Michael Haggerty-Villa Hi, everyone, and thank you for dialing in. And thank you so much to the volunteer organizers of the information architecture conference for organizing the conference in this very challenging time. This has been an incredible time, an incredible time for us to talk about places. And because a lot of us are in the same place every day as we do our work. So I'm here to talk about designing to change user behavior in digital and real places. I am not a behavioral psychologist, I'm not a behavioral economist. But like many of you, we are have stumbled into a situation where we are actually trying to change user behavior and influence user behavior, in our, the experiences that we create. So I have some case studies to talk about, that sort of show attempts at influencing user behavior. And let's dig right in. Michael Haggerty-Villa Okay, this is what we're not doing. Michael Haggerty-Villa This is what we're not talking About so if this is the talk that you wanted, perhaps you should close out right now, this is not about how to manipulate customers, we actually face a number of ethical questions and how we influence our users behavior. This is not certainly about fixing the users. This is a title that was suggested to me in jest by one of my co workers. Michael Haggerty-Villa This is not that tall. Michael Haggerty-Villa But what this talk is maybe a more accurate title for this should be something like designing for change. This is three case studies. And many more questions as I actually researched this and examine some of these use cases, I came up with a number of questions. And there's a lot of reading I did not get to do a lot of research. I was not able to get to, to inform this. I know a lot of it's out there. Please pepper me with questions and, and other resources that we can talk about as we explore this because we are all accident. Mental behavioral psychologists. So I'm going to talk about some neutral split spaces and the idea of what a neutral space might be, if it actually does exist. And and then we're going to start to get into these case studies where, where we've tried to in the case studies that I'm talking about, I'm really intrigued. By the way we've used digital experiences to influence behavior in the three dimensional real world. So that's pretty much what we're going to talk about in these case studies. The first one is a failure and I'm going to bare my soul, it's my fault. So it's actually something that I didn't have in the way distant past, which did not succeed. And then I'm going to talk about some success. And then I'm going to talk about some success that is like beyond our imaginings, and it really taps into our imaginings, and then I'm gonna talk about how we have the idea of incentives to influence Our customers and users behave. So but first, what information architecture conference experience or talk would be complete without talking about George Eliot? Um, yes, let's talk about this 18th century novelist who was also in her way, a little bit of a user experience designer. Reportedly, she did influence some of the design of the publications in which her writing appeared. But I'm going to specifically talk about Middlemarch, her masterful novel Middlemarch a study of provincial life and I know, this seems like a digression. Stay with me, it'll make sense. Michael Haggerty-Villa The hero of this novel, which is like, I'm so smitten by this heroine because she's so ethical and so moral, and a little bit naive, and I fear that I share some of her qualities. But, but this is something she's having about to have a meeting in this in this passage with someone who is very interested in her And she thinks that she's in a good position to have this conversation and let's just read this through together and I'll offer a few asides as we read. And this paragraph isn't Dorothy's viewpoint. The drawing room was the most neutral room in the house to her, the one least associated with the trials for married life, by the way she married failed academic appendant. It was a dry, probably, loveless, sexless marriage. The damask matched the woodwork, which was all white and gold. I imagined that was beige in Victorian England. And there were two tall made mirrors and tables with nothing on them in brief, it was a room where you had no reason for sitting in one place rather than in another. It was below the Brood War. Yes, there are connotations there. We can suspect that nothing interesting happened there except perhaps her husband's death, and had also a bow window looking out on the avenue but when Pratt the servant showed will lattice law Yes, that very same WILL LET US law that Dorothea first met on the streets of Rome. into it, the window was open. And okay literature majors. Symbol alert symbol alert, a window visitor buzzing in and out now and then without minding the furniture, made the room look less formal and uninhabited. Michael Haggerty-Villa Do you think this is a neutral place for Dorothea actual is it? Is it actually a neutral room? And we actually look at it. There's a lot of things to unpack in here. Because will that is law by the end of the novel? Okay, spoiler alert, I'm going to spoil this novel, but it is, I think nearly 1000 pages without a slide does eventually become her husband, and she's not quite prepared for the conversation that's about to happen in that room, which she thinks