Behavioral Design
for Health Bootcamp

This program is for you if you want to better understand the psychology of your users – customers using an app, patients seeking care, healthcare providers, the general public – really, anyone whose behavior you’re hoping to change! If you want to become more thoughtful about how you design – content, onboarding flows, dashboards, communication materials, health hardware, etc. – behavioral science should be in your front pocket.

There is a treasure trove of insights about how people make decisions that impact their health. The current toolkits for product, program, marketing, and service design only expose us to the tip of the iceberg. In this course, you’ll come to deeply understand human psychology and how it drives the adoption, engagement, and retention of your product or service to improve people’s health.

The health course is tailored for people working in environments where they have an impact on people’s health – through the products they’re designing, programs they’re building, patients they’re supporting, providers they’re leading, etc. A majority of the examples, studies, and content is related to health behavior change.

That’s alright! While much of the content is tailored for those who are actively designing products/services/workflows/etc. to change people’s health outcomes, lots of us are interested in improving our own personal health behaviors or those of people close to us. Or maybe you’re thinking about starting a company that will impact people’s health. The exercises in the course are designed in such a way that you could use a variety of examples to learn the key concepts.

No previous experience in behavioral economics or healthcare is necessary. And if you have read a few behavioral science or economics books, you’ll certainly still learn new things. We focus on applying behavioral insights to the health problems you’re solving for at work and in your personal life. If you’re a healthcare provider, the content will be useful as you think about behavior change in the context of patient care.

Preference will be given to teams and individuals from companies whose work is focused on improving people’s health and wellbeing.

Irrational Labs  was founded by author and professor Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman. Our mission is to use behavioral insights in order to help people be happier, healthier, and wealthier. Hundreds of companies have used our process and methods to build innovative new products and improve existing ones.

Companies like Google, Aetna, Eli Lilly, Fidelity, Lyft & Uber, Shapa, Cuna Mutual, and AARP have brought us in to work within their product and marketing teams to drive growth and engagement. Dozens of startups have relied on us to help them understand their customers’ needs and build products that solve for them. We are product designers and behavioral scientists. We are deeply passionate about designing our systems and our environment to change behavior – especially health behavior – for good.

You put in what you get out! Every week, you’ll gain access to two new modules of content with about one hour of reading. You’ll also have about one hour of hands-on exercises a week and sometimes you’ll engage in Slack to share your thinking and give others feedback on their work.

But the really neat thing that will happen? During this course, you’ll start thinking like a behavioral scientist. So while there are the actual (and non-trivial) time commitments to be aware of, you should expect to become immersed in the content in a way that seeps into your daily life. You’ll start seeing the world a bit differently. You’ll ask more questions. You’ll be more curious. We even hope that your friends start noticing that your conversation has shifted a bit!

Consider asking your employer to sponsor this learning opportunity for you. And if you are involved in efforts to fight COVID-19, we will consider scholarships to support you – please mention your work in the application.

You will have access to a platform called Podia, which will feed you the modules. It’s like Coursera in that you’ll log-in and have a list of modules to complete. Learning is primarily self-directed.

Whenever you want to begin! After you’re accepted, you’ll be able to start the course within one week.

Content is guaranteed for the eight weeks of the course. However, we aren’t committing to keeping it live forever and reserve the right to take it down after your course ends.