Vidhika Bansal: Applying Behavioral Science to Content Design – Episode 148

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Humans are notoriously fickle creatures, hard-wired to behave in unpredictable ways. This makes experience design work challenging for both managers and practitioners.

Vidhika Bansal has led both UX research and content design teams. Her background in both the behavioral sciences and UX design gives her a unique toolkit for bridging the gaps between unpredictable human behavior and useful digital experiences.

We talked about:

• her work at Intuit as a UX manager focused on content design
• the scope her work to apply behavioral sciences to design
• how understanding anxiety can help designers increase user confidence in product flows
• the “say-do” gap in human behavior and several ways it manifests in design work
• two common barriers to smooth journey flows – information overload and decision fatigue – and how to craft a “choice architecture” to address them
• the importance of ensuring that you’re providing and gathering the right data as you help users make choices
• “behavioral science thinking” – a lens through which you can see your design work differently
• three truisms about human behavior that guide her work
  1. people have limited attention
  2. humans’ tendency to take the path of least resistance
  3. humans are social beings who want to be liked, to belong
• ways to kindly and ethically engage users: progressive disclosure, instilling confidence, providing choice-making guardrails, etc.
• how adopting a behavioral science thinking mindset can help you design more effectively and ethically

Vidhika’s bio

Vidhika is a Group Design Manager at Intuit, where she leads teams of talented designers and researchers building QuickBooks. She has a background in cognitive science and cares deeply about designing for real life.

In her past (more like parallel) life as a consultant, she’s helped shape product strategies for a wide range of clients from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies to stealth startups. She’s also a frequent speaker, advisor, and coach for in-house teams and conferences worldwide.

Vidhika is convinced that words are magic and that stories — including the ones we tell ourselves! — can change the world. She feels strongly about empathetic leadership, ethical tech, and the power of human connection. She also really likes pasta.

Connect with Vidhika online

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 148. Left to our own devices, we humans routinely make a lot of what behavioral economists would label irrational decisions. Our job as content designers is to help users make good Vidhika Bansal. Vidhika Bansal spans the worlds of behavioral science and experience design. Her unique perspective helps her cultivate in her content-design and UX research teams the kind of thinking that bridges the gaps between messy human thinking and helpful digital experiences.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 148 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really excited today to welcome to the show Vidhika Bansal. Vidhika is a UX group manager at Intuit, where she focuses on content design. She migrated into that from research. Vidhika, welcome to the show, and tell the folks a little bit more about your work there at Intuit.

Vidhika:
Yeah, sure. Thank you so much, Larry. Excited to be here and excited to be recording this. So at Intuit, like Larry said, I used to lead a research team, and last year transitioned to leading a content design team. So I consider myself fairly multidisciplinary and work on… Try to dabble still in research, bring a behavioral science lens to things, sometimes focus on interaction design too. And right now I work on QuickBooks, and so my team gets to… We all get to focus on businesses that are in that mid-market space, and trying to help them navigate our product better.

Larry:
I bet we have some QuickBooks users among the consultants and the freelancers. But you just mentioned both that you’re multidisciplinary, and that one of the things you bring to this practice that we all have is this multidisciplinary lens on the social sciences, specifically on the behavioral sciences, and applying that in our work. Can you talk a little bit just about, what’s the span of behavioral science that you draw on in your work? Because you think first of psychology, but I think you’ve talked in the past about there’s more to it than that.

Vidhika:
Yeah. I think psychology, specifically cognitive science, social psychology, I think those are the areas that I lean pretty heavily on and am most interested in and have nerded out about over the course of my career, and even before that. So I think those are a lot of it, the focus. But I think there’s other fields that come into play, for instance, like anthropology, sociology, any field that helps observe and understand how humans behave, both individually and in relation to each other. I think all of those… I think it’s really important to take our information and our cues from the various fields, because what we find is, I think there’s a ton of overlap, and it’s really nice to be able to triangulate those insights to guide our work and our lives.