is perfectly neutral. So let's flash forward to Oh 1995 or so last century, when we thought the internet was neutral. Did we know we thought it was positive? We thought it was great. We gave up personal information or credit cards or DNA. We thought it was fantastic. What we probably should have known better because right away, we started doing this and this and of course, we evolved to do this. That was great. And then we eventually got around to doing something like this. The internet is not exactly as we know, a neutral place. It's a place where we're constantly being pushed in one direction or another. And it's made me start to realize that there are no neutral spaces, even lobbies of hotels. You know, I'm thinking this, my thinking along this is certainly influenced by Jorge Arango. And a lot of his architectural II influenced views of information architecture. So this is something for us to be aware of as we look at some of the use cases that I'm going to talk about. Because there are no neutral spaces in the internet. There are probably no truly neutral, sit completely safe, unhindered spaces anywhere, we have a great responsibility to be ethical and moral as moral as Dorothy would like us to be as we approach our work in all of our spaces. Michael Haggerty-Villa So let's get into the case studies. I just wanted to set up the conversation with Dorothea and that framework in mind. And, and now let's dig into some of the things we're going to talk about and how we've tried to change real world behavior through our digital experiences. First, I'm going to talk about some of the work that I did ages ago @yellowpages.com none of this work still exists. Everyone who would be involved in it is either no longer there or only comes out in this case study in the most glowing of lights. It is my my failing that I'm going to talk about I'm going to talk about some work at eBay that has definitely influenced seller and buyer experiences. And I'm going to talk about some of the magic of Disneyland And the Disneyland app. So let's dig into the first case study@yellowpages.com. This is what it looks like now. It's evolved quite a bit since my days there, I'm happy to say and they've done a lot of excellent work. Michael Haggerty-Villa It is a local search site. You know, its competitors. Competitors are small organizations like, oh, Google, and Yelp. And But then, when I was working on it to kind of look like this boy, they really leaned into the yellow of Yellow Pages back then didn't make design decisions another time. But we set out to launch ratings and reviews on the platform for the first time at that time, and that was something new for the platform. So the goal that was presented to me by a manager was we need to transform the way people write reviews. So my manager was sort of prescient, this was in the days before Facebook, and I think my manager already realized, you know, the tone of ratings and reviews are really poor. And it's going to damage our advertising business if we don't get good quality reviews. So this was a great call and we set out to do it. And you know, what? How did we do that? We tried to bludgeoned people with content. This is the wrong content for the wrong people at the wrong time. And look, I'm not going to dwell on this screen for too long, because it's so embarrassing. I was not responsible for the QA on this page. Otherwise, I would have had a field day. This is so painful, but the VA and we hit it in health. This was supposed to be our solution. And then it went on the page scrolls, this is all the way just scrolling at the bottom. I'm not showing you the footer because you all know how footers work. But there's way too much content here. Do you think that this was successful in influencing anyone's behavior? Michael Haggerty-Villa Probably not. Do I think anyone read it? I think maybe I did in early draft form. I don't know. Doesn't look like I read it later. Happily yellowpages.com did additional work on ratings and reviews. And this is about all that's left of that documentation. Now, that long essay is just Hey, this is how to how to get to yellowpages.com. And do your reviews. It's much more briefer, lighter experience. So the goal of this first case study was to transform the people write reviews. We didn't give it the time and effort that it needed. So our our results were, well, I'll get to that. We were trying to influence influence people's behavior in restaurants, stores, services, and really to have them reflect their experiences their in their reviews. And so we developed help guidelines. This is an anemic attempt at doing this work. And so our results, unsurprisingly, not ideal. By the way, ratings and reviews were successful. And have been successful for yellowpages.com. And but that was largely the result of an initial marketing effort, which was hugely successful and smartly done. So they've gone on and they've continued to do interesting work there. So the failure there was solely mine. And then probably, you know, just not being aware of all the things I needed to do. Michael Haggerty-Villa By the way, I believe this work happened just shortly after, or before someone named Christina Halverson was writing a book about how to do this better. So I was operating in a in an environment of less than ideal knowledge. But let's talk about our second, our second case study. And this one is a more successful