Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs)
1. Define Specific Target Behavior
When aiming for behavior change, define the target behavior with “uncomfortably specific” detail, focusing on post-login actions rather than just login, to ensure clear objectives.
2. Perform Behavioral Diagnosis
Conduct a detailed “behavioral diagnosis” by mapping every user step with screenshots and identifying the underlying psychologies at play to understand actual behavior and pinpoint intervention opportunities.
3. Redesign Environment for Behavior
Understand that behavior change comes from altering actions and redesigning your environment, not just setting goals, to effectively drive new habits.
4. Understand Predictable Human Behavior
Learn how people make decisions with emotion, present bias, and social norms in predictable ways to design effective behavior change interventions.
5. Align Incentives to Behavior
Set team incentives and KPIs on specific customer behaviors that align with positive customer outcomes to ensure product development is customer-centric and avoids negative practices.
6. Highlight Immediate Benefits
To drive user action, highlight and integrate immediate benefits into products and features, recognizing that present bias makes current rewards more motivating than future ones.
7. Reduce Logistical & Cognitive Barriers
Systematically identify and reduce both logistical (e.g., form fields) and cognitive barriers (e.g., uncertainty, status quo) to simplify the desired behavior for users.
8. Utilize Default Options
Make desired behaviors the default option, especially for complex actions like saving, to significantly increase adoption by making it the path of least resistance.
9. Create Simple Rules of Thumb
Help users make decisions easier by creating simple rules of thumb, like “I don’t take Lyft on weekdays,” to reduce cognitive effort and increase adherence to desired behaviors.
10. Make Benefits Concrete & Immediate
Ensure users immediately experience and understand your product’s benefits by making them concrete and tangible, rather than abstract, to show how it fits into their lives.
11. Skepticism for Complex Features
If a user-requested feature, like budgeting, requires many difficult steps, be skeptical of its effectiveness and conduct experiments, as it may not change the desired behavior.
12. Add Friction to Reduce Action
To reduce unwanted behaviors, introduce friction by adding steps or prompts (e.g., “Are you sure?”) that slow users down and encourage reconsideration.
13. Ask Benefit-Oriented Questions
In signup flows, add easy questions that make users think about the product’s benefits, increasing their motivation to complete the flow and boosting conversion.
14. Avoid Hard Open-Ended Questions
Do not ask difficult, open-ended questions in user flows, as they create high friction and significantly decrease conversion; opt for easy, multiple-choice formats instead.
15. Combine Benefits with Setup
Engage users by asking questions that combine product benefits with setup choices, implicitly showcasing capabilities while guiding them through configuration.
16. Resume User Progress
For long user flows, send reminders to re-engage dropped users and ensure they are returned to their exact last point of progress to reduce friction and increase completion.
17. Reduce User Choice
Decrease the number of options presented to users, such as recommending a single choice or limiting available selections, to reduce cognitive load and improve decision-making and conversion.
18. Leverage Social Norms
Use social norms by informing users that others are performing a desired action, leveraging the “following the herd” bias to motivate their own behavior.
19. Motivate “Right for Wrong”
Encourage desired user behaviors by providing immediate, often superficial, “wrong reasons” (e.g., clearing an error message, getting a social reward) that act as powerful motivators.
20. Utilize Deadlines as a Gift
Implement deadlines to help users prioritize and complete desired actions, as this tactic consistently increases engagement and conversion by providing a clear impetus.
21. Conduct Literature Review First
Before tackling a new problem, conduct a thorough literature review using resources like Google Scholar to learn from existing research and avoid redundant efforts.
22. Test Interventions Relatively
When testing product changes, always compare multiple options against each other rather than evaluating a single option, to understand which design most effectively drives desired behavior.
23. Extend Incentive Duration
Increase the duration of incentives (e.g., annual instead of quarterly) to promote long-term thinking and decisions that align with the best interests of both the company and its consumers.
24. Interviews for Culture Fit
Conduct interviews to evaluate a candidate’s affinity and culture fit, but use skill assessments and trials as the primary tools for predicting actual job performance.