Dan Ariely - Hacking Human Nature for Good: A Practical Guide to Changing Human Behavior

We have this new product, but were not sure how to price it. How do we get the most users but still get paid?

We asked our users what they wanted and they clearly said they wanted this feature, but active use hasnt improved. What now?

We have a good core base of users, but they arent referring us to friends. How do we get more of them to love us?

As a product manager, designer, marketer or engineer, you have undoubtedly asked yourself one of the above questions. In order to figure out the answers to these questions, the marketer or engineer may dive into the site analytics or do SQL queries on actions. The product manager may call a few users in for a quick user research session. Sometimes, there is a cross-functional squat team created. This group will sit together in a room and brainstorm potential solutions until the most reasonable and feasible idea is agreed upon by a majority (or at least by the decision maker).

Sound familiar?

As people who create experiences for other people, we work incredibly hard to create and improve these experiences. Sometimes, it feels like trial-and-error, a series of guesses and checks. No matter how many blog posts by successful founders you read, customers you talk with, frameworks you deploy, it never feels like there is an easy answer.Thats because it is hard. In order to create a product that people use and love, we have to really understand our user. We have to understand how this person makes decisions. We must have a sense of what motivates them to try something new. We need to know their world well enough to create things and experiences that would improve it.

To make things even more difficult, these users have busy lives. They are preoccupied with their jobs, their friends, their kids, their social media feeds. Just like you, they feel like there is never enough time to do everything they want to. It would be nice to think that the user cares about us as much as we care about them. Is this really the case? Of course not. But somehow, were hoping to create an experience they use every day, maybe even multiple times a day.

Given these challenges, how should product managers, marketers, designers and engineers attempt to build experiences that people use and love? Wed like to argue in these books that everyone should take the shortcut. Wait, theres a shortcut? Yes! Theres a shortcut.

Its called Social Science. Academics around the world study how people make decisions. They run controlled studies around choice architecture. They pit two incentive plans against each other, head-to-head. They ponder the true price of free. Information on how your customer makes decisions is being published, debated and refined right now.

And yet...the product manager makes a decision about a feature after talking with only five users. The designer uses their intuition to create a landing page or a sign-up flow. When have you ever heard of a designer being asked if there was current research to support his or her decision to redesign the first page of an application? Have you ever heard a marketer explain his brand positioning proposal using theories of loss aversion?

The likely answer to these questions is that you havent experienced thisyet. Wed like to argue that the current approach to solving product and marketing problems within companies is just irresponsible. Its a colossal waste of time. Every team is reinventing the behavior wheel. Every team is rethinking how to influence behavior and starting from scratch.

The purpose of these workbooks is not to preach the benefits of testing. We assume you know them already and are doing some testing. The purpose of these books is to help you come up with ideas for what to test. The purpose of these workbooks is to help you take the shortcut by making the immense amount of existing knowledge about how your customer makes decisions easily accessible.

To do this, we combed through the academic journals that no one but academics enjoys reading and pulled out the most relevant research.

Things to keep in mind:

• This is not an exhaustive review of the research; it is, however, a nice summary of principles that you can test in your product.
• We call this a shortcut. This is not the answer. The academic research provides insights that will help you speed up your development process, but we still encourage you to test new ideas and in particular to test how the different ideas play out in your domain and application.
• These books require thinking (what?!). There is no framework that works every time when it comes to the human mind. Instead, we have to understand the environment and create a specific intervention. This is not drag-and-drop stuff.

After reading these books, you should start viewing yourself as the choice architect at your company. You should take care to shape your users decisions by selecting the environment where the decisions are made, and through the experiences that you create.