Larry:
That’s it. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I think that’s right. You come from a variety of perspectives. You have better odds of getting at the actual truth of the situation that you’re dealing with. And to that point, one of the things that a lot of people in content design and the design world and the tech world in general right now are dealing with is anxiety. And that’s one of the things you talked about. I think we first connected when you did your talk at Button last fall, and you talked about anxiety from a couple different angles. And like I said, just with the current… We’re recording this in spring of 2023, when it’s rough times out there in the job market and the design world in general. But taking off on the idea of anxiety, one, coping mechanisms, and two, how it’s applied in design practice.

Vidhika:
Yeah. So I think that we’re definitely in a tough spot right now in the tech space, and like you said, Larry, there’s a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear. I think there’s the sense of almost operating in survival mode, because there’s tons of uncertainty. We don’t really know what’s happening next.

Vidhika:
So I think that manifests obviously in our personal lives, but I think in products, and I talked about this last fall, I think there’s ways that we as designers, as content people, as researchers, whatever craft expertise you’re bringing to the space, if you are touching a product that is going to be used by other people, I think there’s a huge opportunity to try and reduce the anxiety that is in those product flows for your users, and instead trying to increase their confidence. So I always like to preach around, increase user confidence over just conversion. Because I think that there is this… We’re all pretty used to seeing it where it’s like, “Hurry, only seven spots left,” or, “You have five minutes to complete this transaction.” And there’s a lot of false scarcity and the sense that everything has to be done now and urgently in products.

Vidhika:
And while sometimes it is going to make someone click the thing faster, buy the thing more immediately, I don’t think it always makes for good decisions. And I think that if you can instead try to infuse more of… Have a more abundance mindset about your product, and if you feel like your product is actually bringing value, and you’re able to prioritize making the user feel confident about how they use it, about whether or not they should make a decision, about a certain SKU or whatever it is that you’re trying to get them to do, I think users actually feel more… They feel better about the decisions that they made, and those decisions tend to be more sustainable. They’re less likely to have buyer’s remorse, they’re less likely to feel like they were deceived or shamed or guilted or tricked into doing something.

Vidhika:
So I would love to personally see more of that, because I think we have tons of… We have so much privilege and power in the roles that we hold, and part of that is in affecting how people are feeling. And when people are already feeling this base layer of anxiety, why add to that in the solutions that we build?

Larry:
Right. And as you’re talking, I’m thinking about… At least, maybe it’s just the circles I’m running in these days, but there’s so much more increased focus on trying to get to genuine human-centered design. And a big part of that is customer journeys. And if you’re thinking about advancing on a customer journey, that idea of having confidence about going forward, versus committing a transaction in the moment, it does seem like a more genuinely human way to operate too. Does that make sense?

Vidhika:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Larry:
Yeah. One thing about this… That’s a fairly, I guess, straightforward way of thinking about some of the interesting things about human behavior. Because the thing I love about all this is that humans are such interesting creatures, that we’re kind of predictable, kind of unpredictable. But one of the other things I’ve heard you talk about that’s in that family is, you call it the say-do thing, like this sort of… It’s not so much not an integrity thing, but we’re prone to say one thing and maybe not do exactly that. Can you talk a little bit about that dynamic and some of the examples of it you’ve encountered?

Vidhika:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s one of the things that researchers especially struggle with a lot, because sometimes someone might say something when you speak to them in an interview, and then their behavior in actuality may not map up. So the say-do gap I think is a huge thing.

Vidhika:
One of my favorite examples of that was fairly recent actually, it was when was… It was around the time that I met you in person, Larry, recently in Amsterdam. But I was attending a conference, and after the conference at the end of the day, several of us had been hanging out, and we’re having a great time, and I got really hungry, and so wanted to go get food immediately. So we ended up going to… It was me and a group of, I want to say about six or seven people, and we all went to the closest place that was open at the time, which was a shawarma place. And me and one other girl wanted to eat. The two of us were like, “Yeah, we’re hungry, we want to order something.” Everyone else was just coming along for the ride, for the company. They didn’t want to eat anything.

