How To Think About Behavioral Science in Product Design

Why do so many hit products incorporate social interaction? 

Why is it important to find out how your customers are already solving the problem your product is designed to solve? 

Recently, I got a chance to catch up with Jason Hreha, a behavioral scientist and former Global Head of Behavioral Sciences at Walmart, who uses his knowledge of human behavior to build better products. 

In our chat, he shared how a behavioral scientist sees the world of product design and what actually works when you’re building products for humans.

Watch or read below.

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Jason Hreha:                So I have a weird name it's Jason Hreha. It's spelled H-R-E-H-A. So I currently work at Wal-Mart. I co-lead behavioral science group that we have. It's an applied behavioral science group who work across the entire organization on in-store projects, HR projects and on digital projects.

Amy Jo Kim:                 Fantastic, what a great challenge.

Jason Hreha:                It's great yeah.

Amy Jo Kim:                 So can you tell us about a project that you worked on along the way, were looking back on if it really taught you lessons that you're leveraging now in your work with Wal-Mart?

Jason Hreha:                My first full time job as being Head of Product was this company called rally.org. So we were a donation platform for non-profits and political campaigns. We were actually, when I was there, we were the largest payment processor for political campaigns in the country. So, if you were running a congressional campaign or going for a local judgeship or whatever it may be, we were probably the ones actually on the back end processing all of your payments and we actually were building an entirely new platform to allow non-profits and small political campaigns to really run all their email marketing, all of their, build donation pages really quickly, almost in a Tumblr style, but this was the first time ever where it was like, cool, we're building a brand new product. We're building this platform from the ground up, how do we do this?

Jason Hreha:                What I really learned during that job, which has really stuck with me on every job I've done ever since that is its super important to look at what people are currently doing. I think a lot of times people in our field try and get too creative and a little bit too crazy and they try and reinvent the wheel or just come up with shockingly cool new stuff, but I think it's very important to understand that we humans, we're just very good at using things that we're familiar with. Of course, we're not good at using things we're not familiar with. So many different products try and do just cool, creative, wild stuff and it just doesn't get taken up by users because when the user comes into our application, they look at it, they don't really have any mental model for understand what should they do, what's the next step and so on and so forth.

Jason Hreha:                Really, in that job I was really, I had some kind of pretty creative, wild ideas early on during my tenure there and as we would come up with the designs and as I would play around or look at the designs and show them that people won't play around with these cool, creative ideas I got a lot of feedback. People were just obviously very confused when I would quick user experience, or user interviewing sessions. Even just casual ones with friends and acquaintances and it became very obvious to me that the best way to build the first version of the product was to do some really in depth research around what are people currently familiar with, what are the popular apps and products out there that they're using? What are current habits? What does their world look like? Their mental model of the world look like and then fit into that or borrow heavily patterns that are used within the current applications and products that they use and bring those into your product.

Jason Hreha:                A lot of times people have bad UX, bad usability and they're like, nobody wants our product. We should just pivot and do something completely different, when it's like well actually you use these bizzarro design patterns and tried to get too creative, when actually for your first version just do something dead simple that everybody can understand and that you know everybody understands so that you can actually understand whether or not you're measuring demand. Whether or not people actually want this thing.

Amy Jo Kim:                 Let's talk about blind spots. It sounds like that's a blind spot that you observe to make this problem. They have a blind spot.

Jason Hreha:                All the time.

Amy Jo Kim:                 So what are some of the other really common blind spots as you work with teams, as you engage with people all over Wal-Mart? I know you also help out teams just in the broader industry, you're a real fixture in our industry. So what are some of the other things that you see teams, mistakes they make, blind spots they have that you would love to help them overcome and that you will help them overcome?

Jason Hreha:                I don't think this is particularly a Wal-Mart problem. But I'd say the biggest problem that I've seen over the years in general working with clients is not perfecting the basics. A lot of product teams will, they'll come to me and they'll say, we're building up this new suite of features, we've gotten a lot of feedback that we need to build out, whatever it is, group messaging or whatever the feature may be. I go and I do an audit of the product before I engage with the new client to understand what's going on there. What do I think the problems are and so on and so forth.

