Using behavioral science to improve your product | Kristen Berman (Irrational Labs)

economics says look people are rational we make decisions with no emotion we use lots of computational energy weigh the pros and cons I mean obviously that's just not true it ignores the whole field of psychology and so in behavioral economics you combine the field of psychology and economics and say look people make decisions with lots of emotion we are present bias we overweight our 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 and so Behavioral Science and behavioral design basically uses those insights on psychology to actually apply it within real world problems welcome to Lenny's podcast I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from

their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies today my guest is Kristen Berman Kristen is the CEO and co-founder of irrational Labs where she and her team use Behavioral Science to help companies like Google Airbnb PayPal Microsoft Fidelity and Tick Tock build better and more successful products in our conversation we cover a ton of real life examples of product changes that her and her team helped craft that led to significant impact at the companies we talk about what biases and psychologies they find most commonly get in the way of people achieving what they want achieving your product your biggest surprises and insights about human psychology and how it relates to product design a couple of real life case studies including her work with Tick Tock and the change they made in the product as a result and so much more I found this conversation super fascinating and super tactical and I

can't wait for you to hear it and so with that I bring you Kristen Berman hey Ashley head of marketing and flat file how many B2B SAS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers at least 40 and how many of them screw that up and what happens when they do well based on our data about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding so if your CSV importer doesn't work right which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting they'll leave I am zero percent surprised to hear that I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign up conversion and increasing long-term retention getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important totally it's incredible to see how our customers like

Square Spotify and Zora are able to grow their businesses on top of flat file it's because Flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster if you'd like to learn more or get started check out flat file and flatfile.com Lenny this episode is brought to you by Whimsical when I asked product managers and designers on Twitter what software they use most Whimsical is always one of the most mentioned products and the users are fanatical Whimsical is built for collaborative thinking combining visual text and data canvases into one fluid medium distributed teams use Whimsical for workshops whiteboarding wireframes user flows and even feature specs and it includes thousands of built-in icons and a rich library of templates see why product teams at leading companies call Whimsical a game changer visit whimsical.com Lenny to have my own templates added to your

account when you sign up that's whimsical.com Lenny Kristen welcome to the podcast thanks honey great to be here it's great to have you you're on something called irrational labs and so to set a little context for folks can you just talk about what it is you all do at irrational Labs yeah so a rational Labs we are a Behavioral Science Consulting and Design shop so we think about all things Behavior change so we work on understanding psychologies that drive users and then designing and testing ways to change behavior and drive engagement and I started it in 2013 with daenery Ellie who's a famed behavioral Economist we started with just working with a handful of companies and now we have a team of 20 behavioral scientists working on Behavior change across Industries can you talk about some of the companies that you've worked with just to give some examples and then what kind of stuff have you actually helped

them with we started a lot of our work at Google we were actually embedded within Google for around three years I even had a bus pass and we started their behavioral economics team we worked with over 25 teams from like self-driving cars to YouTube and so that was a big piece of the early work and then recently we've done work with Tick Tock where we've tried to it actually accomplished decreasing misinformation share by 24 we worked with one Medical on how to increase doctor setting doctors appointments right away during that onboarding and that worked and drove it up by 20 percent we worked with Credit Karma on basically helping them increase set up for reoccurring deposits we did that and increased it by 18 so basically a variety of ways to drive Behavior change done something into it Microsoft LinkedIn and obviously a variety of

startups as well wow okay we're definitely going to talk about some of those examples I'm super curious to hear what you should do with Tick Tock big company and story these days before we get to that what exactly is behavioral design and can you just Define this space for us let's start with what is behavioral economic so basically behavioral economics is a reaction to academics so economics says look people are rational we make decisions with no emotion we use lots of computational energy weigh the pros and cons I mean obviously that's just not true it ignores the whole field of psychology and so in behavioral economics you combine the field of psychology and economics and say look people make decisions with lots of emotion we are present bias we overweight our 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 and so Behavioral Science and behavioral design basically uses those insights on psychology to actually apply it within real world problems what are some of the

biggest surprises or maybe unintuitive results that you've come across working with companies using these insights and and behavioral design behavioral economics yeah great question so you know one one story that recently happened is actually a surprise that happened to the client the partner was shocked and actually didn't surprise us and so this was with a popular fintech app and their most requested feature was budgeting so it came through all the support forums interviews felt like a table six feature people wanted budgeting and so if you're the PM there you're probably like you may talk to a few other users you may get some confirmation but you're likely building budgeting and that's really where they were when we came and started working with them we couldn't move them in in another Direction but we did convince them to do an experiment so we convince them to test and there was three

