Most Important Skills For A Senior Behavioral Designer At Behavioral Design Firm
A senior behavioral designer's most crucial skill is "empathy for, and interest in other people," requiring the ability to understand why people act as they do, even on sensitive topics. This foundation is complemented by behavioral science knowledge, research skills (both qualitative and quantitative), human-centered design principles, and strong presentation abilities to effectively communicate project findings.
Empathy and Interpersonal Skills, Behavioral Science, Research Methods, Human-Centered Design, Communication
Advizer Information
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Marisa Nowicki
Senior Behavioral Designer
Behavioral Design Firm
University of North Texas
Carnegie Mellon University: Masters in Public Policy and Management (MSPPM), 2019
Medical, Sciences & Related, Psychology
Climate, Environment, Sustainability & Waste Management, Nonprofit, Foundations & Grantmaking
Consulting
Honors Student, Scholarship Recipient, Took Out Loans, Greek Life Member, First Generation College Student
Video Highlights
1. Empathy and Open-mindedness: Approaching projects with an open mind and understanding why people act the way they do is crucial. This involves letting go of personal biases and actively listening to others.
2. Behavioral Science Knowledge: Understanding cognitive biases and common pitfalls of human behavior allows for more effective problem-solving and solution design.
3. Research and Communication Skills: Combining qualitative and quantitative research methods, designing solutions, testing interventions (A/B testing), and clearly communicating findings through various mediums (reports, presentations, etc.) are essential for success in this field.
Transcript
What skills are most important for a job like yours?
First and foremost, the most important thing is to have a lot of empathy for and interest in other people. Essentially, every day we're understanding why people act or don't act on their best intentions. We also have conversations with people about incredibly sensitive subjects and ask for trust to try new things.
The ability to let go of our own biases about why people may or may not be doing things, and to approach things with an open mind, is incredibly important. Within that, some really important skills to pick up are an understanding of behavioral science.
This includes an understanding of cognitive biases and the ways people tend to get tripped up. We need to understand the most common pitfalls and how our brain, while evolved to help us function, can sometimes lead us to respond in unexpected ways. Therefore, an understanding of behavioral science is incredibly useful.
In addition to that, qualitative and quantitative research skills would be helpful. In this role, we spend a lot of time understanding human behavior from a research lens. This means identifying the scope of the project, researching through key informant interviews and surveys, which involves both qualitative and quantitative analysis.
We develop hypotheses about why something is or isn't happening, design solutions, and then test them. This often involves randomized control trials or A/B tests to understand if an intervention had an effect. We also need to be able to communicate those research findings to others.
Within that, an understanding of human-centered design is also quite useful, though not necessarily required depending on your specific path. If you take a role like mine, you do a little bit of everything, so it's important.
If you're coming from a private sector angle, perhaps doing user experience or UX research versus UX design, those could be different roles. But in a role like mine, you do a bit of everything. So, I would also recommend some human-centered design.
Lastly, presentation skills are very important. It's crucial to be able to understand what happened in a project and communicate that through blog posts, written reports, conference presentations, and conversations with funders. This is to explain what the project was about, how the problem was solved, and why it was important.