Behavioral Design

Behavioral design is the use of design to influence behavior. Most approaches are about enabling, motivating, and constraining behavior. The enabling approach is making a certain behavior easy to do. The motivating approach is encouraging a user to perform or not perform a certain action. The last, constraining behavior, is making an undesired behavior harder to do.

While design does always have an impact on human behavior, behavioral design is using design intentionally to get the specific outcome the designer has in mind. This field has grown enormously during the years and it focuses on affecting social, health, or environmental outcomes. As I am learning about information architecture in my other design class, I learn how in web design, the way information is organized is behavioral design too. The web designer has the power to facilitate easy and intuitive exploration on the site but also they have the power to make certain information hard to find. The way information is grouped in a website is using the motivating approach where the designer facilitates every click the user will make and not make based on the way the website is designed.