The Design with Intent toolkit is a guide to help you design sys­tems to influ­ence a user’s behav­iour. The author, Dan Lock­ton, has sub­ti­tled the toolkit 101 Pat­terns for Influ­enc­ing Behav­iour Through Design.

Cat­e­gorised into the fol­low­ing eight ‘lenses’ (ways to look at design and behav­iour) the toolkit proves to be a fan­tas­tic resource for help­ing you per­suade through design.

  • Archi­tec­tural (e.g. Seg­men­ta­tion and Spac­ing: Can you divide your sys­tem up into parts, so peo­ple only use one bit at a time?)
  • Error­proof­ing (pre­vi­ously) (e.g. Choice Edit­ing: Can you edit the choices pre­sented to users so only the ones ou want them to have are available?)
  • Inter­ac­tion (e.g. Par­tial Com­ple­tion: Can you show that the first stage of a process has been com­pleted already, to give users con­fi­dence to do the next?)
  • Ludic (e.g. Unpre­dictable Rre­in­force­ment: What hap­pens if you give rewards or feed­back on an unpre­dictable sched­ule, so users keep play­ing or interacting?)
  • Per­cep­tual (e.g. Fake Affor­dances: Is there any­thing to be gained from mak­ing some­thing look like it works one way, while actu­ally doing some­thing else (or noth­ing at all)?)
  • Cog­ni­tive (e.g. Social Proof: Can you show peo­ple what other users like them are doing in this sit­u­a­tion, and which choices are most popular?)
  • Machi­avel­lian (e.g. Anchor­ing: Can you affect users’ expec­ta­tions or assump­tions by con­trol­ling the ref­er­ence points they have?)
  • Secu­rity (e.g. Peer­veil­lance: What hap­pens if users know (or believe) that what they’re doing is vis­i­ble to their peers also using the system?)

From the intro­duc­tion to v0.9 of the toolkit:

You have a prod­uct, ser­vice or environment—a sys­tem—where users’ behav­iour is impor­tant to it work­ing prop­erly (safely, efficiently), so ide­ally you’d like peo­ple to use it in a cer­tain way.

Or maybe you have a sys­tem where it would be desir­able to alter the way that peo­ple use it, to improve things for users, the peo­ple around them, or soci­ety as a whole.

How can you mod­ify the design, or redesign the sys­tem, to achieve this: to influence, or change users’ behaviour?