Jason Hreha:                When I do a lot of these audits, it just becomes very obvious that actually the UX of the core features, let's say it is a messaging app. Let's say the messages don't go through a lot of the time. For some reason there are just bandwidth issues or let's say the UX is a little bit weird for sending emojis or something like that, is just a core part of messaging. Let's say it's just really hard to sync your address book and find your friends. These are the core features, the ground zero, you better get this foundation perfect before you move on to the higher levels. A lot of these things just companies do not perfect before they move on. Especially if you're a founder and you're working on this product every day or you're the lead product person for a product, you're thinking about it every day. It's really boring actually to think about, oh cool, let's make the address book sync really sleek and simple and oh man, it's not quite there yet, let's spend another two sprints on it or like, oh man this emoji finder, it's good enough, let's just move on to the next thing.

Jason Hreha:                No, no, no, don't move on to the next thing. If those things are not good and don't work perfectly every time, get those things. Perfect those things before you do anything else, because those are the core elements that are going to drive the whole system and if you don't really just make those things perfect before moving on to new things, you're just shooting yourself in the foot.

Amy Jo Kim:                 That's such an excellent point and totally reinforces our whole framework in game thinking. So you and I have discovered that coming from different angles and I think it's incredibly important lesson, especially for young teams.

Amy Jo Kim:                 What do you wish people knew about behavior science that they get wrong, that they get mistaken?

Jason Hreha:                I think people inappropriately look at behavioral science as these little hacks. I think that this hacker mindset, or shopping hacks, weight loss hacks, this hacker mindset has infected our field a bit where people see behavioral science as, oh you want to get better conversion, here's six tricks that you can use. You can use loss aversion, you can use social proof, blah, blah, blah. I think that that way of thinking about behavioral science is completely wrong. A lot of the stuff that, our understanding of behavior is built in this weird piecemeal way throughout the years and it creates this folk psychology or this folk understanding of psychology that we all have.

Jason Hreha:                The problem is most of us have not really gone to the scientific literature and looked at why do people actually do what they do? What things do we know help motivation? What things kill motivation? I would say this should be a never ending quest, a never ending process of learning this stuff for people. It shouldn't just be I got Robert [inaudible 00:07:56] books, or the six principles, let me try social proof on my marketing landing page. Oh that didn't work, let me try loss aversion. That's not the way to do it.

Amy Jo Kim:                 Right, I think what you're really getting at here is the difference between features and systems.

Jason Hreha:                Yes.

Amy Jo Kim:                 That was a big topic for us of discussion at Game Thinking Live and continue to be, and a big part of game thinking is thinking in systems versus [inaudible 00:08:24] and you're very much speaking that language.

Jason Hreha:                Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amy Jo Kim:                 As a behavioral scientist, you're very familiar with how behavior is shaped by incentives and rewards.

Jason Hreha:                Sure.

Amy Jo Kim:                 There is a lot of complexity around that. Some of what people are often advised to do is, for example, use a variable reinforcement schedule to keep folks interested, sort of as a hack, as an all purpose hack. You and I have both heard that. Why shouldn't I, so here I am, I'm a product developer, I really want to do a good job, I want to run some smart product experiments. What's the harm in just following that and saying, okay that works good, that gets people's attention. I'm just going to use it here. What's the harm there and then what can I do better? What's the smarter thing to do with variable reinforcement where I'm using it as part of a system rather than us this random feature that's positioned as a silver bullet?

Jason Hreha:                I think that actually knowing that, knowing that variable, that things that are variable, that things that are new, that things that are hard to predict is very attention grabbing and compelling. Knowing that element of perception can be very helpful. From an evolutionary point of view, we don't care about everything equally. We're really predisposed to think, to pay deep attention to certain things. Those things could be food, predators, things that are extremely dangerous, especially things that are dangerous that you can't see like microbes and stuff like that which is where the disgust reaction comes from. When you see a piece of rotting meat and you just feel sick, that is an inbuilt reaction to avoid that thing or spit that thing out or vomit that thing out, right, in order to actually stay away from danger.

