Nudge

Subtle hints can affect users’ decisions!

What is Nudge?

People tend to make decisions unconsciously. Small cues or context changes can encourage users to make a certain decision without forcing them. This is typically done through priming (Previous stimuli influence users’ decision), default option(Users tend not to change an established behavior), salience and perceived variety.

Image from google

Let’s understand with examples

Amazon uses status quo bias to encourage behaviours that aren’t necessary to the user’s advantage.

Status Quo Bias

We tend not to change an established behavior unless the incentive to change is compelling.

Here, the 5–10% discount might be compelling enough for people to onboard this new subscription model and change their behavior.

Airbnb nudges you to add a date and number of guests instead of forcing those filter, during your search for a place to stay.

Nudge. Don’t Push.

Consider nudging users in the right direction before forcing steps.

Two things are required in the case of filters though:

1. Users need to understand the benefits quickly to have an internal motivation to act and
2. The default results must provide enough value.

Just keep in mind that users don’t want more filters, they want better results.

Choice and it’s Players

Each time your product is giving a choice to your users, you are implementing a Choice Architecture. Most of the systems are designed by experts and experts tend to review thoroughly the options and come up with the best possible choice architecture for their own situation.They are well aware of the context, have deep knowledge of the problem space and they want to maximize the possibilities for their users. Moreover, we often assume everyone is like us and will behave like us when faced with these choices (especially true in teams lacking diversity or trust).

We, as product folks, are often in this category: we are subject-matter experts in an area (we are in love with the problem-space after all!). We also have goals for our products, for instance objectives and key results. We also love to measure things and behaviours and supplement our qualitative research with hard evidence.

User testing and UI design are powerful anti-bias processes that help the team realize this mistake: nothing is more enlightening that watching a user struggling to make a choice that seems easy and evident for the product team…

Your users are not static personas. As they start using your product, the choice architecture should support their growing understanding of your product. It maye be helpful to think about your users with a videogame analogy.

1. Newbies/New users have little context and lots of trust. They decided to purchase and use your product after all!
2. As users better understand your product, they acquire more context about their own needs as well as about what your product can and can not do.
3. Power users’ needs are different: they have mastered the key principles and are experts in their domain.

Feedback

The choice architecture for your product is absolutely essential to remove friction, ensure adoption and usage of your product for new users, experienced users and power-users. As a product manager, you should really consider how to help user graduate from newbies, to experienced user to power-user and not overoptimize for one type of user-experience.

Feedback : how do you handle the evolution of your users skill as they master your product so that you can satisfy all types of users.