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I'm a UI designer, and my experience of implementing 'nudges' is that sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. The reality is that the way people make de

I'm a UI designer, and my experience of implementing 'nudges' is that sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. The reality is that the way people make decisions is stupidly complex, because people have stupidly complex lives. Some tweak will work great for one project, and do nothing on the next one. It's hard to even say if it was the nudge that worked the first time. I really view nudge theory as one of many ideas of things you can try, a tool in a toolkit. But the only tool I really feel confident works is the design-test-iterate loop.

solarkraft 4y ago
I'd love to read more about this. Do you have examples?
- JusticeJuice 4y ago
  I was working on a fintech project (gonna be vague as it's not yet released). The legal team told us we couldn't use default choices anywhere, as it could count as giving financial advice. Fair enough. So we designed the onboarding, and there was this choice the user had to make before we could create their account. During testing, we found people were getting really stuck on this choice, to the point of giving up. The choice actually had quite low impact, but it was really technical - a lot of people just didn't understand it. Which makes sense our users weren't financial experts, which was our target user. This choice was a new concept for the market, so we couldn't relate it to other products they might know. The options inside also had quite a lot of detail when you started digging into them, detail we had to provide if somebody went looking for it. Our testers would hit this choice, get stuck, feel the urge to research this decision, get overwhelmed, give up. We spent so long trying to reframe this choice, explaining it better in a nice succinct way, we even tried to get this feature removed entirely - but nothing stuck. Eventually after lots of discussion with legal we were allowed to have a 'base' choice, which the user could optionally change. We tested the new design, and it made a significant difference in conversion rates. Huzzar for nudge theory! Right? Well, maybe. I think it's a bit more complicated. - The new design was faster. There was less screens with simpler choices. It went from a 'pick one of 5' to a 'heres the default, would you like to change it?'. Was it just the speed that made a difference? - The user was not a financial expert, and the company behind the product was. In some sense was the user just thinking 'these guys probably know more than me I'll leave it at that'. Imagine trying to implement this exact change on something the user is an expert in - say like your meal choice in an airplane. I imagine most people would think "How rude choosing for me! I'm an expert in what I feel like eating I want to see all the options". - It had less of a cognitive load. Like the whole onboarding flow was already really complicated, just reducing the overall mental strain to make an account may have just improved the whole experience. E.g. if we had removed decisions earlier in the flow, would this one still have been as big of an issue? We never had time to test it, so I can't say for sure. - Lack of confusion == confidence. For the users who didn't look at the options and took the default, did they just feel more in control and confident because they weren't exposed with unfamiliar terms and choices? They never experienced the urge to research. Like at the surface level this new design worked great, so job done. But it's hard to say definitively it was because of nudge theory. I don't think you can really blindly say "oh yeah defaults == always good" and slap them on every problem - which is why the design-test-iterate loop is so important.
  - civilized 4y ago
    Very interesting. One question: > The new design was faster. There was less screens with simpler choices. It went from a 'pick one of 5' to a 'heres the default, would you like to change it?'. Was it just the speed that made a difference? If you're just going from "pick one of 5" to "pick one of 5 but there's a default", I wouldn't expect one or the other to be "faster". Was the new design more different than that? As for the rest, I think the beneficial features of the design are predicted by nudge theory. "Providing a credible default reduces cognitive load and confusion on the path to a decision, as the user can just trust the defaults have been set up reasonably" has always been the theory for why nudges work.
    - JusticeJuice 4y ago
      The first version was a screen with 5 choices, and detail about each choice that you'd have to scroll through. The second version was a simple "We've set this up for you" screen with two options, continue or customise. If you hit customise, you'd get shown the original five choice screen. What I mean by it being faster is you could get to the next step of the process with both reading less text, and seeing less choices (just two buttons not 5). Cause if you just slapped the continue button (which most people did), you'd skip the whole explanation of all the choices.
  - richdougherty 4y ago
    I think all of those things you listed are kinds of nudges. They are changes in the "choice architecture" that steer the user to an action. In the context of government, a nudge means influencing people to choose something desirable, while still leaving open the option for people to choose what they want (hence preserving liberty). In contrast, a non-nudge solution would be a law or regulation that forces people into the desirable option or perhaps a tax on a certain choice. In your UI, an example of a non-nudge solution would be removing the other options, effectively forcing their decision. Another example of a non-nudge would be charging different fees depending on their decision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#Definition_of_a_nudge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#Definition_of_a_n... "A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not."

solarkraft 4y ago

I'd love to read more about this. Do you have examples?

