The beginnings of Behavioural Economics at Sun Life
Sun Life formally established a behavioural economics (BE) practice in 2019.
Led by Katherine Serwin, the BE team initially focused on marketing optimization - helping marketers bring a more scientific approach to campaign development.
The program proved extremely successful, demonstrating quantifiable impact across multiple business units and client segments (and training dozens of marketers in the process).
After several years supporting Marketing, the team wanted to evolve the program and embed BE more broadly within the digital product development cycle.
When I joined Sun Life in 2020, having a formal BE team was a huge selling feature. I was a big proponent of behavioural design, and had done a lot of conceptual work applying BE to the UX process at other organizations.
When I arrived I expected to see a team that was pumped about the possibilities of BE, but that wasn’t quite where we were yet.
Can't we all just get along?
From my perspective, the distinction between behavioural economics and user experience was pretty clear: they were two separate, but complimentary, disciplines.
However, the broader UX team didn't quite see it that way.
After some exploratory conversations with team members, a few themes emerged:
- BE was often engaged late in projects - meaning they would be asked to come and provide feedback on concepts that were close to complete
- BE told them everything they were doing was wrong, which often resulted in last-minute re-work
- BE wanted to do their jobs, as their feedback kept spilling over into areas like content and visual salience
Needless to say, we had some work to do to change these perceptions and help the team see the value in applying behavioural design principles to their work.
Bringing BE and UX together
The following presentation walks through how Katherine and I approached bridging the gap between BE and UX through education, evangelism, and enablement.
This was originally presented at the Blend 2022 conference by Katherine, Melissa Tomko, and myself.
Winning hearts and minds, one designer at a time
After putting our first two designers through the BE Bootcamp and seeing the results, the value of layering behavioural economics into the design process became abundantly clear.
Due to widespread interest in learning behavioural economics principles, we later developed a UX-specific BE Bootcamp for designers and writers.
This training has since been rolled out to all experience design practitioners at Sun Life, and the results speak for themselves: