COM-B + Experience Mapping: A Design Thinking Love Story
by Jen Briselli & Amy Bucher, PhD
For years, design has flirted with behavioral science to enrich and inform the process of creating more intuitive and meaningful experiences. From research methods infused with behavioral psychology to uncover motivational barriers, to design strategy frameworks that help us tie evidence based psychological dynamics to principles that guide the development of new products, services, and experiences, these two domains have danced together for years.
In recent years, however, both experience strategy and behavior change design have matured to the point where each now employs a robust toolkit of effective methods and best practices unto itself. Experience strategy applies methods like service blueprinting, experience mapping, and value proposition design to inform new products and services, while behavior change design applies evidence based frameworks to identify root causes of behavior and the attendant motivators and barriers that inform the design and implementation of behavioral interventions. As Dr. Rosie Webster, Ph.D., Lead User Researcher in Behavioral Science for Babylon, notes, “traditional user research has an excellent process for identifying problems, and then designers are skilled in creating solutions. However, changing behavior is complex, and the solution which might make common sense, may not actually be effective in driving change.” She cites the example of educating people on the risks associated with their health behaviors — a commonsense approach that evidence suggests does not have the desired effects.
In their maturity, the fields of experience strategy and behavior change design are moving past the casual flirtations of two complementary knowledge domains into a full fledged partnership: when we marry the design of behavioral interventions and the design of experiences, there’s a special power in combining the myriad frameworks from both domains. This becomes especially effective when the goal is not just to identify pain points in an existing experience journey or illustrate an ideal future one — but to make actionable recommendations that will help clients make the leap from actual to ideal.
Experience Journey Maps
Let’s talk about the value of a good experience map. This type of artifact has become a mainstay of experience strategy & service design, and can take many forms. They can be user-centered, business-centered, task-centered, or a hybrid of all three. They can visualize the current state, a future ideal state, or both. They can highlight affective insights related to thoughts, emotions, informational needs, or operational insights related to employee workflows, technology infrastructure, and data analysis. They can highlight pain points and high value opportunities. These maps can serve as intermediary thinking tools that support the design process as it unfolds, or as polished final deliverables that represent the culmination of such efforts. They can be static snapshots in time, or interactive dashboards that reveal progressive levels of detail for different viewing audiences.
Jim Kalbach, head of Customer Experience at MURAL and author of Mapping Experiences and The Jobs to Be Done Playbook explains, “by visualizing an experience chronologically and with multiple facets of information to compare at once, maps show cause and effect in one place. This level of connection and insight is hard to replicate with written reports, presentations, and in conversations. As a result, maps point to improvement of both the individual’s experience and the organizational processes needed to provide an experience. In short, maps help teams find opportunities the may have otherwise overlooked.”
Suffice to say, experience maps can do a lot. A thoughtfully planned, robustly researched, and collaboratively constructed experience map can help organizations:
- Develop empathy for customers, consumers, employees and others through affective & cognitive insights related to emotional states & decision making throughout an experience; this empathy in turn ensures solutions deliver value by solving real, unmet needs
- Identify strengths and high points in the experience that can be celebrated, highlighted, and scaled or extended as much as possible
- Identify frustrations and low points in the experience that can be mitigated or preempted wherever possible
- Understand the context surrounding customer experiences, including where an organization has leverage to control, influence, or inform the experience, and where it simply must design around the experience as it exists but cannot control
- Build internal consensus around an ideal future experience and the touch points, workflows, and assets that are required to deliver it, and to socialize via narrative means for alignment around this shared vision
- Plot a route or roadmap to evolve from the current state to ideal future state and inform potential changes in course along the way during implementation
Most experience journey maps articulate an experience across rows representing customer actions and the other mediating actors, objects, and information that influence the experience. Within the swim lanes representing key actor groups, the these types of maps will often include target behaviors that actors either do or should perform. Typically, in moving from a current to a future state, some of those behaviors will need to change, whether in quality, frequency, intensity, or duration.
This is where behavior science adds value. Dr. Webster explains, “The behavioral science process, by nature, starts with the problem. It helps designers to focus on exactly what they’re trying to change, and then understanding that deeply, before thinking about solutions.” Applying behavior science allows the design team not just to note the gap between current and future state, but to identify what tactics might be most effective to bridge it.
The COM-B Model of Behavior Change
A central tenet of the COM-B model is that people will only perform a behavior when they have the capability, opportunity, and motivation to do so. The researchers who formulated the COM-B approach reviewed over 1200 published studies that identified the precursors to behavior change, and found that the great majority of the barriers to successful behavior change could be classified as either capability, opportunity, or motivation.
Capability refers to a person’s ability to perform a behavior. It can be considered in terms of both physical capability, or the bodily ability to do something, and psychological capability, or having the knowledge, attentional control, or self-regulatory ability to do something.
Opportunity includes external factors that might influence a person to perform a behavior. Physical opportunity is the built environment in which the behavior takes place. Social opportunity, on the other hand, considers the ways in which other people might influence a behavior through norms or directly facilitating or inhibiting the behavior.
Finally, motivation looks at whether and how people’s goals and mental models support their doing a behavior. Automatic motivation considers people’s implicit understanding of a behavior’s role in their repertoire. Is this behavior appropriate for them to perform? Will it bring about desired outcomes? Reflective motivation refers to people’s goal priorities, and is well-aligned to how the word “motivation” is used colloquially. People must not only value a behavior but value it relatively enough for it to take precedence over other behavioral options.