JusticeJuice 4y ago
I was working on a fintech project (gonna be vague as it's not yet released). The legal team told us we couldn't use default choices anywhere, as it could count as giving financial advice. Fair enough. So we designed the onboarding, and there was this choice the user had to make before we could create their account. During testing, we found people were getting really stuck on this choice, to the point of giving up. The choice actually had quite low impact, but it was really technical - a lot of people just didn't understand it. Which makes sense our users weren't financial experts, which was our target user. This choice was a new concept for the market, so we couldn't relate it to other products they might know. The options inside also had quite a lot of detail when you started digging into them, detail we had to provide if somebody went looking for it. Our testers would hit this choice, get stuck, feel the urge to research this decision, get overwhelmed, give up. We spent so long trying to reframe this choice, explaining it better in a nice succinct way, we even tried to get this feature removed entirely - but nothing stuck. Eventually after lots of discussion with legal we were allowed to have a 'base' choice, which the user could optionally change. We tested the new design, and it made a significant difference in conversion rates. Huzzar for nudge theory! Right? Well, maybe. I think it's a bit more complicated. - The new design was faster. There was less screens with simpler choices. It went from a 'pick one of 5' to a 'heres the default, would you like to change it?'. Was it just the speed that made a difference? - The user was not a financial expert, and the company behind the product was. In some sense was the user just thinking 'these guys probably know more than me I'll leave it at that'. Imagine trying to implement this exact change on something the user is an expert in - say like your meal choice in an airplane. I imagine most people would think "How rude choosing for me! I'm an expert in what I feel like eating I want to see all the options". - It had less of a cognitive load. Like the whole onboarding flow was already really complicated, just reducing the overall mental strain to make an account may have just improved the whole experience. E.g. if we had removed decisions earlier in the flow, would this one still have been as big of an issue? We never had time to test it, so I can't say for sure. - Lack of confusion == confidence. For the users who didn't look at the options and took the default, did they just feel more in control and confident because they weren't exposed with unfamiliar terms and choices? They never experienced the urge to research. Like at the surface level this new design worked great, so job done. But it's hard to say definitively it was because of nudge theory. I don't think you can really blindly say "oh yeah defaults == always good" and slap them on every problem - which is why the design-test-iterate loop is so important.
- civilized 4y ago
  Very interesting. One question: > The new design was faster. There was less screens with simpler choices. It went from a 'pick one of 5' to a 'heres the default, would you like to change it?'. Was it just the speed that made a difference? If you're just going from "pick one of 5" to "pick one of 5 but there's a default", I wouldn't expect one or the other to be "faster". Was the new design more different than that? As for the rest, I think the beneficial features of the design are predicted by nudge theory. "Providing a credible default reduces cognitive load and confusion on the path to a decision, as the user can just trust the defaults have been set up reasonably" has always been the theory for why nudges work.
  - JusticeJuice 4y ago
    The first version was a screen with 5 choices, and detail about each choice that you'd have to scroll through. The second version was a simple "We've set this up for you" screen with two options, continue or customise. If you hit customise, you'd get shown the original five choice screen. What I mean by it being faster is you could get to the next step of the process with both reading less text, and seeing less choices (just two buttons not 5). Cause if you just slapped the continue button (which most people did), you'd skip the whole explanation of all the choices.
- richdougherty 4y ago
  I think all of those things you listed are kinds of nudges. They are changes in the "choice architecture" that steer the user to an action. In the context of government, a nudge means influencing people to choose something desirable, while still leaving open the option for people to choose what they want (hence preserving liberty). In contrast, a non-nudge solution would be a law or regulation that forces people into the desirable option or perhaps a tax on a certain choice. In your UI, an example of a non-nudge solution would be removing the other options, effectively forcing their decision. Another example of a non-nudge would be charging different fees depending on their decision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#Definition_of_a_nudge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#Definition_of_a_n... "A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not."