A Heuristic Approach to Use Behavioral Models to Design for Change: Refining and Validating the Persuasive and Motivational Design Method

PMD is a method to design for sustainable behavior change within organizations concerning the introduction of innovation. An earlier evaluation of PMD among users and a use case resulted in the need for refinements. In this paper, the authors describe the refined version of PMD and validate this in another case, in which a solution based on the interaction elements resulting from the PMD method was created for a company. Based on data acquired, they designed models of current and requested behavior. They selected the right interaction elements to facilitate the target audience in a change of behavior. After implementing the solution at the pre-fab concrete company, the authors observed a change in behavior among users, growing towards the behavior required to reach the set business objectives. The research allowed for the creation, evaluation, and validation of the PMD method itself in a real-life situation and showed that it is possible, at least in the use case in this research, to design for a required behavior change to increase adoption of innovations in organizations.