Designing for behavioural change in the healthcare industry

By taking into account psychological drivers, the health-care industry can create products and services that will help individuals improve the way they manage their health and well-being, writes Becky Slack in an article in the New Statesman (published in association with Philips).

” Does this mean the end user should be actively involved in designing the product or service? There are mixed views as to the effectiveness of this approach. Fail to give appropriate attention to the needs of the customer, and the product design can end in disaster, wasting a great deal of time, money and energy.

However, as much research has documented, people are not always conscious of the reasons for their actions, so they won’t necessarily recognise the external and internal factors that would influence design considerations – such as the “hyperbolic discounting”, in which people choose immediate rewards over distant ones.”