case study. This is EBay, it looks a little bit like this. Now, actually, I took this screenshot a little bit before the COVID-19 situation in which we all find ourselves at this point. So this is a little bit more Have an optimistic screen then we might otherwise see because I'm pretty sure there's a an announcement of the COVID-19 situation as a banner on the on their page now. Um, but what's interesting about the, it's always been interesting about the eBay experience is feedback. You can you can buy something and then you could tell the world what you thought of that experiences as a as a buyer. Michael Haggerty-Villa Recently I did purchase some California poppy seeds because I'm an optimist like that. And, and I get to tell the the, the green Grove garden, the seller about what my experience was like, Did I get it on time? How was the experience? Did they communicate with me? Was the item described? Well did this and did I get it on time? Of course. And then I click that leave feedback button and what is it been what happened is the automatically creates data that eBay and the seller have about That's all there is Dooley. Um, so how do we harness that data to make buyer experiences better? A while back, eBay was having a problem with what they called Bad buyer experiences. And of course, they turned that into an acronym BBE, which makes it sound, you know, so impressive, but not a good thing. So the goal was to change seller behavior to make sure that people were getting things on time that people were getting the right things in the right size. So this is a while back, they've actually gone ahead and created a seller dashboard. This is something that they first released a while back, perhaps 2008. And this was a way of giving the seller insight into all that data that eBay was collecting from from the buyers about their performance. Did they describe the thing well, was the communication correct? Was shipping time you know, done. With on time shipping and handling, and also lots of other insight into what ways that eBay looks at the seller, and then determines how the seller may be promoted in search results, and how the seller sort of may succeed on the platform. This has actually be become a really big part of the seller experience. And so it's an it's evolved from then this is a Michael Haggerty-Villa generations ago design. So all of these terms and a lot of the designs and colors, a lot of it is evolved. So it says, this has been an interesting way of showing sellers how the system of eBay has been viewing them. This was an early version, there are some there are some not ideal things here that have since changed, like that red arrow shows you Yes, we actually showed the sellers, algebra, and everyone knows how much customers like to do algebra. So Yeah, some of this has evolved to be a little bit more clear and a little bit more helpful. And that's some good content work that has continued to happen at eBay. Michael Haggerty-Villa So this case study number two, what was it? You know, we were supposed to reduce bad buyer experiences. But really, to do that, it was about changing seller behavior. And the seller behavior, most of it is in the real world. It's, you know, when they write that listing, when they source that material and get a good product to sell, when they mail that thing on time, those are all real world business activities that really affect the buyers experience. So the solution was to, you know, be clear about what the seller standards were, communicate with the sellers, and to develop his dashboard so that they could see at a glance of how they were doing, you know what this worked, they bragged about is on the very year that this happened there was bragging in the hallways about how this work, and it just evolved shortly. Even better. There were, you know, since EBay is a system, as are all these sites, there are were repercussions. There were some sellers who were uncomfortable once they started to see how eBay as a system viewed them and their behavior. And there were some sellers who, you know, chose not to be a part of the ongoing eBay experiment. But for the most part, it did result in creating a better buying and ultimately a better selling experience because of that transparency. So let's move on to the third case study that I want to talk about. And this one is a This one's a fun one full disclosure, I have actually worked at Disneyland. I know I was not a churro seller or popcorn or balloons, though. That would be quite fun, wouldn't it? I actually worked on some of their digital products. This is actually because of non disclosure agreements. I'm not talking about Any of the work that I actually did, I'm talking about a specific, specific use case of a challenge that exists there that I didn't work on, though I know they've had some phenomenal success with. So yes, everyone knows that Disneyland is the happiest place on earth. And I, I look at this map and say, gee, wouldn't it be great to go back there again, and we will my friends in time, in time. But Disneyland in the Disney Parks experiences also, they have a little bit of a reputation of being a place we can go to stand in line for experiences. And that's not the ideal experience. It has. It is the busiest most crowded place on earth according to some people and that's not the trademark expression they went to go by. Even when they launched the