Vidhika:
So while we were about to buy food, I asked several times, I asked the group, “Are you sure? Does no-one want anything?” And they all insisted, “No, we’re not hungry. We’re good. We don’t want anything.” And so when I started to make the purchase, I ordered… I told her, I was like, “I’m going to order more just in case, because I would not be surprised if they actually will want to eat once they see us eating.” And so, spoiler alert, that’s kind of what happened. I got the food, brought it to the table. Initially, everyone was being a little coy. And then once we started eating and we were like, “I mean, this food is for you guys too, that’s why we bought so much,” very quickly people dug in, the food finished.

Vidhika:
And so I was teasing them about how this is the shawarma problem, because while you said you didn’t want any food, once food is in front of us, sometimes those intentions change. And I think it’s just a very human example, I think. That’s not the only time, it’s happened so many times before, and so many times since, where we don’t always… We mean well when we say a thing, but it’s really hard to predict our future behavior. There’s so many factors that play into that.

Larry:
Yeah. I love that story. It also reminds me… Because it’s occurring to me as we talk about that, that your background as a researcher coming into content, I want to… All of a sudden, I want all of your research mojo in my content design practice, because that notion of say versus do, that’s a real common thing that comes up in research methodology all the time. How can we actually get the information? We know they’re going to tell us this because they want to make the researcher feel good or whatever, and getting to what they actually are likely to do. Are you finding that your research background is helping the content designers you’re working with get different insights or approach things differently?

Vidhika:
I hope so. I guess I’ll have to ask them, but I hope so. I think that one of the things that both my research background and my behavioral science background, I think one where area where it really helps, is being more mindful of, when we do have customer interaction, what kinds of things are we asking? So for instance, one thing that I discourage is, let’s not ask people to, case in point, predict what they’re going to do down the road. Because if you ask someone, “Will you buy this?” It’s very easy to say, “Yes, I will buy a thing,” when you’re answering that on a survey. It’s very different when you ask them for their credit card number. Suddenly that yes may very quickly turn into a, “Well, actually,” hesitation. So I think some of it is that.

Vidhika:
I think some of it is also thinking about just the real… How can you design realistically? Since we know things like what people say and what people do are different. And Margaret Mead has a great quote about what people say, what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things. And so I think if you bring that lens to it… I think it also helps for… I remind my content designers too, that we have to… It’s important to listen to what customers are telling us to do, and they’re the expert on their problems and their lives, and it’s important to observe how they’re using a product, how they’re going through a flow. But we also bring a really powerful… Sometimes it’s not the right solution to ask people, “Which word should we use?” There’s times where we have to pick how to name something based on what we know of customers’ understanding of different phrases, but we also have to be future facing. We also have to think about, what will this product or feature, for instance, mean to us in the future? What are we hoping for it to encompass?

Vidhika:
So I think there’s several ways for us to think about that. And largely, I’m constantly reminding people of just… I think there’s a couple of basic tenets about human behavior that we can lean on, and I think it can be easily summarized maybe by, try to go with human nature and not against it, and really try to pay attention to those factors that might be influencing how people are behaving, even if it seems like it’s super minor.

Larry:
Interesting. You’re reminding me, as you say this, there’s this… It’s almost like a running joke on the podcast that most of content strategy is about people, and content strategists are really therapists. And it’s not like we’re practicing therapy, but the way you just… Especially when you’re talking about helping, really getting what customers actually want, getting to that, so all the methodological things you were just talking about, how to discern that, but then also converting that into actionable content that can help them achieve what they want to achieve. Again, in your current work with… You’re so fresh to content, I’m curious how you’re seeing that unfold in the content world, the content that your folks are creating and developing.

