Four simple questions for designing any behavioral intervention.
EAST is an acronym (Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely) that sums up four questions for designing or auditing any behavioral intervention. Is it easy? Is it attractive? Does it make use of the social? Does it arrive at the right moment?
The UK's behavioral team used it to redesign the organ donor registration page on the driving license website. They tested eight different versions of the same question, each one varied according to one of the four EAST letters. The winning version, which made use of the social (a line appealing to reciprocity, "if you needed a transplant, would you take one?"), generated close to 96,000 additional registrations a year over the control version, without changing the form itself.
EAST is a checklist that connects many of the individual principles (simplicity, affect, social validation, salience) into a single design process, so you don't have to rely on intuition to decide which lever to use.
Source: Behavioural Insights Team (2014). EAST: Four Simple Ways to Apply Behavioural Insights.
Before redesigning a process, a form, or a campaign, going through the four EAST questions helps you quickly spot which of the four is failing, instead of redesigning the whole process blindly.
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