Psychology

When digital communications is seen as a technology issue, psychological dimensions are often overlooked to the detriment of adoption and effectiveness.

There are psychological concepts that relate to design and consumption of digital technology that have an enormous influence on the outcomes of online (and offline) interactions, and their adoption. These concepts include such ideas as cognitive load, incentives, last mile problems, authenticity, recognition, conversion, etc. Providing Local Authority staff with a toolset of language and knowledge of such concepts will help to produce better designs, better solutions, better interventions and better outcomes.

Establishing Behaviours

Things the Local Authority does are only successful in as far as they succeed in getting people to adopt behaviours.

Information only becomes truly useful when behaviours are established such that people are aware of and know how to access, use, interact with and benefit from the things that are available to them. This is especially important online where behaviours frequently don’t yet exist at all.

Establishing behaviours involves the provision of simple, obvious ways for people to do things, connecting these things to existing behaviours, and then actively encouraging people to adopt the new behaviours until they becomes habitual.

This also involves being highly consistent, and not continually changing the way you want people to behave.