Vidhika:
I think there’s several ways that a lot of that manifests in design content in general. I think one is definitely… I think we’re so used to hearing the term information overload these days, but in most products that we’re dealing with, there’s often a ton of information overload, a ton of decision fatigue. And I’m convinced that those are two of the most common barriers that prevent someone from actually going through a journey smoothly. Because every screen, every time you go from one screen to another, you are being met with a decision, which is, do I abandon this flow? Do I move to the next thing? Do I leave? Do I go backwards?

Vidhika:
And so I think that, as content designers, we have a lot of power in what behavioral scientists refer to as choice architecture. We have a lot of power in terms of how we frame up choices, how many choices that we serve up to people, how much we differentiate those choices, like are they distinct enough that people can actually make an informed decision about whether to do this or whether to do that? How are we talking about those things? Are we using plain language? Are we making sure that we’re mirroring the terms and mental models that the people using our product have, versus leaning too much on our own internal jargon, which it’s totally natural to get mired in, but it’s not something that we want… We don’t want to shift the org chart. We don’t want that to be reflected in the product, if we can avoid it.

Larry:
Yeah. And I love those examples you just gave. Both of those, like you said, there’s this choice architecture. I didn’t know that that was a thing. I love that that’s a way to approach this. But both of those are arguments, the info overload and decision fatigue, those are both arguments for the less is more thing and simplifying stuff. Is that a, I don’t know, a heuristic or a practice that is good to just stick… Well, like you just said, reducing that intellectual burden on people to make choices. Are there other ways? Yeah, go ahead.

Vidhika:
Yeah. No, I was going to say, I think that to some extent yes, less definitely is more. I think sometimes there are ways that we can lean too much in that direction. So when I used to be a survey designer, one common mistake in surveys is that people will include too few choices. And so if someone… I think it’s more important to reflect back what possible options people are thinking are, versus only prioritizing fewer options.

Vidhika:
So a really simple example is, if someone asks you, for instance, “Where did you learn about this product?” Or, “Where did you learn about this podcast?” Or whatever else. Oftentimes “I don’t remember,” or “I don’t know,” is not an option, but I think it should be. Because especially if you are requiring a question like that, and if someone truly doesn’t remember, at that point they’re just picking something arbitrarily. They’re eeny, meeny, miny, moe-ing it. And if it’s required, they have no choice. And you might be taking that data point into consideration as part of your set, most likely, because you won’t know that that person didn’t know what they… They were just picking randomly. And then your data set is essentially, you could say, contaminated, or not accurate.

Vidhika:
And that’s why I think the push for data driven decisions sometimes bothers me, because the decisions you make with data are only going to be as good as the data. Garbage in, garbage out. And so to your point, I think less is more… I think the more chunked things are, the more you’re able to show the edges, like what are the differences between these choices I’m asking you to make? Obviously having 16 choices on a screen are probably overwhelming for anyone. But if you have to pick between three choices that are unclear, and maybe may not reflect all the choices in someone’s head, versus five, I would go to with the five if it truly does capture most people’s mindsets.

Larry:
Yeah. And as you’re saying that, I’m realizing I just am ashamed of all the horrible surveys I’ve designed now, because I probably infected them with really horrible data. But it’s interesting. Something I’m thinking about now too is, we were talking before, we went on about the other side of this equation. Because right now we’re talking about, we’re in the weeds a little bit, which I love, about methodologies, about how to elicit the right info and serve people the right way. But I think at a higher level, we were talking before about this notion of behavioral science thinking, as a framework for this whole thing. Is that a more useful… The whole point of this podcast is to help people do their jobs better, to get their principles and practices in place. And it seems like that thinking level, that that might be one of the best lessons we can get from you today. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Vidhika:
Yeah, absolutely. The way I think about it, behavioral science is not a method. It’s not something that you just come in and sprinkle some behavioral science on the thing, and it’s all of a sudden better. I think behavioral science is a lens. It’s a lens through which to approach your work, people around you, the world. It’s a way to apply psychology that can help you. So I mentioned this earlier, but I think one of the big things is, be realistic. Design for real life, design for human nature, design with it, not against it. Take that into account. Don’t just look at the happy paths, look at the crappy paths too, look at the edge cases, so to speak. Look at the things that aren’t… Make sure that your designs are reflecting reality.

