There’s a moment in almost every product career where you build something thoughtful, ship it carefully, and then watch people completely ignore it. Not because they don’t care – but because changing behaviour is genuinely, stubbornly hard.
That’s the problem Alex Waddell, behavioural and implementation science practitioner, researcher, and lecturer, has spent her career trying to solve. At our recent Product Anonymous session, she gave us a fast, hands-on tour of behavioural science and implementation science – and how product people can actually use both.
First: What even are these sciences?
Behavioural science is an interdisciplinary field drawing on cognitive science, economics, psychology, sociology, and neuroscience to study human behaviour and design strategies to change it.
Implementation science – which was born out of healthcare, where it takes an average of 17 years for research to reach the patient bedside – asks a different but related question: how do you get something that works into an organisation or system with speed, fidelity, and quality?
One is more micro. The other is meso and macro. But both ultimately boil down to the same question:
“Who needs to do what differently?“
Alex said this was the one thing she wanted us to take away. It’s deceptively simple – and it cuts through a lot of the vagueness that plagues change initiatives.
Step one: Get brutally specific about the behaviour
Before you can change a behaviour, you have to specify it. And this is harder than it sounds.
Alex asked the room: what behaviour am I doing right now? In about thirty seconds, the audience shouted out ten different answers – presenting, talking, staring, moving around the room. They were all correct. And that’s exactly the problem. If you can’t pin down the specific behaviour you’re targeting, you can’t measure it, and you can’t change it.
To get specific, Alex introduced the AACTT framework – a tool for mapping behaviour across five dimensions:
- Action – what can be observed and measured? If you can’t observe it, you can’t change it.
- Actor – who specifically is doing (or not doing) this behaviour?
- Context – the physical location, the social setting, and critically, the emotional context.
- Target – who is the behaviour being performed for or with?
- Time – when is it happening?
The emotional context piece generated a lot of discussion in the room. Participants reflected that we tend to design for the rational user, in a neutral state. Real behaviour happens in emotional contexts – rushed, distracted, anxious, under social pressure – and those contexts matter enormously.
Step two: Stop going straight to solutions
Once a behaviour is specified, the instinct is to jump to solutions. Alex made the room do exactly this – using a photo of a woman examining apples in a supermarket, she asked how we’d increase apple sales to her.
The ideas came fast: discount signs, taste testers, better labelling, smaller bags for easier carrying, large-font labels, recipe cards. All reasonable. All based on assumptions.
Then she asked: what assumptions are we making about this woman?
The list was long. That she has grandkids. That she has poor eyesight. That she can afford apples. That the apple is even for her. That she buys apples at all.
“We need to be really, really careful about assumptions. People are not like us. They don’t have your lived experience, they’re not from where you’re from, they’re dealing with other things.”
The exercise was a pointed reminder that we design for ourselves more than we realise – and that good research with and for people is non-negotiable before you reach for solutions.
The frameworks: COM-B and EAST
Alex introduced two frameworks worth keeping handy.
COM-B
Synthesised from 33 theories, models and frameworks by Susan Michie and colleagues at UCL, COM-B says that for any behaviour to happen, a person needs three things:
- Capability – psychological and physical ability to perform the action (knowledge, skills, stamina)
- Opportunity – external factors that make the behaviour possible (time, resources, location, cultural norms)
- Motivation – internal drivers, both reflective (conscious plans and beliefs) and automatic (impulses and habits)
One insight that landed particularly well: motivation includes beliefs about other people’s capabilities, not just your own. Alex drew on her PhD research into shared clinical decision-making – where some clinicians assumed certain patients didn’t want to be involved in decisions about their care, and so never offered it. A belief about someone else’s capability, cutting off behaviour before it started.
EAST
A more action-oriented framework from the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team, EAST gives you four levers:
- Easy – reduce friction, simplify messages, use defaults
- Attractive – make it stand out, use images, personalise, consider rewards
- Social – show what others do, use networks, make commitments visible
- Timely – prompt at the right moment, consider habits, plan for barriers
Alex walked through a famous cautionary example: a sign that read “Littering in our local area has increased” – intended to encourage people not to litter, but framed as a social norm that actually increased littering. When you tell people that something bad is happening a lot, you inadvertently signal that it’s normal.
The lesson: always test before you roll out. Behavioural interventions can backfire.
There are 93 behaviour change techniques
One of the most eye-opening moments of the evening was learning there are 93 identified behaviour change techniques – and that the instinct most organisations reach for first (training, education, an online module) is just one of them.
“People most often say, ‘let’s just do some training and they’ll [the people whose behaviour you are trying to change] will do it.’ They probably won’t. Or they might, and probably not everyone.”
The richness of options is the point. If your current approach isn’t working, there are dozens of other levers to try – and a growing body of evidence about when each one works.
The key takeaway
At the end of the session, Alex asked the room to spot how she’d used behavioural science in the workshop itself. The answers came quickly: prizes for participation (incentives), the active listening exercise at the start (priming for engagement), the Slido polls (social proof, visibility), the hands-on activities (behavioural practice) rather than passive listening.
It was a neat way to close – and a good reminder that these frameworks aren’t abstract. They’re design tools. Every product interaction, every onboarding flow, every survey you send is a behaviour change attempt. The question is whether you’re doing it intentionally or not.
Want to go deeper? Alex has compiled a resource guide with links to the frameworks mentioned – including the behaviour change technique taxonomy, the Theoretical Domains Framework, and the EAST playbook. Grab it, then find Alex at coformed.com.au to see how she helps teams turn good ideas into lasting change – and get in touch. Connect with her on LinkedIn too.
Thanks to our hosts
Thanks Zendesk for being our wonderful host for the evening!
Editor note: citations for works quoted or referenced here are included as direct links to the source material.