conditions one was the control which is just like telling people how much they spend and the other two were variations on budgeting so two different ways to do budgeting so big experiment this is with 10 000 people so we can really trust the results and what happened nothing so they were shocked the team was shocked remember this is like a big investment of time an effort took a lot of energy to build zero change in average spend zero change in spend variability and so the question is like why weren't we surprised why were they surprised and so the thinking here is if you map out every single step that it takes to do this Behavior and the behavior would be reducing your spend it's pretty clear that budgeting just isn't going to pull the weight and this is what we call a behavioral diagnosis where you map out every single step so you'd have to like know what your budget is you'd have to know where in the month

you are you'd have to make a plan to do it you then have to do it multiple times during the month like incredibly difficult to do this one behavior and once you do that behavioral diagnosis and you map out you try to understand what people actually do versus what they say they will do and by doing that it becomes wildly clear that we should all be skeptical that budgeting would actually work to change the behavior that you're trying to get to yeah I'm also not surprised that didn't have a big impact I have so many apps with budgeting features and I've I've tried many times to use them and it never sticks it's like yeah I'm just gonna it's too much work it's way too much work and so 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 you know measure if they actually do it is there a better approach to that specific

problem that you've found or is that too brought up a question kind of the first line of defense in any problem solving be how would you make it easier for somebody to do and so in the personal finance world really the answer to most things is just default so it worked for automatic enrollment 401K the reason we have retirement Savings in America is because people are defaulted into saving from their paycheck so that would be first line of defense obviously difficult for product teams to execute on takes a lot of back-end infrastructure so if we're just solving the personal financial management it's down like a budgeting alternative we'd actually go to making it not just logistically easier but cognitively easier so we call them rules of thumb like instead of having to decide in the moment do I do this thing and you're weighing the pros and cons you know it's kind of typical econ like how much is

this three dollars worth to me you'd actually make a rule of thumb that says do I do it or not so instead of deciding do you take a lift you know when you're coming home from work you have a rule of thumb it says I don't take lifts on the weekdays I take it on the weekends very simple now to actually make this kind of decision it's a heuristic it's not going to be perfect but it's going to help you reduce your spending in an easier way at least in a way that you'd stay adherent

too it reminds me a bit of James clears is kind of idea of creating this identity for yourself where he's like if you're like I am a person that doesn't take lift on the weekdays that becomes kind of this identity component and that makes it easier for you not to do that is that related yeah basically you know sometimes we think Behavior change is driven by our attitudes our preferences like I really you know want to be a runner or like I really like this thing but in reality our behavior is driven by what we do so in order to change Behavior you have to do something different it's not enough to have a goal objective to do it and I think that's kind of maybe that's like the big annoying thing about the self-help industry it kind of just tells you it's enough to have a goal it's not enough you actually need to to redesign your environment to change your behavior

is there any other examples of big surprises or an intuitive results from work you've done one big one is actually and I'm sure people on the listening have worked on sign up flows before this is kind of a common question and and challenge in product world and the common thinking is and most often correct that if you reduce friction to the sign up flow your conversion will increase right this is kind of the law that we all live by and yet there is one example one time where this is just not true that you can actually increase friction and increase conversion so actually Lenny have I ever told you about my mother nope okay so now you're thinking about my mother oh before you were not thinking about there's nothing about my mother but I just made you think about my mother by asking you a question so 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 so if you ask them a question they can think about the benefits it's going to increase their motivation to get over the hump of the future friction you're going to put in front of them because now they understand the benefits so as an example if you go to apartment lists they ask you questions during the sign of flow that's like what kind of apartment you want you want a studio or one bedroom a five bedroom do you want a patio a basement a view now all of a sudden I'm thinking I'm engaging with the benefit I understand how much Supply that they have so if you like do Stitch fix or actually Trunk Club has come out and said they did this and it increased conversion by 133 percent so asking these questions can really drive conversion we actually did something

where we put a quiz on a partner's website and it's title care which is basically a a device that lets you remotely connect to a physician it's a little bit hard to use but we wanted to help people understand the device and we ask them questions about their medical Behavior their frequencies of technology and for people who completed a quiz 53 of them went on to purchase versus 37 who didn't didn't complete so these type of questions can have can have a real

impact and so very tactically the idea here is you add a step to your flow that asks the user some question that isn't actually something you need an answer to but may get them to be more excited by finishing is that right exactly yeah and I would say probably most teams can do this you just you can replace the carousel like the carousel you know in something where it tells you the benefit but we want people to actively engage with the benefit so that they're thinking about how you can improve and affect their lives so you said it's worked a couple times it probably isn't something that usually works as I experience like sometimes it may work it may be worth trying but usually probably won't work is that generally right I think you know we want to remove the field that was like an open text Fields we're asking people an open-ended question and we improved conversion by 40 page over page so for sure some

