All around the world, companies are deploying digital products that intentionally and systematically seek to change their users’ behavior: and they are doing so at massive scale. Some of these efforts are laudable, but others are far less so.
Behind many of these efforts lies behavioral science – an interdisciplinary study of human behavior, combining economics and psychology to better understand why people take seemingly irrational choices and actions. It uses that understanding to help change behavior: whether that is in people's daily lives, or in how they use a product or service.
In this talk, you’ll get a practical introduction to how companies are applying behavioral science at scale, how you can do so in your work. You’ll learn about the ethical challenges they are confronting, and ways to safeguard that these techniques are used appropriately. You’ll also discover how behavioral science and experimental methods complement big data approaches, and how they are increasingly intertwined to help understand, and shape, behavior.
Key takeaways:
- How to apply behavioral science in UX and product development, and how other practitioners are already doing so
- How to combine the wealth of techniques available to you, from behavioral science, to machine learning, to in depth qualitative user research, to gain a more wholistic picture of your users
- How we can apply behavioral science to ourselves – especially to address algorithmic and design biases, and follow an ethical behavior change path