Catalog
concept#Product#Delivery#Governance#Reliability

Behavior Change Game

A structured concept for designing playful interventions that support behavior change in products or organizations.

The Behavior Change Game is a conceptual framework that combines playful elements with structured interventions to deliberately influence behavior.
Emerging
Medium

Classification

  • Medium
  • Organizational
  • Design
  • Intermediate

Technical context

Product analytics platformsUser research toolsA/B testing infrastructures

Principles & goals

Identify and prioritize targeted leversTest and iterate in short cyclesConsider side effects and fairness
Discovery
Domain, Team

Use cases & scenarios

Compromises

  • Unintended negative behavioral incentives
  • Perceived manipulation by users
  • Lack of sustainability if implemented poorly
  • Ensure transparency toward affected parties
  • Iterate with pilot groups
  • Conduct ethics reviews before large rollouts

I/O & resources

  • Target group analysis
  • Measurable behavior goals
  • Data sources for monitoring
  • Concrete interventions and prototypes
  • Metrics and observation plan
  • Rollout and evaluation strategy

Description

The Behavior Change Game is a conceptual framework that combines playful elements with structured interventions to deliberately influence behavior. It helps teams systematically analyze situations, levers, and side effects, and to plan practical measures. Use spans product design, user interactions, and organizational routines.

✔

  • Quickly verifiable behavior hypotheses
  • Focus on concrete levers instead of generic advice
  • Encourages interdisciplinary collaboration

✖

  • Not all behavior changes remain stable short-term
  • May raise cultural or ethical concerns
  • Requires measurability of target behavior

  • Behavior conversion rate

    Share of users exhibiting the desired behavior.

  • Retention after intervention

    Measure of how long behavior changes persist.

  • Side-effect indicators

    Indicators of undesired behavior changes or harms.

Onboarding game in a FinTech product

A small gamification experiment increased completion rates via stepwise tasks and rewards.

Team points for knowledge sharing

Introducing a points system promoted voluntary knowledge documentation within the team.

COM-B supported process change

Using the COM-B model to identify capabilities, opportunities and motivation before interventions.

1

Define goals and metrics

2

Apply COM-B or similar models

3

Design and measure small test interventions

⚠️ Technical debt & bottlenecks

  • Missing infrastructure for long-term measurement
  • Hardcoded reward logic without configurability
  • Outdated data collection processes
Lack of valid metricsLimited user researchTechnical integration hurdles
  • Incentives creating unhealthy competition in a team
  • Hidden manipulation instead of open communication
  • Metric fixation without user context
  • Confusing correlation with causation
  • Evaluating success indicators too early
  • Insufficient segmentation of target groups
Basic behavioral science knowledgeDesign and prototyping skillsData analytical competence
Measurability and data availabilityEthics and user transparencyInterdisciplinary collaboration
  • • Privacy and compliance requirements
  • • Limited development resources
  • • Cultural differences in target groups