Case Study
Did We Just Become Best Friends?
How we brought behavioural economics and user experience together at Sun Life - featuring scenes from the 2008 classic “Stepbrothers”
MY ROLE:
AVP, User Experience Design
CLIENT:
Sun Life Financial
DATE:
March 2022
TOOLS:
N/A
TEAM MEMBERS:
- Katherine Serwin (Director, BE)
- Melissa Tomko (UX Design)
- Sneka Sampath (UX Design)
Background
BE’s beginnings 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.
The Opportunity
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 Katherine’s team would be asked to come and provide feedback on concepts that were close to complete
BE told them everything they were doing wrong, which often resulted in last-minute rework
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.
Blend 2022 Presentation
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.
Results
Winning hearts and minds, one designer at a time
After putting our first two designers through the BE Bootcamp and layering BE principles into the design process, the value of combining UX and BE became obvious.
Due to widespread interest in learning behavioural economics principles, we’ve 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.
We’ve also begun embedding behavioural economics resources directly within product development teams. By getting BE experts involved in the ideation phase of the design cycle, we’re able to integrate behavioural principles from the outset.
The results speak for themselves:
“Embedding BE into our design and development process clearly accelerates our delivery. BE ceases to be a “step in the process” and simply becomes “part of how we build things”. BE is able to work within the team and contribute material and content that helps define and is actually used in our design solution”
“It has been immensely valuable integrating a BE perspective early on into the design process...BE gives us access to that research has affected literally everything in the flow. This is very exciting and would not have been possible if we weren’t working so closely with behavioural economics from the onset of the project.”