Product Design & Consumer Behaviour
Hacking the design process with multi-disciplinary thinking.
If you’re a designer or product manager, you’ll want to dig deep into the user journey. Learning about consumer behaviour and psychology can become a magnifying glass on the user. I studied consumer behaviour in business school, and it helped me align a product with business objectives and psychology.
Getting to Know Each Other
A UXUI designer and a marketer walk into a bar.
As a conversation picks up, the two realize that they have a lot in common. Understanding people is at the core of their disciplines, but they have slightly different perspectives.
The designer raves about creating an appealing user experience that gleams with fluidity, and efficiency. Their ideal is to build an ecosystem of features that help a user perform a task or goal.
Instead of users, the marketer has eyes for consumers— people that make decisions to satisfy needs. As consumers make the executive decision to put their money forward, knowledge of how consumers behave can make or break a product.
For a product that keeps people coming back— the product must add value, and be tailored to their target user. Designers and marketers need to ask:
- “How does design and marketing fit together?”
- “What does UX improve in designing for consumers?”
The Consumer Behaviour Perspective
Consumer Behaviour is a field that combines psychology, marketing, anthropology, behavioural economics and more. It’s a melding pot for perception, thoughts, and feelings that influence behaviour towards with products and companies.
It asks: How does a target demographic interact with a business? What is a consumer’s “why?”, and how can we align the “why” of our product? With this lens think about how a product is perceived based on its marketing and design.
Psychology principles and design is inseparable in UX. While this emphasizes interactions between people and product, it creates a blind-spot. Designers need to think broader. If a product does not have business or consumer context, we lose crucial story-telling and uniqueness in a competitive market. Tunnel visioning on psychology prevents a holistic understanding of a user and the external forces a product/business faces.
Consumer behaviour is a multi-disciplinary approach with an edge. Beyond people and product, it includes business while maintaining a context of cultural, societal and economic forces. It’s a refreshing combination of research, empathy, with a touch of creativity.
As a business student, the consumer behaviour class served as a foundational perspective to tackling product design for the first time.
Hacking Product Design with Consumer Behaviour
Let’s dive into an example of a design that uses consumer behaviour principles as a foundation.
This is Ecovillage, a hackathon project made with 4 teammates during nwHacks. I relied on a love for Medium articles and my business to carry me through my first hackathon. It’s a carbon-footprint tracking app that encourages lifestyle changes and habit formation.
Product Overview
Inspired by real-life, ecovillages are planned communities with the goal of sustainability in four dimensions: social, economic, environment and cultural. Sustainability is viewed holistically, and our product touches on all aspects to encourage prosocial behavioural change by tracking a user’s carbon-footprint.
Problem Statement
How might we reduce the abstractness & cognitive load in thinking about carbon footprints?
Bonus: Add a viable business model.
Users?
Consumers (rather than users) echoed in our minds during the project. My teammates all had a foundation in business. We spoke a common language. Technically, what we actually defined were target markets.
Consumer behaviour acted as a “stand-in” for user research, as time was a limitation in the hackathon. The key difference is that we looked at our product as a business. We can shift our perspective to a product as something more than “just something a person uses”, into something that is integrated with the world around it.
I’ll refer to consumers and users as the same people, for the rest of the article.
Addressing Consumer Behaviour with Features
Ex 1. Loss/Gain Framing—Visualize Abstract Outcomes
Problem:
Back to the overarching problem statement, it’s hard for humans to feel the global magnitude of climate change. You are told that there is 716 million tons of CO2 being produced by Canada per year. There’s no way for us to interpret that in a meaningful way. Psychic numbing occurs when the problem is too abstract or large for us to comprehend.
Feature:
The app includes a live graphic of your “ecovillage”, and its health reflected the carbon emissions resulting from lifestyle choices. The more progress you make, the more luscious your village becomes. If you’re on a bad trend, the village begins decaying.
Consumer Behaviour:
This draws from behavioural economics and psychology. There’s an incredible HBR article that mentions an experiment with a recycling program. In short, the experiment tried to frame “loss” and “gain” messages, to encourage recycling. The results? People don’t like experiencing loss. When met with tangibility and data, users can then take action to mitigate loss. People like to experience risk in gain, and it’s an emotive process. Both of these benefit from visualizing and framing abstractness in a way that pertains to what action you want a user to take.
As a result, Ecovillage can increase a user’s understanding, and willingness to change their behaviour.
Ex. 2. Normative Influence — User see, user do
Problem:
Subconsciously, people look over their shoulder to see what others are doing. This is why the bystander effect exists, where matching group behaviour can be powerful, and dangerous at the same time. This is normative influence, or how norms affect what we do. How do we change behaviour for the better, within the constraints of a digital product?
Feature:
Ecovillage compares a user to others within the area, and their friends. When you exceeded the average carbon emissions for similar people in your area, it contextualizes your behaviour against what others are doing. This is important to our own personal goals, and self-consistency. It’s a mix of celebrating your sustainability goals, while being a social reminder if you haven’t been doing your part.
Consumer Behaviour:
From a mix of psychology and sociology, normative influence is huge in behavioural change at a micro and macro level. People we relate to, and those that we compare ourselves to, influence us. In-groups are our friends and communities, these are the people we signal similar values to, and feel a sense of belonging. While dissociative out-groups are those that are outside our circle. It’s the instinct from the early days of humanity, where the “us vs. them” mentality is a powerful motivational force.
A user behaviour’s can be determined by how they perceive other users to behave with the product.
Ex 3. Go Beyond Competitive Analysis — Market while Designing
Problem:
How does your product compare in the market? You can advertise shiny forks made of unicorn ivory and vibranium — if consumers want soup, they’d go with a spoon instead.
It’s common in product design to do a competitive analysis. But how about an entire business model? How can you align what your business does with what your user/consumer wants?
Solution:
In a product road-map, think about the features and how it aligns with your business goals. Ecovillage took a step ahead and looked at comparable carbon-tracking apps, and a common theme was the level of resistance it takes to motivate a user to track their carbon footprint by hand. So, my team members added a Chrome Extension that would pull from your shopping card, and we automated a lot of the process. We wanted to market the app as a way to signify to yourself and others that you are making an environmental impact.
Consumer Behaviour:
Designers can think about the “Purchase Funnel”, a concept used in marketing.
When you design for a consumer, you’re also thinking about how to attract them to selecting an app. Designing for a consumer means that you’re thinking more about the process that got them there in the first place. In an increasingly crowded space for everything from SaaS to video games in an app store, competitive analysis should think about the steps to getting the product to a user’s hands.
The concepts above only scratch the surface of consumer behaviour insights being applied to app design. There’s incredible overlap with psychology in design, as consumer behaviour is rooted in psychological study. Knowing these principles gives an hidden edge to the product design.
Marketing and Design… a Never-ending Love Story?
When we marry consumer behaviour with design, the product benefits from business thinking, research, and holistic perspectives. It gives the added “human touch” that extends beyond the product, towards companies and their macro context.
Designers have the craftsmanship and empathy for human-centered solutions. Marketers connect these solutions to needs — with the goal of measurable outcomes and relationships for a business. They’re both storytellers that can build connection between people, product and business.
This article isn’t about “applying consumer behaviour” everywhere you go. It’s in following a similar philosophy for drawing holistically from multiple disciplines. Beyond iterating designs or marketing messages, we should iterate on entire perspectives and mental models.
This is how stories, love and life continue: through iterating and drawing from the things around us.
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For an academic reading: How to SHIFT Consumer Behaviors to be More Sustainable: A Literature Review and Guiding Framework
