Have you ever thrown a party? Was it a successful one? Did everyone enjoy themselves? What was the highlight of it? In retrospect, what did you do? Now assemble all the experiences you had at that party or any other party for instance. Because you are about to throw another one….
You’ve started this job in a new city, and trying hard to blend in the ecosystem of your office, but unfortunately, it has been a dead-end. Then it strikes you, throwing a party would be a great opportunity to know and to make a great impression on your boss and colleagues. So without any second thought, you invited everyone in your office for a party at your place, this weekend. But there’s a wrinkle, you forgot that it’s already Thursday. And now you’ve got only one day to prepare for a party.
What are you going to do?
It’s time for you to look at this problem with the eyes of a UX designer
Like I have said earlier that “ design is solving problems within constraints”, and the first step would be to identify the problem here, which is quite trivial.
To throw a party that everyone can enjoy
And the constraints, that you have only one day to prepare for a party, the fact that you know nothing about the likes and dislikes of your guests. This scenario is similar to that in which a client asks you to build something in short notice, that a third party can enjoy.
Ideally, the first step begins with user research, in which you try to understand the user as a whole by implementing certain research methods. Mental model has a critical role to play in all this. But what happens when you have limited information and time, making it almost impossible for you to conduct user research. In such a case there’s only one thing that you can rely on to create a satisfying user experience, and that is Behavioral Science.
In design, it’s important to focus on what the users do rather than what they say. Because that is where the real problem lies.
For eg., Apple conducted a test in which it called few users to be a part of product testing in Apple’s showroom. Where, the users were asked to tell pick a color that was looking the best on the iPhone, to that many people voted for a light blue model. Later when they were asked that they can take a model with them, all of them went for the black model. That was completely different from what they said.
In my previous article where I discussed how the adoption of any product/service is completely dependent on the mental models of user and designer. They have to be on the same page to make the product successful. And that’s exactly what user research is all about, in user research, the designer has to understand the mental models of different users and then tweak the design accordingly. The process seems to be quite tiresome, and it actually is, but what if I tell you that there are certain default settings in the user’s mental model which can be hacked to be of designer’s advantage.
These default settings are known as Cognitive Biases.
A ‘cognitive bias’ is an error in human thinking which impacts on how we make decisions — a blind spot in our understanding of the world.
This can be used by the designer, to make the users adopt a product in a way intended by the designer (An inception of sorts). This is how behavioral science works, it’s similar to a many-one function. In which the mental models of different users come in sync with the designer’s mental model.
Here are a few examples of certain cognitive biases.
1. Framing effect — Framing of inquiries can influence responses
2. Confirmation Bias — Humans tend to only look for evidence confirming their hypothesis
3. Hindsight Bias — Humans always find reasons for their actions in the past
4. Social Desirability Bias — Humans tend to speak in a way that makes them look good
5. Sunk Cost Fallacy — Humans tend to stick on longer to their losses than they should
6. Serial-Position Effect — Humans tend to value items at the end/beginning of lists more
7. Illusion of transparency — Humans tend to overestimate the extent to which others know what they are thinking
8. Clustering Bias — Humans tend to find patterns amidst randomness when there are really none
9. Implicit Bias — Humans have implicit associations about certain groups and their behavior
10. Fundamental Attribution Error — Humans tend to attribute errors to internal characteristics even when it is situational/caused by external forces
Coming back to the party problem, since you don’t have the time to examine the likes and dislikes of the guests, and clearly your experience of a good party might be different from theirs. And that is why you can use the tool of cognitive biases to govern things the way you want.
A classic example of that would be the power of choice:
People love choice! Ask anyone if they’d prefer a smaller number of options or lots and everyone will say the more the better. This is very ingrained in our culture, and that’s because we believe that choice equals freedom, and therefore the more choices we have, the more freedom we have.
When you have lots of options you are responsible for what happens to you. Bad choices make people regret only if they bear responsibility. Although adding options makes it easier to choose something we’ll really like, it also makes it easier for us to regret choices that don’t live up to our expectations. Greater choices equal greater opportunity for buyer's remorse, and we are prone to regret aversion. We do our best to avoid it because it feels bad.
There are many products and services to help nudge us towards our goals — whether that’s making healthier eating choices, developing better financial habits, or maintaining a more active lifestyle. Yet creating products that successfully accomplish these objectives can be immensely difficult. Designers are realizing that traditional design methods are not always enough to effectively tackle these complex behavioral challenges. That is why behavioral science is a game-changer.
Humans are lazy, they want the product to get their job done, and the experience of this is directly proportional to how humane does the product behave.
Why is Alexa is one of the most brilliant product in the market right now? Of course, it can perform a plethora of operations such as playing music to most of the IoT applications, but its most intriguing feature is its interaction. It’s the ability to exhibit human-like behavior. That is why it gives a feeling of a person and not a product. All of this comes under the umbrella of interaction design.
What’s the reason that Uber has successfully taken on the transport business, despite having players like Lyft and Ola in the same market. The reason is that because Uber invested a lot in behavioral and cognitive science. It ran trials to estimate how the waiting time affected the user’s behavior (cancellation of rides) and worked on to improve that experience.
Speaking of humanizing experiences, have you looked into the clap feature of Medium? It has tried to capture the experience of clapping in a virtual way, for every clap you make you have to click the button, and the maximum no. of claps doesn’t exceed 50, which in reality is also true, there’s a time period for which applause can go on. Don’t believe me? well, why don’t you press that clap button and find it out :3