questions are harder and you should not ask them when questions are easier and it's a drop down multiple choice this is when you should be trying it but but definitely the recommendation is not to ask a a hard question where people have to think about by the way for the question that we did that was open text the folks on the team thought that it was an easy question but most questions when you're asking people kind of wait an open text field is just not an easy question right hate those open text fields and then just one last because I mentioned people are listening to this like oh maybe you should run this experiment is the general best practice to ask a question that gets you to think about something that motivates you by finishing what's like the rough mental model there I so I think it's each each product obviously will be different one example would be like so if I'm a bill pay app

you could tell me that I could pay my bill once a week every day every month I could time it but a better approach would be to ask me do you want us to pay your bills immediately or every week or every month and so what you're doing there is engaging people in the setup and actually implicitly telling them we can pay your bills immediately so would think about kind of combining those two is showing people the benefit like how fast do you want us to pay your bills which gets you to think about how fast they are and the settings which is actually like you're really doing something to help the app work awesome

before we dive even deeper into more examples I wanted to zoom out for a moment and I'm curious just how did you even get into behavioral economics you said you worked with Danner Ellie how did all this come about yeah great question so I met Dan around 2008 and if you don't know Danny Riley definitely worth a Google and at that time he had just written his first book predictably rational and I was a product manager at Intuit working on QuickBooks online so first use customer Discovery and really after reading the book hearing the talk it's just like this light bulb went off and it was like I'm like talking to five to ten customers to inform a feature a product and try to come up with some like Insight on human behavior and yet there's this whole field that studied this right that has papers and thinking and studies why we behave the way we do and so this was like wow I can't believe we're just missing out on it the product

community and so started working with Dan and you know we started and now 14 years later this is this is it's what I do is is bring product insights bring behavioral insights to to product teams you said you were running an embedded team within Google to work on this sort of thing amen yeah so so basically Google it's kind of a first mover and thinking about how important understanding Behavioral Science was to product and marketing development and so it was Dan and I in the beginning and over the course of the three years we hired internal googlers we brought in more people on our team and really kind of were an internal consultant where we'd be pitched to other teams work with them from start to end on a project and now Google has one of the bigger Behavioral Science teams that's out there wow okay so you've worked with how many companies at this point roughly I'd say 100 I mean yeah hundreds okay so

there's hundreds of companies there's also I imagine hundreds of these kind of biases and heuristics and kind of Behavioral expectations of people I'm curious of the work that you've done

what are the most common biases heuristics of people that you find most useful in improving product experiences and product design like what's kind of the handful that ends up being most useful totally and there are so so many mistakes that humans make and we can call them biases heuristics our team uses psychologies what are the psychologies that drive us and so to tackle this our team basically has created a model of behavior change we call the Three B's and this summarizes the most important psychologies that drive user that are important to the product managers and the marketers we've used this at Google Microsoft LinkedIn so all the companies that we work with and they they now use it and so the first B so 3B framework first B is actually not a psychology but it is the most important part of behavior change and it should kind of be obvious like if you think about Behavior change behavioral economics it is

behavior in order to change Behavior you have to pick a behavior that you want to change so companies are really good at outcomes but just not as sharp at picking the behavior when I say Behavior I mean action the thing that you want someone to do by the way the only wrong answer here is log in so it's really it's not about logging in it's about what you do after you log in and when we're Consulting teams would be like we need to get uncomfortably specific we say just really specific in the behavior so example if I'm Peloton pm and I'm working on the app I would say something like within seven days of somebody starting the app they do two 10 minute workouts with two different instructors now obviously that is wildly specific and you'd probably be very happy if they did one workout with one instructor but the reality is if you don't Define that behavior you're going to change you can't actually Define the

psychologies that affect someone's decision making when doing that behavior so that's a first be second B again is probably pretty obvious and it's very critical it's just barriers so we need to reduce the barriers to doing the behavior there are two types of barriers we look at one is logistical so this is just the stuff in our way it could be entering a credit card could be any form field and then the second is cognitive so the cognitive barrier is getting our way as well these are things like uncertainty aversion this is optimism bias information aversion right these are the things that would prevent status quo big one it's just you do the same thing today that you did yesterday right so your job can you talk about those

three just throughout there just briefly I'm curious about the specific license over there so uncertain version when something is uncertain or we're not so I'll give you an example if you're Lyft there's logistical friction which is wait time but then there's also this uncertainty of is it going to come on time when is it going to come and with this uncertainty you're probably going to look for other options you're going to open up Uber and say like maybe it'll come faster and so when there is uncertainty in our life we either look for other options or we just don't make a decision at all right this is by the way very big in in healthcare where when you're very uncertain about something you may not even go to the doctor or you may just make the wrong decision got it and same with status quo effect where you know we kind of underline status quo effect it's this idea that we always take the path not always but majority of

it you don't really say always when you're talking about human behavior human behavior is very complex but more often than not we take the path of least resistant so we do the thing that's easiest and typically the thing that's easiest is the thing that we've done yesterday and the day before and so when you're asking someone to do something different which is what most product especially startups are trying to do you actually have to increase you know their motivation or make it easier reduce the barriers to get them to do that and so status quo effect is a big big one that

