so, we drew on a theoretical framework which highlights that defaults operate through three channels: first, defaults work because they reflect an implicit endorsement from the choice architect—your company’s HR department, your city’s policy office, your credit card company, your child’s school. Second, defaults work because staying with the defaulted choice is easier than switching away from it. Third, defaults work because they endow decision makers with an option, meaning they’re less likely to want to give it up, now that it’s theirs. As a result, we hypothesized that default designs that trigger more of these channels (also called the three Es: endorsement, ease, and endowment) would be more effective. In our analysis, we find partial support for this idea. That is, we find that studies that were designed to trigger endorsement (defaults that are seen as conveying what the choice architect thinks the decision maker should do) or endowment (defaults that are seen as reflecting the status quo) were more likely to be effective. In addition, we find that defaults in consumer domains tend to be more effective, and that defaults in pro-environmental domains (such as green energy defaults) tend to be less effective.

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A free online course on behavioural insights for public policy from the Behavioral Economics Team of the Australian government

A principle element in good graphic design comes down to font pairings. Inside, we explain the science of font pairings and how to use them to make your design in Canva look professional and sleek.

4 types of nudges/sludges and characters to represent them

Summary: Exposure to a stimulus influences behavior in subsequent, possibly unrelated tasks. This is called priming; priming effects abound in usability and web design.

In other words, it’s not a question of consumer choices being made that are bad, but of whether consumer choice exists. So when we ask why we ‘choose (or not)' highly energy efficient products, maybe we should ask instead if we're actually ‘picking (or not)' super energy efficient products. Picking vs. choosing. This is not a question of semantics. Far from it.

While co-design with users has evolved as a promising approach to service innovation, it remains unclear how it can be used in public service contexts. This article addresses this knowledge gap by applying a co-design framework during the ideation stage of six public service design projects. The findings provide insights into (a) recruiting and sensitizing suitable service users, (b) conditions enabling users to co-design ideas, and (c) requirements for implementation of user-driven ideas. The article contributes an approach that shifts public service design away from an expert-driven process towards enabling users as active and equal idea contributors.

This idea, that five to eight users will reveal 85% of all usability problems, is an old myth. It’s not true. It’s never been true.

BETA hosted Australia’s first ever Form-a-Palooza on 28 June 2019. It was a one-day festival of forms, designed to share the latest in form design with public servants from across the Australian Government. Forms are the most common interaction between people and the government, and there are thousands of them—most still in paper. Improving forms is a simple but important way to improve service delivery and increase public satisfaction with government. Over 200 participants from 38 agencies came along to Form-a-Palooza to learn new techniques and put them into practice. We also launched a brand new framework to guide the development of good forms—the WISER framework. It’s based on the latest research, as well as our own experience working with government agencies on forms, letters and communication.