If you develop solutions for your customers or employees, you need to know what that solution is addressing and what it is trying to change.
This is where the Behavior Change Techniques Taxonomy (Michie and colleagues) can help you and your organization think through what “ingredients” or components need to be included in a solution.
As a reminder, there are 93 techniques including categories such as:
-Goals and Planning -Feedback and Monitoring -Social Support -Shaping Knowledge -Comparison of Behavior -Associations -Reward and Threat -Identity -Self-Belief
You also need to know how to translate a BCT into a feature..for example:
You find that Goal Setting (a behavior change technique) is a component you want to include.
How do you design for that goal-setting scenario?
You could take a few different routes: 1. You decide the goal (you may take away autonomy here) 2. You let the person decide the goal (they may not know how to choose a goal) 3.
You combine and give some guidance as well as some freedom
Which is best? You will know this by the insights you got doing your behavioral analysis, which would have included the things we need to change and our behaviors including context.
We are working on translating BCT's at the moment for a client project, so wanted to remind you all of how powerful they can be.
Teams need to get comfortable using the BCTs to design solutions that are science-backed and evidence-based.