Everybody who has ever tried to change an undesired behaviour knows how hard this can be. And when you realise changing your own behaviour is hard, it will not come as a surprise that changing other people’s behaviour can be even harder. At least when you are attempting to change yourself, you have some form of acceptance of the necessity of the change, and some initial motivation (even if that motivation may quickly dwindle when the change process gets frustrating).

When you are designing for other people’s problems, your target group often lacks awareness of what the outside world considers undesirable, and your audience more often than not lacks the motivation, capability, and opportunity for the actual behaviour change.

In this text, which started as a keynote lecture at the Behaviour Change symposium of the UTwente DesignLab, I address some of the issues that make it so difficult to design something that people actually want to use to solve their problems and, where possible, I suggest some viable strategies to deal with the most pressing challenges. You can read it all on Medium.