Unit 4: Design and Potential Interventions

When we start downselecting and choosing what interventions to do, it’s a good idea to get our stakeholders in the room. Because rather like a behavioral statement, there is no right or wrong intervention selection; we’re simply trying to choose the portfolio of interventions to evaluate that are most likely to accomplish the business goals. For example, the CEO might only want to try high impact interventions, even if they are low confidence or hard to change. Or the CMO might forbid any interventions that change the brand messaging, because it has already been locked for the next year.

It is really our job to provide the menu of potential options, supported by the evidence of impact, confidence, and likelihood to change from the underlying pressures. From this, our stakeholders will tell you what types of interventions the business has appetite for and if there are any business concerns.

Led by the designer, we can also do some clustering to help downselect. Clustering looks at the proposed interventions and finds where they can potentially be deployed together. For example, several suggestions might affect the label, so we can use them together to increase the power of our intervention. Remember, this isn’t academic science; ultimately, we care about changing behavior, not proving theory, so we don’t have to isolate pressures before evaluation.

Downselecting is a subjective process and that’s perfectly fine; every intervention should already be based on a clearly-observed pressure, so none of them are “bad” options. We should avoid obvious sources of bias (like labelling who suggested each intervention or using group norm-influenced methods like dot voting).

You don’t need to worry about how you can do the pilot at this stage. Those operational considerations belong in the next stage – evaluation.