folks are fighting awesome thanks for sharing those we can let's keep going cool so the third B is benefits so this is where you want to increase the not just the benefits but the immediate benefits of doing something so 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 in action but you actually have to give them a reason to take an action today so as an example if you're Asana and if you're trying to get someone to log a task the right thing for them to do is log the task because it's going to get their project done on time you're going to have a collaborative and communicative team that you're going to want to be on but one of the real reasons we may log a task is because of completion bias we want to see the checkbox we may log it because of social desirability bias where other people see

that we're getting our work done there's a notification that goes to my teammate when I complete something so these are the immediate benefits that we have to build into products and features to drive to drive use awesome I I definitely have completion bias I love checking those freaking check boxes yeah I know sauna has famous for that little unicorn confetti thing right for like making you feel really good when you complete some yeah you know I don't know how much emphasis to put on these kind of like you know confetti stuff I think the idea of being done is that that psychological understanding that you completed it confetti or not is very powerful I love confetti okay so just to recap there's the Three B's Behavior what is the behavior you're trying to change and the way you described it sounds like the activation Milestone that's the way most companies think about that is that right

I would say the activation Milestone and the novel thing here is getting really specific about this Behavior so much that if you're not arguing with your teammates you're doing it wrong oh about which behavior and yeah I imagine this often comes similar to the activation kind of moment it comes back working backwards from what is most likely to keep this person around long term kind of to keep them retained right yeah exactly and yeah so what correlates with retention and what provides kind of an immediate value to them by doing this Behavior awesome okay so Behavior then

barriers how do you break down barriers logistical and cognitive and then benefits and the point about being an immediate benefit is a really interesting one because yeah it may be like in a year from now you might earn some money but I'm not going to do anything hard right now if I'm not going to make any money right now exactly and so this is a tough one because we want to believe that people really do and use our product for the end benefit but we really need to give people the reason to do it today awesome I want to dive into a couple case studies of companies that I know you've worked with maybe before that I thought it'd be good to ask this question about just like the dark side of this stuff I imagine people often worry about hey are you just drinking people into doing things they don't want to do that's not good how do you think about that kind of line yeah it's a great question I think

the answer to this really with many things in life comes down to incentives so what are the incentives of the product teams of you your manager the team working on this I like to say kind of we are what we measure and it really matters what you measure so I'll give you a personal example yeah Lending Club a while ago hired me to increase their conversion flow for borrowers so they're a lending app and they wanted to get more borrowers in the flow the novel thing here was that they would pay me a lot of money if I hit a bump it was like a five point bump and zero if I didn't hit anything that was there that's your incentive structure right so my incentive structure was to increase the conversion flow and over the course of working with them I became a predatory lender I was suggesting things that the legal team was like no Kristen of course you cannot do that and setting some contacts I was at that time leading a

Duke University lab called Common Sense lab it was focused on low to moderate income Americans thinking about their Financial Health building savings apps for them so here I am this kind of like do good non-profit very focused on Financial Health of Americans and my other hat was Predator lender for Lending Club right and so it's really about the incentives that we're giving ourselves and our team that will drive how anything is used much less behavioral economics with these tactics but generally what's the success of your

team you may not have a clear answer to this but any advice for setting those incentives correctly anything you've seen work well yeah I think for us there's two tips one would be to set the incentive on the behavior because the behavior is going to align more with the customer outcomes than the active use or the retention and of course and I'm not suggesting we don't measure active use and retention and these things you just definitely imagine them but setting the incentive in the kpi and the product and the marketing team on the behavior is going to result in a more customer friendly product and outcome and then second would be increasing the duration of the incentive so if you're trying to hit a quarterly outcome you're likely going to do things that will impact the short term to give that a bump if you're trying to hit an annual or even longer outcome you're going to be looking out for the best interest of the company and

the consumers in a little bit different way awesome for the Lending Club example what did you end up doing In The End by the way did you just like ma'am let's not do this I can actually reveal the intervention that we did but I did miss it so there was a five point by the way point not percentage bunk which is a lot and we got 4.5 so we almost hit it but you know it's a clip it doesn't work that way almost sold your soul for that bump and you didn't you didn't get there I know it seems like Richard it was a good lesson in and sent him to dive and by the way at that point Lending Club was offering good rates to to borrowers so there was efficacy in the idea of it which is Lenny clubs lending to people who have lower FICO and and with better rate and yet you still want to have you know you don't want to become the predatory lender in that situation okay awesome are you hiring or on the flip side are