Capability, opportunity, and motivation are interrelated and can influence each other. For example, when people are more skilled or practiced at a behavior (capability), they are more likely to consider it as an option and to prioritize it against other options (motivation). Similarly, if a behavior is easier to perform within a certain context (opportunity), it becomes a more attractive option (motivation). Some barriers seem like they could be easily placed in more than one category; usually when this happens, it is because of how capability, opportunity, and motivation influence each other. Consider whether or not a person’s friends smoke in the context of tobacco cessation. The friend behavior creates a social opportunity barrier (peer pressure, norms around smoking) but also a motivational barrier (mental model that smoking is acceptable, desire to fit in).
The implication of COM-B is that a product or experience can make a target behavior more likely if it helps people overcome or avoid capability, opportunity, and motivation barriers. Therefore, a designer needs to do at least three things in order to get people to take a particular action.
The first is to clearly identify the target behavior or behaviors. As one of the first steps in any design process, the team should identify the critical actions that users must take in order to achieve desired results. Dr. Webster notes, “One of the challenges in behavioral design often tends to be right at the beginning, in defining the behavior to change. Often the business wants to achieve broad goals (e.g. “get people to be healthier”), which aren’t conducive to designing something impactful. If the behavior isn’t well defined at this step, it makes every other step (e.g. conducting research, identifying barriers, evaluating impact) much more difficult.” This is because all of the subsequent research and solution generation will anchor around these target behaviors. For most projects, the target behavior list is fairly brief (under 10 behaviors) and highly specific — as Irrational Labs says, “uncomfortably specific.” “Checking smoke alarm batteries every six months” is an excellent target behavior because it is specific and measurable; “engaging in fire safety” leaves far more room for error.
The second thing a designer needs to do is to identify the barriers and opportunities for the target behaviors. As Dr. Webster notes, “when we take the time to systematically and deeply understand the barriers, we may discover more opportunities.” What’s causing the target behaviors to occur, or to occur more often or more successfully? These are facilitators which may be incorporated into the design. What’s making the behaviors occur less often or stopping them entirely? These are barriers that the design must overcome or avoid.
As barriers are identified, they can be added to a draft journey map alongside the key behaviors they impact. Kalbach points out that “using a diagram to first identify barriers and then find solutions to overcome them removes unnecessary friction for customers. This is ultimately a source of growth. Aligning the customer needs and business goals is core to becoming more human centered.”
The third thing a designer must do to increase target behaviors is to include solutions that mitigate barriers and amplify facilitators. Identifying a problem isn’t particularly helpful if there’s no solution proposed to fix it. Part of the COM-B model helps narrow down the universe of possible solution sets by aligning barrier types against intervention functions. Similarly to how the COM-B model includes a taxonomy of barrier types, it also includes a taxonomy of solution types. Importantly, those solution types have been cross-referenced to barrier types based on where they have been most successful in bringing about the desired target behaviors. “Matching intervention functions to COM-B barriers gives a clear “menu” to start ideation from,” explains Dr. Webster. “Designers can then use their skills to bring these functions/techniques to life, confident that they’re creating something with the maximum chance of effectiveness.”
The COM-B approach can help identify design priorities within an experience map. For each target behavior identified, any COM-B barrier types can be labeled and described. Then, the intervention functions most appropriate for those barriers can be listed. The objective will be for design teams to take those intervention functions and translate them to specific designs that help bridge the gap between current and ideal state.
What Does It Look Like In Practice?
So what does layering COM-B over an experience journey map look like in practice? Mad*Pow colleagues Paul Kahn and Olga Elizarova described an early approach to this marriage in 2017.
Since then, through our own work collaborating on behavior change focused service design challenges and exploring the integration of these methods, we’ve approached the challenge in a variety of ways to produce detailed, thoughtful artifacts that help our clients prioritize their roadmaps to support user behavior change and bring about desired outcomes.
For example, Exact Sciences engaged Mad*Pow to help improve patient experience and completion for its at-home screening test for colorectal cancer, Cologuard®. Mad*Pow married behavior change, experience strategy, and service design to meet the need. Through robust research, clear guiding principles, and easy-to-follow experience directives, the collaboration resulted in the development of a playbook full of evidence based recommendations designed specifically to overcome the particular engagement barriers observed. Exact Sciences is implementing these initiatives and observing measurable increases in Cologuard completion rates as a result. All of this work was founded on Mad*Pow’s expertise in experience research, strategy, and service design with expert application of the COM-B behavior change framework and best practices in value-driven, human-centered design.
In another example, Mad*Pow worked with the National Fire Protection Association on an effort to increase fire prevention behaviors among two key audience segments: contractors who install safety infrastructure including electrical, alarms, and sprinkler systems, and the rural elderly, who are particularly vulnerable to injury in case of fire and hardest to reach via conventional messaging campaigns. Mapping the experiences of each audience segment helped identify the highest impact opportunities for NFPA outreach and intervention to educate and motivate these audiences, and integrating the COM-B behavior change framework provided evidence-based recommendations to ensure NFPA’s engagement tactics are effective.
Ideally, your experience journey map rests on a solid foundation of primary research. COM-B can be directly incorporated into experience research as early as the ideation phase. All it takes is some idea of the target behaviors that the design team wants to understand and influence. (The list does not need to be final — the research itself will help to eliminate some target behaviors from consideration and prioritize others.) Using the COM-B model from the earliest stages of an experience mapping project onward will make it relatively easy to leverage its power in the final product.
In Closing
As organizations seek to leverage the insights of behavior science to design better products, services, and experiences, the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and cross skill development becomes more significant than ever. As Kalbach notes, “The map itself serves as a catalyst for conversations and sense making across members of a team. It’s not about the map (the noun) but about the mapping (the verb) and how you facilitate conversations to make insight actionable.” The methods and frameworks that designers, strategists, and behavior scientists bring to their respective practices grow more robust by the day, but true innovation will rely on these experts expanding their toolkits to mix, match, and combine the core components of each others’ craft.