app the first time there's that they had to they made sure to keep well wait time as a part of it and they they show that there's a The see wait time in real time is a slide of the initial initial education screen. But look how long the lines can be or have been in the past for experiences like Dumbo the flying elephant. And it's one of the signature rides one of the rides that were available at Disneyland when it first opened in 1955. And it's still one of my favorites and my children's favorites. Sometimes that line can be up to 50 minutes, sometimes it could be 55. What's great is the customer can now use this app when they're in the park. Get some transparency about how long that line might be. But how do we avoid those lines? And to make sure that customers continue to have a magical experience and by the way, I might lapse into calling the customers, our guests because that's what Disney calls the customers. So so how do we reduce the stress of Park lines. Obviously, Disney developed Fastpass, which was a way of creating a way to get into a line that was not as long as the regular line for a lot of attractions. But then there was also the development of Max pass. So, so you can use the app to get access to the shorter lines, you have to pay for it. I believe it's about $20 per ticket. I've done it, it's worth it. And however, it is not exactly easy. As far as influencing user's behavior to use the park differently, it actually requires you to read documentation like this and take a few steps that are really hard you have to link your tickets to your Disney account. To get that code in your app. And after you get into the park, you have to take another step and Do you actually have to educate yourself on how to do this before before you actually get to the park and then as soon as you get in the park, or in the park resort area, there's some additional steps to take. It's not so it's not free, and it's not easy. And, and it's not exactly perfect. But this happens connectivity in the parks, there's and may not always be ideal. So occasionally this might happen. But it does work like well, you know, it does really help get people around to where they want to be sooner. It's fascinating also, because it makes people negotiate the parks and walk through the parks in different ways. When you go to a park and a lot of cases you just stroll along and you serendipity serendipitously discover things and say Oh that's cool. I might want to do that. With this you can actually pre plan your day. No, no that at 330 from 330 to 430 I have to ride Dumbo the flying elephant. So there there are things like that it actually helps really influenced the way the guests experience the parks. Michael Haggerty-Villa So, in this case study, our goal is to reduce the stress of sparklines. Yes, it does reduce that stress, it doesn't deny that there is that stress, it gives a solution for it. And this affects both disney world as well as as well as Disneyland. And this solution is Max pass. And the result, actually, since it costs $20 a ticket is a new revenue stream, a completely new way of navigating the park and traffic reduction and redirection. Some of the some of the attractions like some of the the attractions in Cars Land, for instance, have very long lines. So it's really harder to get the max pass for that. And the idea is that the park operations are diverting people from those long lines to shorten those lines a little bit, sort of redistribute people in the parks. And it's interesting, I'm sure, when the parks are open, they're collecting a lot of this data. And I know, the very smart team at Disney is figuring out how to use that data about customer behavior. Guests behavior in the parks, continue to get people to move, not in lines, but to better experiences all the time. So So in a word, this does work, a little bit like magic. It's very impressive, but to make it all work, this is a very systems approach to user behavior, and user behavior design. It does in fact, take a small world. Park operations is involved product design, digital experience, design, marketing, and brand all work together to help people understand this experience and how they can participate. So let's talk about Since end incentives, and these are some of the things that we we use to try to influence behavior change in living information, Jorge, our ongoing talks about, you know, here's some of the intent to sensitives we have remunerative, we pay people social, social pressures to behave so that I don't rush up to Mickey every time I see him in the park. It's a very Mickey I love you know, I want to do that. But social pressures kicked me from doing that. And coercive, and there's, you know, when the law tells you, you just can't do that, because the park operations people will send you want to park. Michael Haggerty-Villa So, moving on, but there are conditions that need to exist for those, those kind of incentives to work. And Jorge also, he outlines four of those, you know, agency for incentives to influence your behavior, you must have the freedom and ability to act in some ways and not others. That is a direct quote from from poor his book. But and so that our customers need to feel that they can act on their own and make the the choices for themselves. This sentence is directly from the book as well, the people who control the shape of the environment have greater power