Applying behavioral design to digital products

How to develop products that people love to use

The exciting thing about developing digital products is that everything the users see, when they see it, how it is designed, the whole environment where the interactions between users and product take place has to be designed beforehand and is thus 100% controlled and influenced by the design team. At the same time, the way that environment is designed shapes the perception of the users, impacts their decisions and thus their actions.

It’s all about decisions

Every product requires the users to make decisions — but decisions are not made in a vacuum. The way information is presented and in what context have an immense impact on what decisions the users make. That’s why decision architecture is so important, whether it’s in marketing, innovation strategy or product development.

What is Behavioural Design?

Behavioural design brings the knowledge from psychology and behavioral economics to product design. It helps us to understanding why people do what they do, why they sometimes make surprising or irrational decisions, how they make decisions and what drives or motivates them to do something.

Whit the knowledge from behavioral science, we can develop products, services and systems that are aligned to how our brains work. This makes the interactions with theses product more intuitive and enjoyable to use. Users can then achieve their goals more easily and with less cognitive effort as the processes are less confusing or faster, decisions are easier, or generally speaking, reduce the things our brains would struggle with.

What do we need Behavioral Economics for?

Behavioural economics explore how people make decisions. Using behavioral experiments, this field studies what influences people’s thinking in certain situations and helps us to understand the patterns that drive our thinking, how we process information, how we evaluate them and how we make decisions.

Often, our thinking runs on autopilot and we are not aware of what is going on in our brains. Information get processed automatically following…