A Quick Primer on Psychology for Product Managers
The last few years have seen several tools and processes emerge to assist us in managing products. However, most of these tools have focused on the quantitative side but not much to help product managers approach and design solutions to problems. Understanding human psychology, however, can be a huge help to product managers when designing these solutions. The principles of behavioural psychology can be harnessed by a product team to understand potential strengths and flaws of a product idea and ultimately create something impactful and desirable for their customers.
Below we look at some principles from psychology that help us understand cognitive processes, human behaviors, heuristics, and mental models so that we design our products better.
Understanding Human Motivations
One challenge that Product Managers face when designing new products or features is that behavior and perceived opinion are completely different things. What people say they are going to do versus what they actually do are not the same. Understanding human motivations can help product managers grapple this.
Psychology distinguishes between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. This means that someone can be driven to do something either by external factors, like the prospect of receiving a reward such as money, or by internal factors, like the enjoyment derived from doing an activity.
A website or app that encourages people to exercise more might offer a reward whenever a user exercises, thus creating extrinsic motivation for the person to show that behavior. Rewarding someone for an activity they already inherently enjoy might lead to a short-term increase in this behavior, but as soon as the reward is taken away, the activity is often pursued less than before the reward was given. This phenomenon is called the “over-justification effect”, because the existing reason for a person to do something, such as enjoyment of exercise, is suddenly joined by another reason, the external reward.
Extrinsic motivations are great to initial traction for products, but product managers should also dwell on creating intrinsic motivations to ensure stickiness in the long term.
Leveraging Motivation to Drive Behavior Change
A Product Manager is essentially trying to drive a behaviour change. Whenever we are launching a new product or feature, we are trying to get users to do something differently as compared to what we they are doing right now. Understanding what motivations drive behaviour change often unravel interesting insights.
A useful framework for looking at what enables human behavior is BJ Fogg’s behavior model. The model states that, for a specific behavior to occur, three elements have to be present at the same time: motivation, ability and triggers. The model assumes that a behavior is most likely to happen when a person feels sufficiently motivated, is able to perform the behavior (for example, they want to go for a swim and they have access to a swimming pool) and is reminded to perform it by a trigger.
A trigger can take various forms, such a push notification or a text message reminding user to go swimming. Triggers, however, work effectively only if the person’s levels of motivation and ability are sufficiently high. Simply reminding someone to go for a swim, even if they have access to a pool (i.e. their ability is high), will not be effective if the person is not feeling well and the person has no or very little motivation to do it.
Traits of an effective psychological trigger include:
- Good Triggers are Well Timed: Great products create an instantaneous link between an emotional itch and the salve the service provides. To create this mental connection, effective messages are thoughtfully timed.
- Effective Triggers are Actionable: Good triggers prompt action while vague or irrelevant messages annoy users. It’s important that a trigger cue a specific, simple behavior.
- A Good Trigger Sparks Intrigue: A bit of curiosity goes a long way when it comes to prompting specific, intended actions
While BJ Fogg’s behavior model sounds like a compelling framework for a website or app, simply ensuring that the three components are present might not be enough to create a persuasive interface that encourages behavior change. A user can be motivated in several ways, and what motivates one group (for example, earning money for working out) could have a detrimental effect on another group.
Similarly, ability level likely varies between users, and some might prefer certain triggers to others. To design a successful product, you will need to tailor the three components of the model to your users and thoroughly understand your target audience. A few tips to achieve this are:
Map Your Users’ Motivations
Customer experience maps, personas and user journeys are useful tools for capturing these insights, and they serve as a great reference throughout the UX and design process. While these maps can help you to identify the motivational component in Fogg’s model, they could also give you hints about your users’ ability levels and effective triggers.
Assess Ability and Lower Barriers
Before launching or revamping a product, answer the following questions.: Where will your users most likely be when they use your product? What tasks will they most commonly perform? What mistakes or frustrations might they encounter? How do they feel about their capacity and skills? The answers to these questions will point to the requirements that your interface and product will have to meet.
E.g. The graph below shows people are tired and hungry at certain periods of the day. If people using your product around lunch time, they’re going to be tired and hungry, and bit annoyed. Tiredness leads to lack of motivation, so perhaps sending a trigger at that time may not yield the result you are looking for.
Keep It Simple
One of the most common advice to Product Managers and entrepreneurs is to always keep it simple. Well guess what, psychology too says the same.
Cognitive Load
Hick’s Law is a psychological concept that says people will take a longer amount of time to decide if they have more choices. When people have to make decisions, they have to think, and this raises cognitive load. Therefore, it makes more sense only to present a limited number of choices at any given time as users advance through your interface.
We want to reduce the amount of attention that people need to use the product. To encourage conversion, we have to lower the mental effort that is requires of your customers. Amazon does It will with one button buy now click.
