Designing Behaviour: Understanding behaviour, the environment and designing for change. Looking Beyond People.
For a long time, I explained behaviour by looking at the individual. Someone is impatient, chooses not to follow the rules, or just never does the right thing. These explanations felt intuitive because they focused on the person. However, as I learned more about behavioural science, service design and systems thinking, I realised that behaviour doesn’t happen in a vacuum. People are constantly responding to the environments around them, often in ways they don’t even notice.
Growing up in Nigeria, I often noticed that queues rarely functioned in the way we typically imagine them. Someone joins from the side, another person is invited forward because they know someone, or the person providing the service attends to whoever happens to be standing closest. Like many people, I explained this as impatience. That explanation felt reasonable until I spent a year living in Madrid. There, queuing rarely felt like a decision. The environment clearly communicated where to stand, everyone followed the same expectations and the system rewarded waiting your turn.
That experience made me realise I had been asking the wrong question. Rather than asking why people behave the way they do, I became much more interested in understanding how different environments produce different behaviours.
Understanding the Environment
Queuing is more than standing in a line, it is a social agreement. We wait our turn because we trust that everyone else will do the same and that the system will reward fairness. For that agreement to work, however, the environment has to support it, and I realised that many of the environments I had experienced in Nigeria weren’t designed to support queuing.
There is often no clear beginning or end, no physical barriers, and no indication of whose turn it is. In many cases, the only way to know who is next is to remember who arrived before you. When the environment leaves so much open to interpretation, people naturally begin creating their own rules. The environment also weakens trust in the process. When anyone can be attended to regardless of when they arrived, waiting your turn begins to feel like a disadvantage rather than a fair exchange. Over time, the system unintentionally teaches everyone watching that shortcuts work and that standing in line offers little reward.
Seen through this lens, the behaviour begins to make more sense. It no longer becomes a question of “how do we encourage people to queue?”, but “how we design environments that make queuing feel like the natural thing to do?”
Designing for Change
One useful way of thinking about this is the EAST framework, which suggests that behaviours are more likely to occur when they are Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely. Rather than changing people first, it asks us to redesign the environment around the behaviour.
In this case, making the behaviour easy would involve clearly marked entry and exit points, visible floor markings or physical barriers that remove ambiguity. Making it attractive means ensuring that waiting your turn consistently leads to the best outcome while bypassing the queue does not. Making it social involves making the desired behaviour visible so that people naturally follow what those around them are doing. Finally, making it timely means introducing these cues at the exact moment people arrive, before they have the opportunity to make a different choice.
Queuing is only one example, but the principle extends far beyond it. Whether we’re designing public services, workplaces, schools or digital products, behaviour becomes much easier to understand once we stop asking only what people are doing and start asking what the environment is encouraging them to do. If we want sustainable behaviour change, changing people is only part of the equation. We also have to design environments where the desired behaviour becomes the easiest, obvious and most natural choice.
About the Author
Eniola Falana, Colectivo Fellow
Eniola is deeply focused on applying behavioural science to public systems and citizen experience, particularly in emerging economies. She thinks structurally and long-term, with a strong interest in trust, accessibility, and systemic change. She’s motivated by impact and thought leadership, and is comfortable contributing ideas and representing Colectivo externally.