you looking for a new opportunity well either way check out lennysjobs.com Talent if you're a hiring manager you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand curated people who are open to New Opportunities thousands of people apply to join this Collective and I personally review and accept just about 10 of them you won't find a better place to hire product managers and growth leaders join almost 100 other companies who are actively hiring through this Collective and if you're looking around for a new opportunity actively or passively join the collective it's free you can be anonymous and you can even hide yourself from specific companies you can also leave anytime and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from check out lennysjobs.com Talent

so there's two companies that you work with that I use and I'm curious what you did for them and how you worked with them one is Tick Tock and then the other is one medical and so it'd be cool to just yeah hear what you did for them what they wanted your help with and then just kind of what you took away how it went all that great yeah so Tick Tock is obviously a a big platform and with any big social media platform they have misinformation on it so this is not just a problem with Tick Tock Facebook and Twitter habit and misinformation is is growing and so they asked us to help decrease the spread of misinformation on their platform so there's lots of ways that we could take that and the first thing that we did is we kind of do with any companies think about what is the behavior that you want to change and so we narrowed on decreasing shares so we could have said likes you know we could have said comments or general engagement

which you know is a broad thing but we narrowed on decreasing the shares so when you're actually going to see a misinformation video yo we want to decrease the number of people that share it so that was the first step and the second step is this you know 3B model how do we think about the barriers and so you know with Tick Tock the thing that you want to do is get people to do something less right when you want to get something to do something more you make it easier when you want someone to do something less you may get put up barriers what are barriers yeah actually a nice example of ether the an elevator study where basically you want people to use the stairs and so what the researchers did was make the elevator door close 16 seconds longer so now you're getting the elevator you're annoyed it's harder to use the elevator and people went to the stairs 16 seconds interesting number 16 we can't wait 16

and then it's actually kind of long though you're standing there it's building your thumb I'd use the stairs yeah yeah and so that's kind of what we did for tick tock which is basically you're in a very hot State Tick Tock is a very fast platform and so we just slowed people down so two things there was a label on the the video which is kind of classic in the misinformation world where you tell users that it's unverified information and the second thing was once you click the share button we popped up something that said are you sure and this was basically slowing people down so logistical friction and actually cognitive friction because we're asking people to reconsider a prior decision and question their their self and so with that both those things the label on the video and the pop-up reduce shares by 24 and these are tactics that Facebook and Twitter are also using to slow people down this was actually one

of the first so published studies that showed that this this drove down this information can you talk a bit about how you came to those two conclusions I know you work really closely with the product team and there's this whole process you

go through how do you come up with these ideas how many ideas did you test is there anything more you could share around that yeah it's actually a pretty involved process so first we did a literature review which is basically say like look we're not the first people to think about this let's talk to the expert and understand what has worked and what hasn't so with that actually one of the insights was that reminding people about their value of accuracy so most people want to be accurate most people actually don't want to share this information and so if you can remind people the point of sharing by the way it doesn't work if you remind people before or after like it's at the point of sharing that this is unverified information Studies have shown that this could decrease share so we took that piece we also took this you know like the hot and cold State literature that says if you actually don't want to get someone to do

something how do you intervene so we did this literature review we came up with a hypothesis and we had probably 30 different ways to implement this because the hypothesis is just a starting point and then we put it into quantitative research so we actually put five different versions of the pop-up in front of over a thousand users which you know we got users from prolific which is a a platform where you can easily test things and you didn't measure you didn't measure the idea of like do people like this we measured a condition against another condition so relatively what condition is more likely to work than the other condition and that would increase our intuition that it would would work in Market we're not saying that you know studies outside of the product are you know end-all be all but it's going to drive our intuition up a lot more for the research that you did I imagine that's a lot of the value that

you and your team bring to a group for folks that are just on their own maybe is there any advice for how to like find research on problems you're trying to solve yeah I mean I would say basically if you're looking at a new problem it's very tempting to talk to five users in the beginning we would basically say look go spend a day on the internet Googling to see what else has been done and Google Scholar is a great place to start like Hot Tips would just be making sure you're searching the right keyword so if you're looking at something in healthcare you'd want to know what are the buzzwords for chronic care and things that would actually drive you to a meta-analysis that would summarize what's already been done so Google Scholar great place to start and then coming up with the hypothesis and putting them to test you never we never do a study a ux study where we're just showing people one thing because they

could really like it or hate it but they could really like or hate all the designs we have no idea so when we're doing this we always present multiple options and then relatively look for the which one is going to to drive the behavior we're intending to change is there a reason you did ux oriented test versus testing the product is it just because they weren't ready to build an experiment in product yet yeah we actually only got two conditions in product which for us is we would like more and it was you know we don't know if we're going to get a second bad at this so we said well two conditions plus a control but what should those two conditions be so for us it was like we want to make we want to de-risk the launch as much as possible awesome and is that feature in the product today it is yes it is in the product and yeah they've they've done more Global launches as well sweet I'm clearly not

