Organizing and Experimenting

This week, we forged into more designerly territory. After a month of ramping up on principles of behavioral economics (which we acknowledge is massively insufficient to be experts on the subject), we have begun to prototype tools to help designers access experimentally-identified human tendencies.

As part of our divide-and-conquer plan, half of our group is looking at designing tools for the research and analysis stages, and the other half at the synthesis stage.

problem statements we're addressing

Forming these subgroups has allowed us to cover more ground in our search while increasing our focus. Our hope is that our investigations will inform each other and that we'll ultimately be able to integrate our findings.

Research & Analysis & Behavioral Tendencies

The research and analysis team has been looking at ways of helping designers know what to look for when they're in the field. We've looked at ways of linking identified biases and tendencies to existing frameworks and methods:

Can tendencies be tied into human factors and

create deeper understanding in these fields?

Can a field tool direct attention to factors in irrational

decision making? Could this be sufficient (do people need to

know they're seeing "status quo bias", or can they just

observe that everyone picks the default?)

This team has also been looking at creating decision archetypes to understand the factors that contribute to user biases. We have taken an initial stab at what these factors are and are testing this through a decision-log for users and a corresponding scoring of our list of identified tendencies. We hope that this information will not only provide us components of an archetypical decision, but also give an insight into how tendencies relate and concur.

Logs of user decisions to help us develop archetypes

Creating solutions that account for behavioral tendencies (aka synthesis)

The synthesis team has been looking at how to organized the biases and tendencies. To accelerate the testing time, they evaluated our list of tendencies to select 30 that give broad coverage, speak to high likelihood situations, and apply to the synthesis phase. With these in hand, the team is developing a tool that can communicate what the tendencies are and a navigation system to help designers know which tendencies to design for.

team working on refining the tendency list

We're excited to be making things and to start getting a better sense of some of the questions that have concerned us since we began this project (how much education is needed? how much additional work can this be?) Looking forward to posting what we learn!