Vidhika:
And then I think that there’s a couple of things that are always going to be true, at least so far for humans. And one of the three that come to mind that I think… Again, these are not exhaustive, they don’t cover every single scenario, but I think they should hopefully help a little bit, is that if you want to think more like a behavioral scientist, you have to remember that people have limited attention. That’s just a function of how our brains work. We cannot attend to everything at once. So designing with that principle in mind, I think, can be really powerful.

Vidhika:
Secondly, we tend to take the path of least resistance. That’s a very nice way of saying we can be lazy. And that’s not a bad thing, because we’re conserving energy, we’re trying not to focus on things that aren’t important. So we are going to take the path of least resistance, things are going to fall through the cracks, and it’s important that we design with that in mind. And I think that’s one of the big arguments for setting good defaults in design. If there’s one thing I can super encourage, it’s be really thoughtful about what are the defaults in your… I mean, the defaults in our society are obviously, at a grander level, super important. And at a more micro level, in your product, what defaults are you setting? Because most of the time people are not going to change those. And we know that from various studies about everything from people saving for retirement to organ donation, and on the list goes.

Vidhika:
And then I think the third bucket that’s also so important is that we are social beings. We want to be liked, we want to belong. And many of our decisions are downstream of that, or in service of that. So that’s where social proof comes in. That’s where social desirability comes in. People will do and say things that they think are going to make them fit in better. And so finding ways to remember that people are not acting in what you can completely completely rational ways. People are aligning to these natural human tendencies.

Larry:
Yeah. And some of those tendencies… You just used the word rational. There’s a whole new field of behavioral economics, and Dan Ariely’s… What was the first book, the popular book on it was called…

Vidhika:
Predictably Irrational.

Larry:
Predictably Irrational. Yeah. And we’re getting into that territory as well. And that’s the happy path versus the crappy path too. You think, “They’re just rational people, they’ll figure it out.” It’s like, “Oh, no. They’re completely irrational.”

Vidhika:
Right. And these things are made to help us, these heuristics. We would go nuts if we had to analyze every single data point and potential possibility before we made a decision. We’d go completely just… It would be really hard. And so I think that these heuristics are there to serve us. We just need to make sure we remember that that’s how our brains work.

Larry:
Yeah. And like you said, that’s not an exhaustive list, but I bet if you could internalize those three notions about limited attention span, conservation of energy, and the social belongingness needs, that you’d probably be a better designer if you could think that all the time. Yeah. That makes sense. Something else you said in there… Oh yeah, the limited attention span. I wanted to come back to that a little bit, because the flip side of that is the thing that drives the internet and business these days, is the notion of engagement. And given that limited… And you talked before about the scarcity, for example, or those anxiety inducing techniques, is one way to get their attention and get them to act, I guess, have you thought about what’s the kindest, most user-friendly, human-centered way to engage people, given that they have limited attention spans?

Vidhika:
Yeah. I think part of it is… I think there’s several ways to approach it. I think one is progressive disclosure. If we don’t want to overwhelm people and we know that they have limited attention, providing people with the right… Which is what content strategists think about all day long. How do we provide people with the right information, at the right time, in the right way and the right medium, so that they can consume it and actually move forward with it in a way that helps them? So I think that’s one way to do it.

Vidhika:
I think also, again, if you’re prioritizing people’s confidence, try to make them feel good about their decisions instead of, again, shaming, guilting, scaring them into making those decisions. And I think giving people the space and grace to think about a thing, and here’s the information that you need, almost like, “We’ll be here if you want to buy this thing.” I think that there’s a lot of power. So I think this comes back to giving people a sense of agency. I think it’s helpful to give people guardrails, because again, too many choices as we know is not a good thing. The paradox of choice gets into that a bit. But providing guardrails, providing suggestions like, “This is maybe the most popular,” or, “This is highly recommended for these reasons,” and yet giving them the agency to choose.

