ABOUT · JAMESON DAINES
Behavioral science meets design.
BehaviorUX is the work of Jameson Daines — the story behind The BehaviorUX Canvas and the thinking that drives it.
I’ve spent the last decade designing products in regulated health settings. I started in pharmaceutical human factors engineering at AstraZeneca, moved into consumer health-tech at Samsung on the Galaxy Watch team, and the whole time I was also studying the psychology of why people do (and don’t do) the things that would keep them healthier.
The same pattern kept coming up. Teams would build something that tested well with users, scored well on usability metrics, and passed every review. Then patients would use it for a week and quietly disappear.
What they were missing wasn’t better visual design or more user research. It was the piece the behavior-change literature has been writing about for thirty years: the difference between whether someone can use a product and whether they will. That’s the question The BehaviorUX Canvas was built to answer.
Before BehaviorUX I built Curve, an early toolkit for plugging behavioral science into design thinking, and founded Lissn, an app for early detection of mental illness in young people. Both came out of the same stubborn belief: that behavioral science has a lot to say about product design, and most of it is not getting through.
The short version: science and creative problem-solving are not on opposite teams. Wire them together and you get products that actually change how people behave, instead of products that only look like they should.
THE CANVAS
From research to framework
The canvas started as a private notebook. I was working through my Masters in Behaviour Change at UCL and trying to figure out how to actually use the principles on real product work the next morning. Eventually the notebook turned into a one-pager.
That one-pager kept getting shorter and more specific until teams could pick it up in a workshop without me there. It wires together the COM-B model, a shortlist of behavior-change theories, a set of cognitive biases worth knowing about, and a choose-make-test loop for prototyping.
People at Deloitte, IBM, LUMA Institute, and a long list of other places have downloaded it. I still edit it when I find something that should be clearer.
PRINCIPLES
What I believe
01
Evidence over intuition
Design recommendations should come from behavior-change research, not from gut feel or whatever is fashionable on design Twitter this month.
02
Accessible over academic
Most behavioral science papers are written for other behavioral scientists. The canvas is the translation layer that makes them useful to a product team on a deadline.
03
Behavior over usability
A product that is easy to use and nobody uses is still a failure. Usability scores are a poor proxy for whether people actually change their behavior.