sharing much misinformation because I haven't seen it yet you may not be searching the right thing so if you search the medical equipment politics you may you may get it oh boy here it becomes the decline of me

okay so next case study that I thought would be fun to talk about is one medical which I'm a happy customer of what did you do with them yeah so we worked on one medical to basically won my glasses to increase engagement this is a classic question how do you increase engagement in a product or service right engagement just using it more often right exactly but the that's the real question is what does engagement mean I actually have fun exercise that people could do with their teams is if you ask everyone on the team what engagement meets 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 yep yeah so after lots of debate we came up with a key Behavior to Target basically somebody setting up a doctor's

appointment right after signing up for one medical and this is really important because more likely than not you're going to sign up for one medical six months later you're gonna get a fever or get sick and are you going to remember this app that you signed up for six months ago probably not you're gonna do the same thing you did before which is call the doctor that you've normally gone to so really important for one medical upfront during onboarding to set the mental model of what they can be used for and go into that doctor's appointment so then we look to the barriers what are the barriers like who is going to be your provider your doctor like picking somebody's hard finding a Time an appointment time is hard you know we're all busy people how are you going to fit it in knowing actually what one medical can help you with also difficult like what what is this company or thing and where should I what

should I go to them for and then the benefits right what are the benefits and the benefits for using more medical is you get your questions answered immediately it's very simple but you can really get your health questions and issues addressed and so the simple intervention we did was just during onboarding we asked people a few questions about their health Mental Sleep physical we then recommended a provider so instead of having lots of choice decrease the choice recommend them one provider told them why and then recommended appointment times and limited the amount appointment times it was for tomorrow we recommended a virtual appointment so it'd be a quick thing that you could do from your home and then that intervention like the onboarding intervention increased bookings by 20 during onboarding of appointments I have appointments yeah yeah onboarding I don't know if I went through that when

I joined one medic this is recent yep okay cool yeah by the way one Medical's awesome as you're talking I'm thinking just if you could think about what are like the five most commonly successful changes to a flow one right now you just shared was reducing options which is interesting

and then another you mentioned earlier is just like reminding you of maybe what you're going to get out of at the end I don't know is there anything that comes to mind of like here's like a subset of things that seems to often work when you're trying to improve say activation or conversion of a flow yeah you know I would caveat all this with like behavior is contextual so you know why we are religious about testing is because it's hard to drag and drop from different contents so I'd caveat it with that and of course there are there are some rules of thumb so one thing really is about showing people the benefits right away so really not under or overestimating that people understand the benefit of your app and so how do you get them to experience it immediately so say that that's one and then the other is really just the you know reducing I hate to sound so simplistic but this is you know 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 like you really want to move something you know from the world of people can't really imagine how it fit in their life to how does it actually fit in their life and and keeping them going you know if if it's a long sign up flow and people need to drop out how do you send them reminders to pull them back in and then when they are back in land them on the spot that they were at so wealthfront has said you know one of their key insights was when people dropped out of the flow you know normally they would just put people back at the beginning it's really frustrating if you can put people back where they landed they're more likely to continue that makes sense reduces barriers I'm learning exactly so there's two really interesting things you just said that I'd love to dive into a little

bit one is showing the benefit of something right away is there anything is there an example that comes to mind where you did that and it worked out really well like what's an example of showing a benefit yeah so actually benefits can be there's two ways to do benefits one is the actual one that a consumer has so right Asana and the like collaborative Communicator versus maybe one that's more immediate and so when we're thinking about more immediate benefits this could actually be things like social norms where you're telling people everybody else is doing something and to them the benefit of do of doing this is following the hurt we all like by the way don't like to think that we're part of the herd but we all we all will succumb to this at some point in our lives and so you know one example is where we worked with a company called study and this was a fintech app and we're helping people to sign up or sync

their bank accounts syncing their bank account is a required step in any kind of fintech app and yet so difficult big drop off point and just by reframing the choices of getting someone to think about completing a step you know versus the benefit that would come to them after so the benefit of syncing their bank account was actually huge you'd get to see your income you're really actually changing someone's Financial picture by doing it and they're signing up for it they know it but the small immediate benefit is how you're framing each step each step is going to give you the immediate benefit so for this one it

was a completion bias thing again where people are motivated to complete something sometimes we you know we'll do an error message if it's really important for the app to work and again that's not you shouldn't do that all the time but if it's really important the benefit is actually decreasing that error message on the screen we call this right for wrong doing the right thing for the wrong reason where the right thing may be completing the slow but the wrong reason it's seeing that error message go away again I would use that with caution people will not use and love your app if you're putting error messages all over it that makes sense I think you mentioned this so I haven't mentioned but you wrote a guest post for my newsletter it's one of the most read posts of the newsletter on just using a lot of these yeah I don't know yeah that's awesome yeah and it's about using these insights to improve