Jason Hreha:                But also, we're incredibly, we are social creatures, we evolved in this social environment. Our survival is really based upon understanding other people, gaining their favor, attracting them with mates and so on and so forth. So much of our brain is really built around understanding other people and thinking about other people and getting positive attention from people is incredibly rewarding. If you look, and if you think about just social activity, it's the ultimate variable ratio reinforcement system. A lot of time when you have a conversation with your friend, it's just the same conversation you've had before, it's not all that compelling or not all that rewarding, but every once in a while, the most amazing conversation ever, or your friend tells you something fascinating or interesting and boom, suddenly whoa, jackpot reward.

Jason Hreha:                If you just look at human interaction it's the perfect variable ratio reinforcement system and it's completely natural. This doesn't require an engineer to go in and come up with some amazing reinforcement schedule. This doesn't require an engineer to know the math behind this stuff and think about oh, cool, I'm going to create a continuous ratio reinforcement system and then above that I'm going to actually have this variable ratio reinforcement system that I'm going to build in and then every 50 times you get a jackpot, you don't need to think about that at all. If you just get a bunch of humans together in a system and you get them interacting, you're going to have variability of reward, you're going to have certain jackpot moments that are wild and amazing and fantastic.

Jason Hreha:                If you look at all of the apps that have really taken off and our world changing, from just an engagement usage point of view, they're all social. I don't think it's a surprise. In certain games, of course you have people actually building these specific reinforcement schedules and systems and stuff like that, but in the consumer app world or in the enterprise app world, I think the people that think about these things from more of a higher level, conceptual systems point of view are the ones that do it right.

Amy Jo Kim:                 Let's talk for a moment about how you, as a product leader, as someone working with teams, working on innovation initiatives, how you think about collecting and then synthesizing and taking action on feedback as you're bringing new ideas to life. Feedback comes from many different sources. You get feedback from potential customers when you're testing new ideas in some form. When you're in a problem space versus a solution space. You get feedback from your stakeholders. You get feedback from your team. You get feedback from customers who are a different kind of customers when your product is further along and it's closer to launch. How do you think about managing all of that and then guide your teams that you're working with to know essentially what to pay attention to and what do ignore?

Jason Hreha:                In the early stages of a product, or even actually, after the product has been released, what I would like to do is have individuals play with what I've created. I have a three step user interviewing/user testing plan that I've built out over the years, which is I like to either recruit people or just find people out in the field and then pretty much show them the product that I'm working on, or show them whatever I want feedback on and just tell them, talk aloud, tell me what's going through your head and just with no instruction, see how quickly can they grasp what the product does? How obvious is it to them that they can do the different things within the product that I want them to do? How understandable is this thing and the value proposition, how to use it? In that first phase.

Jason Hreha:                In the second phase, what I like to do is I like to ask them if I'm doing a usability or user test, can you do this for me? Can you do that for me? I write out all the key tasks that I want people to be able to do within the system. Then I have them go one after another, I go down the task list and ask them to do each thing. That way I can actually create a tally after I talk to, let's say 10 or 15 people that this task was the hardest one to do, this one was the next hardest one to do, that one was the next hardest one to do. I can actually rank all the tasks within my system by usability.

Jason Hreha:                Then in the third phase, I really like to ask the person that I'm talking with a little bit about this problem space in their life. So let's say I'm building a washing service where we come and pick up your laundry, wash it for you and return it a day later or so. I would talk to them about today how do you wash your clothes? Nice, do you live in an apartment building? Oh, interesting quarters are a pain in the butt, interesting.

Jason Hreha:                We'll talk to them just about how they scratch that itch today because really, for every significant problem, or issue that people have, they're scratching the itch somehow today. So I want to understand as well as I can what are their current patterns? How are they thinking about this problem today? What are they doing, so that I can actually fit within that in an elegant way and not just completely disrupt what they're already doing. Or if I do disrupt what they're already doing, it's in a way that's very elegant and actually fits within their mental model of the world and how they think about this thing. Not just coming across as a zany weirdo.

Amy Jo Kim:                 Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing our insight and wisdom and really awesome advice. It was wonderful.

Jason Hreha:                Great, thanks so much Amy. I really appreciate it. I love what you're doing.

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