Designing salient and supportive systems for proximal behaviors.

Designers should create salient reminders and support mechanisms to help users stick to near-term plans by reducing participation costs and increasing belief in the ease of tasks.

About this paper

The author conducted two studies to understand how temporal distance affects planned behavior, finding that attitudes become more important for distant events while perceived behavior control influences intentions regardless of timing.

These findings advance the Theory of Planned Behavior and provide strategies for designers and event organizers to motivate behaviors over different timeframes.

Here are some methods used in this study:

Within-Subjects Experiment Between-Subjects Experiment

Which part of the paper did the design guideline come from?

“We hypothesized that people tend to have a higher intention to perform the behavior in the far future compared to near future (H5). Results of the paired-samples t-test show that the mean of willingness to attend the yoga class differs a month before the event (M=.80, SD=.41) and a few days before the event (M=.60, SD=.49) at the .01 level of significance (t=2.70, df=29, p<.01, 95% CI, for a mean difference .05 to .35, r=.62). We should point out that in the end, only 6 participants actually (...)” (‘Change in Intention Over Time’ section)

Suh, M. (Mia), & Hsieh, G. (2016). Designing for Future Behaviors. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Inspiration and scope

The authors focused on people's characteristics to encourage participation in proximal behavior or sticking to plans.

You design for someone trading convenience for sustainability by making a geogame to reach public transit goals. Both contexts prioritize encouraging behavior change. Goal setting, feedback, and incentives are effective, highlighting savings over time.

At the same time, both emphasize contextual feedback to motivate users. In your geogame, tracking environmental impact or giving badges for transit use maintains engagement, like academic feedback shows progress.

Leverage these similarities by designing the geogame with real-time feedback and incentives. Users receive ongoing motivation, leading to a more sustainable lifestyle through increased transit use.

Your input

  • What: geogame to help people reach their public transit use goals
  • Who: person trading off convenience for sustainability
  • Design stage: Ideation

Design ideas

Consider the following components for your design:

1

Integrate a dynamic leaderboard that displays users' environmental impact rankings within their community.

2

Include context-sensitive tips and route suggestions that adjust based on real-time transit data.

3

Develop a reward system featuring both short-term incentives, like daily badges for public transit use, and long-term rewards for consistent behavior.

Methods for you

Consider the following method(s) used in this paper for your design work:

Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB)

Applying the Theory of Planned Behavior can help generate a comprehensive set of factors influencing the target users' decision-making process when trading off convenience for sustainability. Designers should consider attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control and how they influence users' intentions.

Construal Level Theory (CLT)

Using Construal Level Theory can help in understanding how users perceive their decisions differently based on the temporal distance of the behavior, aiding in generating ideas that leverage high-level (abstract) and low-level (concrete) construals. Keep in mind users may focus on abstract reasons when thinking about distant future behaviors and on specific actions when the behaviors are near.