conversion in general so we'll link to that in the show notes and I think in that post you mentioned this concept of right for wrong it might be worth spending a little more time on this just like what does that mean and what's what's an example of that when we think about right for wrong we're helping people again do the right thing so this is a behavior that they want to do but the reason is actually probably not related so if you think about just you know vaccines and what we saw here like the reason to get a vaccine is to help my neighbor and prevent them from getting sick and yet what happened we get gave people donut give people free pot or marijuana there were lottery tickets in Ohio so this is the right for wrong idea where you're really substituting by the way there's one one of the bigger voting interventions is just having pizza show up at the pole line right you're motivating people to go vote not because

they want to contribute to democracy but because there's Pizza in the poll line so at some level we're pretty simple human where we want an immediate benefit um you know Clubhouse actually was an interesting example of this at some level where you saw two levels of status in clubhouse there were the people who were friends with the people on stage and then there was everyone else and so that was like a motivator to be friends with more people and start following people so that you could be in that little you know bucket of friends with other people so we're giving people kind of some other reasons to do a thing that they may want to do but they don't necessarily the motivation to do it right away if you think about Peloton you know yes I want to work out yes I want to have a healthy person but maybe I want to go to the class because the instructor may give me a shout out or there's some streak that I'm trying to

continue right so they're right for wrong here is like the real reason to work out is to improve my physical health but while I just want that instructor to give me a shout out so the key there just to kind of come back to the dark side of some of the stuff is you want to make sure the the end mean is is good and and right whatever exactly yeah and so again all these things you know the possibility of using anything for negative outcomes exists and really it's about the incentives is what is your incentive to drive the customer benefit and that's really where we say you have to be measuring the customer outcomes you have to be focused on the customer outcomes and you know some of the toughest teams we have understanding this are non-profits so we worked with one company me a while ago we tried to get them to add a deadline because they were trying to help people sign up for interviews so like they were

basically filtering people before Staples would get them for an interview so they'd do the interview prep they'd help them show up for the interview but the reality is that like sometimes people miss this stuff it takes a long time to get to the interview and so our push to them was to add a deadline to help people show up sometimes we say deadlines are a gift right you're just helping people kind of prioritize this and they said no absolutely not we cannot add a deadline this is just too hurtful and the reality is when you add deadlines and we've done this in multiple companies where you add a deadline more people do the thing right because you're helping kind of create the right for wrong reason giving people the wrong reason to do the behavior that they actually want to do we added a deadline to Kiva slow for when their borrowers were signing up and we increased their conversion so obviously

you can use this in ways that are unintended and it really has some upside to help people I imagine you're building kind of this just like toolbox of ideas that end up working often at flow I know you said that you can't just copy and paste rarely is it just like oh this worked at 10 other companies it'll probably work here but that's kind of a cool thing that your team's probably doing just making this big list of like here's 10 20 things that we could start with these ideas and talk about them yeah there's you know once you understand the psychology of human behavior you really start to understand and see patterns we started with the idea that behavioral economics shows that people act in irrational ways but we do it in predictable ways and so once you start understanding this you can really start designing for the behavior change it at this kind of predictable level for a product team that's

listening to this and they're like oh we we can't work with you guys right now we we can't afford it we don't have time just like generally but I want to think about this stuff and maybe implement it on my team what would

you suggest to say a PM leading a team that wants to implement some of these principles yeah I would probably start from the process angle you know we have the 3B framework which again the most important step is defining the behavior so if you were to do a workshop with your team on what is the uncomfortably specific behavior that you want to change and you align everyone to this it's going to be much easier for you to change that behavior because the psychology that drive that behavior will be a better conversation and more obvious so first in starting with the behavior to get everyone in a room do a small Workshop the second would be that behavioral diagnosis and this is the toolkit in Behavioral Science where we study not what people say they will do but what they actually do and so the behavioral diagnosis it's like a journey map on steroids where you're really trying to map the steps

that get people to the behavior change and again just doing this teams have light bulbs and this is one of the main things that we work with teams on we help them do the behavioral diagnosis to have those light bulbs and then we you know help diagnose and design the intervention can you talk a bit more about this behavioral diagnosis step like what actually happens there there's kind of two steps one you can outline the full kind of high level flow where you're saying you know maybe there's 50 steps and getting to the behavior and you can do this before they hit your product too but when we're working with just like a very kind of we want to help a team grow their product versus develop a new product it's just about growing and improving the current product we'll do a deck of 200 or 300 slides of screenshots where it's just very detailed analysis of the steps that it takes to get to the behavior change and

then we overlay the psychologies that are driving people at each step right this actually takes a really long time but the light bulbs of like how you actually get to that as I said Behavior changes and easy you know it's it's complex it's hard it's noisy and so you have to understand the steps that that get you there before you're trying to change it wow that sounds really useful so you go through the product make a screenshot of every little step and then connect what barriers keeping them from progressing is that roughly right exactly yeah so maybe in a health app it's information aversion they don't actually want to see their test result that you know that's a step and then we attach that psychology to that step and now we can have a brainstorm about well what would help decrease information aversion to get them over the next time what's cool

