The Hole in Your Product Team That Keeps Swallowing Users

The Hole in Your Product Team That Keeps Swallowing UsersA new employee engagement platform launched its pilot with a perfect customer. Warm relationship at the CEO level. Company-wide mandate. Strong early results from the users who engaged. One problem: most of the company never touched it. Despite the mandate. Despite the results sitting right there in the data. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] ⁠⁠⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠⁠⁠ https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] ⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] ⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

• 0:15Speaker 00

  A new employee engagement platform had launched its pilot with a perfect customer. Warm relationship at the CEO level, company-wide mandate, strong early results from the users who engaged. Only problem, most of the company never touched it or heard of it. Despite the mandate, despite the results sitting right there in the data, nobody had designed for the behavior of actually opening the app.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  So whose job was it to design for this? That person hadn't actually been hired yet. Behavioral design sits at the intersection of psychology, user experience, and systems thinking. A behavioral designer's job is to understand not just what users do in your product, but why they do it. And then to build experiences that work with human psychology rather than alongside it and hopes for the best. The distinction from user experience is real. A UX designer asks, is this product usable? A behavioral designer asks, will anyone actually use it? Both answers matter enormously and they're both different questions. Only one of them is being asked on most product teams.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  There's a behavior model called BJ Fogg's Behavior Model. It's a useful way to see the gap. A behavior happens when motivation, ability, and a prompt converge at the right moment. Miss any one of those three and the behavior simply doesn't happen. Most product teams invest heavy in ability, making things easier, and prompts, notifications, tools, tips, nudges. Motivation gets discussed in brand meetings and then forgotten when the sprint starts. And motivation, it turns out, is the only one of three that changes completely when you ask someone to do something genuinely hard. TikTok, for example, and Duolingo have achieved something remarkable.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  TikTok is among the most engaging apps ever built. Duolingo's 60-day retention rate sits at around 18.5%, roughly 400% higher than the average for self-help apps. These are Herculean feats of product design, and I promise you, each was accomplished with the help of many highly-trained behavioral designers working full-time on exactly those problems. And their job, while extraordinarily difficult, it's still easier than the one I've spent my career on. Here's why. When your product lives entirely on a screen, you control the environment, you control the prompts, the rewards, the friction, the timing. A Duolingo user who opens up the app is already inside the experience.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  Your only job is to keep them there. The products I've designed for needed something far more ambitious. A health app accompanying the launch of a major weight loss drug. Games asking patients to manage chronic illness, to change what they ate, how they moved, how they thought about their own bodies. The screen was just a starting point. The real work happened out of the user's life, where you control nothing, nada, not their mood, not their couch, not their spouse asking what's for dinner, not 15 years of not doing the thing you've asked them to do. You've got a lot of things there that you need to figure out. The gap between what the product asked for and what the user's actual day looks like

• 3:45Speaker 00

  is where most behavior change products fail, and it's where behavioral design either earns its keep or it doesn't. TikTok uses these insights to keep users scrolling indefinitely. What if you use them to help create lasting value for your users, much like TikTok does? Failed conversions are a behavioral problem. A user who has every intention of upgrading, but never does, isn't confused about paying the price or your pricing page. Something in the design at that moment failed to bring motivation, ability, and prompt together. A behavioral designer knows what that something is and how to test it, how to figure it out.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Feature abandonment is a behavioral problem. When a company invests in building something and then watches analytics show that 80% of users never find it, that it's not a discoverability failure. It's a motivation failure. The feature never answered a question, "Why do I want to do this?" in a way that the user's brain found compelling. Churn is a behavioral problem, too. Users don't churn because they dislike your product. They churn because returning to it stopped feeling worth it. And worth it is an entirely psychological calculation that your product either wins or loses dozens of times before the user finally cancels their subscription. These costs compound.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  A modest improvement in conversion rate across a large user base is not a modest improvement in revenue. When a company doesn't have a behavioral designer, behavioral design doesn't stop happening. It just happens accidentally or coincidentally. Someone on the product team makes a gut call about how a commitment screen should read. An HR manager picks a wellness platform because the sales demo is good. An obsolete designs a compliance checklist that makes perfect logical sense that nobody ever completes. These are all behavioral interventions. And they were, they were, they just weren't good design. They just, they just weren't designed by anyone with the knowledge to do it well. They weren't good enough.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  The cost of accidental behavioral design are diffuse, which is part of why they're so easy to ignore. No single decision looks expensive. But churn that runs two points higher than it should, a conversion rate that never quite hits the benchmark, a compliance program with chronic participation gaps. These things add up to a number that would justify a very good hire. The question is, what that person actually looks like? So if you're trying to find someone, here are some tips of what to look for. Behavioral designers tend to arrive from one of very few directions. Academic psychology, UX research, game design, or public health.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  What they share is a working knowledge of behavioral science. And the practical ability, the practical ability to translate that into a product or organizational decisions. The best ones think of themselves as advocates. They are the user's representative in the room when decisions are being made. Asking whether a given feature or process serves the person it's designed for. Or is it just for company metrics? That kind of thinking keeps products honest. It keeps workplaces functional. And as it turns out, honest products and functional workplaces are also more profitable ones. The behavioral challenges your product faces are definitely solvable. Someone just needs to be the right person who, whose job it is to solve those problems, get to the crux.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  If your team isn't ready for that conversation, you need to make sure they are ready. And if it's something where you just need a little bit of outside help, that's a place where I might be able to jump in and help. So if you need some outside helpers, some coaching, reach out to me and I'm happy to help provide that coaching for you. That's going to do it for this episode. I hope that you enjoyed it. If you have a topic you want us to discuss, learn more at agiledad.com. I'd love to hear from you. And as always, we encourage you to stay healthy, stay well, and stay agile, my friends. Until next time, do take care. Bye now.