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Behavioral Biases
Consumers are not fully rational. There’s an assortment of biases that human beings are prone to. One is that we focus on the short term and the long term is a foreign country — for many of us, “Later Land.” And we’re not sure we’re ever going to visit. People really care about today, and two weeks from now, might not be that important to them. It’s called present bias. So if you try to sell someone a product by saying in 30 years, you’re going to be so glad you have this product, your customers might think, that’s not even me in 30 years. I don’t know who that person is. And a designer can draw their attention, let’s say, to the day after tomorrow or the day after that, by talking about something that involves money, or that involves health or safety that has long-term consequences.
It’s also the case that people will often say, “Yeah, whatever,” and not struggle to change the status quo. So inertia is a very powerful force. If you turn on your cell phone and it has an assortment of default settings, most consumers will say with respect to most of those, “Yeah, whatever,” and not change them. If you buy a new laptop, it has an assortment of default settings, you’ll change some of them, but for most laptop users, they just stick with the default. If you are using a social media platform, by the way, they have lots of default settings and they’re acutely aware that people suffer or benefit or just use inertia and they won’t change the default settings. And that means the default settings will stick. And that might be in the company’s interest and possibly not so much in your interest.
So your relationship with your employer, your school, your government, maybe, has a lot of terms, some of which you’ve never attended to, and you can change some of them if you try. Maybe with your electricity provider. But inertia really matters, and people frequently won’t do anything to change terms, even if they’re not ideal because they just don’t want to bother to change it. There’s a little sludge they have to navigate. And so designers should be acutely aware that the default settings will often stick because inertia is so powerful.
Cognitive Biases
People are often subject to unrealistic optimism. It’s a bias. So that can be exploited by companies in a way that’s manipulative, or it can be countered by companies which are trying to give people a realistic sense of how the product works, how long it’s going to last, and how other products compare to it.
It’s also the case that people have limited attention. And this can lead to what works out as a bias where when you’re buying, let’s say an automobile, you might focus on how does it look, how much does it cost, and how fast does it go. Some consumers think about those three things. But there are other things that are relevant to a car, including multiple safety features, questions about durability, whether it has a rear-view camera in it, as some cars in some countries do so you can see in back.
And these features of a car that are really important might not be noticed or attended to by customers, even though they matter, unless the person who is designing the sales experience, let’s say, specifically calls them to the customer’s experience. So limited attention can lead to bias in a form of inattentiveness to things that matter. And that can be used for evil by companies that disguise features of products, or it can be used for good by companies that draw attention to things that matter.
Or it can be used in a way that it is self-interested by the company, but it’s a positive thing because the company does really excel along this dimension the customers would not normally think about.