about this is like you could just as a team you have all these things you're trying to improve all these flows and steps and things like that and basically these psychologies as you call them are useful or just like anything you're trying to optimize I imagine there's just like a list on Wikipedia of all these human psychologies and biases I imagine a better way to learn about this is to take your course so it's maybe it's a good time to just chat about the course that you teach versus you know coming in-house and working with the team can you talk a bit about that or are those the same thing um maybe I'm not interested no that that's that's perfect yeah so we have a thanks for the tea up bloody uh appreciate it we have a boot camp course which basically is a self-paced online course that you can go in and understand and there's all a lot of our case studies many of them I didn't talk about here and we walk you

through the process right and you'll have an intro call with us there's a slack group there's office hours really trying to help people go through the process of Behavioral design yourself and it it really brings these cons Concepts to life and helps you apply them to your to your product so I think starting with that boot camp is a great place for designers product managers marketers researchers to start we also we can I can send you this we have a sweet 16 like some of the 16 biases that we you know that we refer to most The Three B's is an easy way to evaluate a product if you're just starting but as you get deeper these different psychologies will pop up awesome please send that and we will link to it in the show notes just a couple more details in this course how often do you run it how long does it take generally for folks to take yeah so once a year we'll do a cohort course that's a little bit more

in depth but the the best way is this kind of self-faced Chords it's a eight-week course and we give you a month extra to to go through it there's 16 modules there's homework throughout it that you can post in slack and get feedback from behavioral scientists so a pretty kind of interactive course but you can go through it on your own and and even share with share with your team we do group things so we'll do like a team of 10 and then we can give you a private office hour where we just riff with you on your your product challenges awesome and folks can find that at irrationalabs.com is that right yeah thanks again for this yeah right celebs.com is is this is the spot and if you probably signing up for a newsletter it's also uh we'll be publish all of our research there another kind of fun behavioral insights sweet well with that

we've reached our exciting lightning round so I'm just going to ask you a bunch of quick questions whatever comes to mind fire away and we'll just go through them real fast sound good great okay cool what are two or three books that you recommend most to other people I would be remiss not to say particularly irrational I think this is a great starter book for people getting interested in the field influence is also a great starter book for people getting interest in the field many times you're really influence and you change your career they're really powerful powerful book and then undertalked about one is a lumpy author Robert Frank who wrote Darwin economy and he talks more about kind of status and social norms and how this drives a lot of our our Behavior so I would recommend Robert Frank as an author and Darwin economy what's another favorite podcast other than the one you're currently on science

of change in my actually podcast so a little self-promotion we interview product leads and talk about what they've done in their product and then the other one is no stupid questions so this is by the Freakonomics Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth come together and just answer questions about Behavior change what's a favorite recent movie or TV show so I love the rehearsal this is yeah so it's basically where you native Builders rehearsing life and I think you know Sports is so obvious you want to practice I just started ping pong lessons actually like I'm doing the same stroke for the net for an hour but like in life we don't rehearse as much like you know we I don't write an email a hundred times and then practice sending it and so I think there's probably an opportunity for us all to learn some lessons from that have you seen Nathan for you his other show I have yeah that rehearsal was just so

compelling and I'm not usually somebody watching me yes this was like mind-blowing I I loved it I actually like Nathan For You better so that was interesting okay I'll I'll uh give another what a weird show but I love it okay next what is a favorite interview question that you like to ask so interviews four I'll take this interviews for people when we're hiring I would caveat to say so interviews actually we know don't predict job performance so very little to no evidence and say interviews will predict how I perform on the job and so yeah so we use you know skilled assessments and trials and ways to predict job performance but interviews are good at predicting affinity and culture fit and so if you want to ask a question about that you know one of my favorite questions is just what is it a personality trait that defines you so really one that you are feel the strength but that also you know can be

seen as something your work talking to improve yeah so for me I may be confident but that may mean that I'm not listening and so we have really strong personality people are really quick at answering this question they really know the thing that they do good but also can hurt them and I find that it it helps understand a person's a little bit easier and faster last question who else in the industry do you most respect as a thought leader so I don't know if people will know him but Chris York so he is a behavioral scientist designer just really just know I would go to Chris and ask him a question if he has done a full research just accidentally had you know in the last year and done full research on the question has a very thoughtful answer and yeah yeah Chris York wins for me amazing have not heard of him we'll look him up Kristen thank you so much for being here I feel like you're going

to change a lot of people's behaviors you're going to break barriers for a lot of products and there'll be many benefits that come out of our our chat thank you again for doing this wonderful thanks for having me Lenny this is super fun thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode