Recap from my last blog post:
In Nudge, Richard J. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein essentially posit that there is no such thing as a neutral design, that “everything matters” and that we cannot avoid influencing others decisions. Due to this reality, they propose nudging.
What’s a nudge? A way to affect people’s choices toward better outcomes without removing any options or changing their economic incentives (e..g restrict or ban options and you can’t put obstacles in their way). For this type of approach (the nudge), the authors came up with a crafty term “libertarian paternalism” and it brings some interesting ideas related to design.
Within government, there are those who feel government should not step in – they should not remove choices for people. Essentially, they believe that people can make their own choices. The Republican motto is “Maximize Choices!”
What about designers?
But designers are not Republican-centered, nor are they Democrat-centered who are into equitable approaches and choice elimination (“One Size Fits All”). Designers are human-centered, doing what’s best for the user. And what’s best for the users – often isn’t obvious. We must understanding how people think and design accordingly.
Here are 3 examples of how knowing how humans think affects our design work in different phases of the user-centered design process:
- User testing: if we know anything from user testing, people don’t often know what they want, they have a tough time articulating what they need, and can be easily biased if you don’t select the right type of people. Interviewing is such an art and science (and quite amazing to witness when it’s done well). Avoiding leading questions is a big concern as to not skew answers.
- Design planning: we often overestimate what we can deliver in time (this is called “the planning fallacy”)
- Design: When we design forms, for example, we often choose a default. It is found that people tend to go with defaults set more often than changing what’s presented (this is called the “status quo bias”).
Fuddling through 401k enrollment
The other day I was trying to sign up for my 401k. I had joined my company a while back but totally forgot to enroll. Did they set me in some default? No. I was not enrolled at all. So I went through the trouble of signing up and finally I was given the option on how to allocate my deposits (which stocks to put the money into on repeat).
Now, the system did not give any defaults – nor had I picked anything before. So what was the best option?
With a libertarian paternalism approach, we would put ourselves in the person choosing. Thinking through investing, a typical person would want to choose stocks that performed well in the past, have a low expense ratio, and are projected by a reputable agency (Morningstar for example) to continue performing well. By putting ourselves in the user’s shoes we set defaults that are the best option for them – without restricting other options or changing incentives to make them change.
Anchoring on what we know
None of these defaults were presented to me and in the end, I had to call my wife and brainstorm on what to pick. I relied on another “anchoring heuristic” and picked stocks which at the very least perform as good as the S&P 500 index.
This personal example just illustrates how important it is to know how people think and to nudge appropriately.