Vidhika:
And I think that even goes for defaults. If you set defaults a certain way, even if you’re trying to be kind and ethical about them… So I think essentially this comes down to acting in the user’s best interest. But even if you’re doing that, I think making it easy for people to change those defaults if they don’t match the majority, or if they don’t match the use case that you primarily have built for, I think those are some ways to be kind.

Vidhika:
And I think, thinking also from a service design lens, and not hyper-focusing on just one touchpoint, and trying to work… I know this is very hard, especially if you work at a big org, but trying to work in tandem with other people, because customers don’t see… They don’t care if it was your web team or your this team or your that team that worked on a thing. They’re going to experience a service or product as all of its touchpoints.

Larry:
Right. That’s my current focus in my architecture practice is on omnichannel content, and there’s an analogous thing there. People don’t care if they’re looking at their tablet or their phone or their desktop or a kiosk, they just want consistent, reliable, accurate information, and that’ll help them advance their journey. And I love the way you said that too, that combination, it’s a balancing act that we’re all doing all the time, but that notion of give them agency, they’re in charge, it’s their experience, but also provide some guardrails, and doing that in a thoughtful way that again, like you said, promotes confidence in their journey. It sounds easy enough, but I bet in day-to-day practice, there’s probably some details that come along with it.

Vidhika:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of things to… I think sometimes when we work on products, we forget what the other side feels like, being in a product and actually having to navigate a lot of this stuff. And so I think if… I know we’re often told, “You are not the user.” And yes, that’s true. We obviously need to make sure we’re actually understanding the target audience’s needs and things like that. But in terms of the one thing we have in common with our users, at least so far, is that we’re humans. And so if there’s something that is incredibly overwhelming for us on the team, I don’t think it’s fair to assume that… Unless it’s a very specialized field and the user is a neurosurgeon, or working in some field that you just don’t know much about, if it’s overwhelming to you, it is probably overwhelming to other people too. So I think trying to… If it’s not something you would want to be subjected to, trying to keep that in mind as well, and having that empathy for the people you’re designing for, I think can go a really long way.

Larry:
Yeah. I love that. Just remembering that your colleagues right there can, maybe not as a full proxy for the… But just a reminder that we’re all humans in this thing together. Vidhika, I can’t believe it. We’re almost coming up on time. These always go way too fast. But before we wrap up, I want to give you… Is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation or that’s just on your mind, that you’d like to share with the folks before we wrap up?

Vidhika:
Yeah, I guess I just want to reemphasize that behavioral science, thinking that way, it’s a mindset, and every single thing that we design is essentially… We’re hoping for it to affect behavior, whether that’s because you want people to do a thing, or you want them to avoid doing a certain thing. We are in many ways the architects of human behavior, and I think that’s such a power, privilege. So I encourage everyone to think about the ethics of what they’re doing, and making sure that they feel good about the decisions they’re making, provide informed consent, making sure that you’re acting in the user’s best interest, to the extent that you can, at least, in the context of a company. And just keeping in mind those couple of tenets, and remembering that real life is messier than our pretty screens. I think that’s really… That’s important to me.

Larry:
That’s right. We have the benefit of tidying everything up, just down all these old pixels and words that we share. Yeah, I love that. I think I’ll do a better job now of keeping the messiness of humanity in mind as I go about my days. One very last thing, Vidhika. What’s the best way for folks to connect with you online?

Vidhika:
Yeah. So Twitter is probably, at least at the moment, the fastest and easiest way to reach me. And aside from that, I’m on LinkedIn, I’m very terrible at checking it, I’m working on hopefully getting better at that, but Twitter or LinkedIn are probably the easiest ways to get in touch with me.

Larry:
Cool. I’ll put those in the show notes as well, but I like to get it in the recording as well. Well, thanks so much, Vidhika. This was a fun conversation, as always.

Vidhika:
Thank you, Larry. Thank you so much for having me, thank you to everyone listening, and just really enjoyed this as well.