than those who merely use it. That's us. We need to make sure that we give power to our customers so that they feel they can control their destiny. We can guide them along but we need to empower them in many ways. And I'm so proud to work at QuickBooks where empowering is actually one of our principles and one of the attributes that guides us as we create experiences for our customers. Identity having a stable identity within the community is a key component for social incentives to be effective. Yes, and to transparency of obviously the eBay example is a great example of this transparency, access to information for anyone to know how they are doing with regard to the incentives they are being measured. So these are things that are, I tried to develop these into actually a rubric where we could actually look at some of the experiences. But I'm not quite sure how to get the metrics to measure these four things. But these are definitely things that we need to be aware of, as we craft our experiences, and try to influence customers behavior, hopefully, for their benefit. Michael Haggerty-Villa Fortunately, this is really hard work. And Amy Buker calls this out in her book, which just came out, I believe it was released this week. I'm recording this on April 16, I believe, and this is hard work. And she just came out with his book of designing for behavior change. And she writes, a key ingredient in successful behavior change is motivation. How do we motivate our customers to make a change? And and I'm not just saying that we need them to click that buy it now button. Well, how do we make them She talks a lot about about healthcare applications and other applications that can make even more meaningful differences in our customers lives. And how do we do it? How do we tap into their values, goals, or identity? Oh, thanks, Amy. That's easy. That's just how do we tap into the very thing that makes people people, their values, their goals, their identity, we have to do it in a very thoughtful and sensitive way, I believe. And this book, actually, which just came out, and I have not finished reading it, because it just came out, actually gives us some good insight into how we as designers can do this and provide motivations for our customers. And also so that we don't manipulate our customers. It's this is not about manipulating this racism. This whole idea of user behavior design raises a number of ethical concerns that we need to be Aware of we have a lot of power, the power, you know, as as Jorge's quote shows us, is in our hands, more often than not, how do we equalize that? what's what's awesome at QuickBooks is we don't want people to have an experience with our product. Nobody who is running a small business, especially right now wants to do a counting. It's not fun, for the most part. But there's this app that will do it for you. We want you to give that app just enough information and then go back to doing the things you love. And that's we don't want to manipulate people any more than that. So we've tried to design things that help people achieve their goals, not necessarily ours. And of course, we're always doing that dance of balancing business and user goals. This becomes even more more of a thing that we need to focus on as we look at our experiences with the user behavior design perspective. I'm moving along fast here. And I'm hoping I'm allowing a little time for, for some of these to be absorbed. And also as questions come up, feel free to jot them down, throw them at me. I think I have a lot of questions as I go through this. I am not a behavioral designer. I am not a behavioral economist. I am not a behavioral psychologist. We're all kind of stumbling into this territory. Amy beuker is not she's actually a psychologist. And so her insights can be helpful, but there are definitely other insights out there. And as you know of them, please share them with me and share them with the rest of the community. I think this is there's a lot that we can learn about changing and influencing our users behavior, in digital experiences, as well as in the real world. The final word I need to come back to my heroine my excuse me, my hero, Dorthea in Middlemarch. And at one point she realizes that one of her associates is in grave danger of losing his reputation and his livelihood, which is obviously something that is of concern in Victorian England and concerned now. And she actually explains what do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other. Indeed, as we design experiences, we're trying to make things easier. And we're not just trying to sell things, or and unduly take our customers time, the time of their lives that they can spend doing the things that they want to do. Let's really strive to make things less difficult for all of us. Thank you for your time. I'm a little bit under time, but this would be time where we would move into questions if I was in a room with you all. I'm looking in my way from where I'm sitting right now into all of your eyes. And I'm asking for your questions. And I'm looking forward to continuing to work with all of you. And I thank you all for this opportunity to talk to you about these case studies. And I hope we've learned a little something. And I hope we can go on and do good things for all of our users and ourselves. So, thank you so much. Be good to yourselves. Be safe. Transcribed by https://otter.ai