Minimal user cognitive load also implies users don’t have to strain their mind to understand the product and navigation. They just start using the product effortlessly.
Declarative Knowledge vs. Procedural Knowledge
Humans love mnemonic as it helps us to remember a series of steps by linking each of the steps. Step 1 reminds us of step 2 and so on. Classically this is how the human mind works. We are not good with declarative knowledge (facts) but we are good with procedural knowledge (sequences).
This is important to remember when we design web pages & apps. People follow a procedural way of doing things such as browsing a page. For example, a search on the top right is a classic design axiom. This is different from design patterns. Design pattern is a way of doing things, while design axiom is generally the most accepted and best way of doing something.
The flow of the product should be designed supporting the users, showing what steps that they have to complete with the use of clear guidance and options. We should provide only related information and reduce application noise.
Humans tend to do something well when clear instructions and suggestions are given to them to complete a task.
Field Theory
Another interesting theory from Psychology is the Field Theory developed by Kurt Lewin. He mentioned that human behaviour is influenced by two pressures:
- Promoting pressures — reasons to do something
- Inhibiting pressures — reasons not to do something
As Product Managers, we often ignore inhibiting pressures when we actually want people to do something more. We automatically resort to promoting pressures when we think of wanting people to do some more. Its when we think of wanting people to do something less, we think of introducing inhibiting pressures. Removing inhibiting pressure removes friction, and ensures users reach the “wow” moment on your product as quickly and as effortlessly as possible.
E.g. Most ride hailing startups were focused on promoting pressures, such as how to ensure people reach from point A to point B faster or in a better car, which were promoting pressures. Uber however focused on making payments easier, which was actually an inhibiting pressure. And I don’t need to tell you what this did to Uber.
Emotion vs. Reason
Much of human behavior is driven by emotion rather than reason. Writing in Pyschology Today, Peter Noel Murray PhD, describes the roles of emotion in consumer behaviour. He mentions that when a customer evaluates a brand, it is emotion (feelings plus experiences) that is used to conduct the evaluation and not the information that the person has (brand attributes, benefits, features, facts, etc.).
Human beings are emotional creatures and much of our actions are a response to our emotions rather than to a reasoned process. Research shows a clear link between emotional connections with a product and sales and longevity. Cooperation between design and marketing can create emotional stories that make products easier to be adopted and then appropriated. Appropriation itself is a rich source of emotional stories and should be investigated carefully during iterations of both design and marketing approaches.
Social Theory
The social theory suggests everyone has two identities. Our personal identity is determined by the elements that interest us, like hobbies and skills, traits which make us unique.
Social identity is the perceived identity of an individual within a group. An individual may adjust his identity to “fit in”. Examples of these groups include lifestyle groups, religious groups and educational groups. Advertising to the individual in a group using this strategy sells the idea that the consumer will be more accepted, admired or envied by others if they have a certain product.
Besides, trying to fit in, humans also want to stand out. Though both seem contradictory, but if both or one of these things are not accomplished by your product, the possibility that users will be happy is very less.
E.g. if you look at excel, there are several advance features that most users don’t use. Users want to feel important and the presence of these features in a tool they are using makes them feel so. As a Product Manager, you may look at usage metrics and decide to remove these advantage features, but that could be detrimental to your product. Usage isn’t the only metrics you should rely on.
Fallacy of Sunk Cost
If we are taking a more rational economics or classical economics approach, the rational player would ignore sunk cost. So if you have spent time or money on a website or app but it is not fulfilling, you will leave it. But real world doesn’t work like this. A real player is very reluctant to discontinue an activity once they’ve already put effort in.
If you look from a gaming context, a player is much more likely to return to look after items that they’re dealing with if they’ve either earned the items themselves or they’ve paid for it. FarmVille capitalized on this really well.
Product Managers can use this strategy during free trial by getting users to invest something so that they will convert. Find a way to incentivize them to take the first step. This will then activate the principle of consistency, where users will be encouraged to remain consistent with their own previous intentions: I’ve started so I’ll continue. At which point they’ve invested time, effort or money which encourages further investment leading to habitual use.
When the blogging platform Ghost dug into own data it realized that new users who accomplish one specific task were 10x more likely to subscribe to a paid account than those who don’t. Surprisingly enough, that task was not publishing a blog post. It was adding a custom blog theme.
Conclusion
We think that we are designing the product for people who we identify in the early stage of the process, but we forget that they are humans. Psychology can provide Product Managers with mental models to better use procedural knowledge to design better interactions. All from basic principles of how people think, behave and build models in the real world.
When product managers have knowledge in cognitive and social psychology, it would be an additional advantage for them to understand how people think about problems or scenarios that they come across in real life. With the knowledge in behavior, psychology allows product managers to know what to do when encountered by problems and scenarios and how much motivation is needed to change the behavior of the users.
