Using behavioral science to improve your product

I hate to sound so simplistic, but a lot of it is about making things easier logistically and cognitively, and making the benefit much more clear, salient. We say moving it from abstract to concrete.

This is the toolkit in behavioral science where we study not what people say they will do, but what they actually do.

We are what we measure, and it really matters what you measure. I like to say we are what we measure, and it really matters what you measure.

People make decisions with lots of emotion. We are present bias. We over-weighed our present selves. We follow social norms. But the good news is that we do these things in predictable ways. And once you understand how and why people behave, you can start to change it.

We're giving people kind of some other reasons to do a thing that they may want to do, but they don't necessarily have the motivation to do it right away.

When you want to get somebody to do something more, you make it easier. When you want someone to do something less, you make it harder.

Sometimes, any kind of work that we put on the user, we should be skeptical. We have to really prove that it's worth their time, and then measure if they actually do it.

We are all present bias, which means we prioritize our present self over our future self, so there are plenty of reasons that somebody, your customer, your user should take an action, but you actually have to give them a reason to take an action today.

You're going to sign up for One Medical, six months later, you're going to get a fever and get sick, and are you going to remember this app that you signed up for six months ago? Probably not. You're going to do the same thing you did before, which is call the doctor that you've normally gone to.

We call this Right for Wrong, doing the right thing for the wrong reason, where the right thing may be completing the flow, but the wrong reason is seeing that error message go away.

When you ask a question, you can insert an idea into someone's head, you can get them thinking about something different. And so, in a sign up flow, what would you want people to be thinking about? You probably want them to be thinking about the benefits that you offer.

If you ask everyone on the team what engagement means separately, you can compare answers and most likely, people are saying different things. And if you guys can't agree internally on what to do or what engagement means, it's very difficult to build a product by which your users understand what to do.

People make decisions with lots of emotion. We are present bias. We over-weighed our present selves. We follow social norms. But the good news is that we do these things in predictable ways. And once you understand how and why people behave, you can start to change it.