Design Thinking Applications

Last week, I was showing Sameer Munshi (EY's Head of Behavioral Science) an emotional trading preventor app I vibecoded in an hour. I'd vibecoded the entire A/B test on Lovable - not just two versions of the app, but the actual A/B test logic built right into it with random user assignment. Everyone who visited got randomly assigned to: • either the experimental condition (with intervention) • or control condition (without intervention). While the design of the prototype simulated that of actual trading platforms, Sameer said something that I hadn't thought of: "It's a little hard, out of context, to say 'here, buy or sell' and then expect the intervention to work." I'd built this A/B testing setup but hadn't included the most basic thing yet: you can't test *emotional* trading without inducing the *emotions* that drive it. Sameer suggested creating scenarios like showing a screen that said: "Tesla just jumped 15% after Elon tweeted about record sales. You can buy before it rises more..." Suddenly it's not just clicking buttons - it's FOMO. That sick feeling you're missing easy money. Exponentially more visceral. If you're testing any behavior change intervention: • Identify the emotional triggers that drive the behavior • Engineer those moments in your test environment so it's as close to the real world as possible • Then test your intervention Whether it's impulse purchases, doomscrolling, or overtrading - you need to recreate the psychological context first. We don't make decisions in vacuums. Our decisions are driven by interactions between multiple situational and internal (psychological, biological, demographic) factors. Try to engineer as many of them as possible while testing your intervention. P.S. if you're trying to engineer delight for your ideal buyers via your marketing (without any dark patterns or salesy tactics) 📙 Here’s how to do that in 5 behavioral science-based upgrades (free!) → https://lnkd.in/g54xD9pY

How do you and your teams synthesise and select which customer needs or pains to progress in your #product, #design, or #innovation projects? Imagine you've just completed some great customer discovery research, including observing, interviewing and being the customer. You've built some good empathy for who your customers are, what is important to them, what pains them, and what delights them. Then you unpack your findings into some form of empathy map, and you've got 100s of sticky notes everywhere. You've then started to narrow them down to the most promising and interesting observations, but this still leaves you with a sizeable collection and you want to add some rigour to your intuition on which ones to take forward first. Well, here are 3 different methods that I’ve used and iterated over the years: Number One – The Opportunity Scale This first one is the simplest and is inspired by how Alexander Osterwalder et al rank jobs, pains and gains in their book Value Proposition Design, 2014. As a team, you take your short list of observations from your empathy map and rank them from how insignificant/moderate to how important/extreme the need/pain is for the customer with the most important/extreme being prioritised to explore further first. Number two – The Opportunity Matrix A The opportunity matrix increases the rigour and confidence of your prioritizing by adding ‘strength of evidence’ as another dimension. Strength of evidence at this stage of journey can be determined by the number and type of data points. For example, if you heard from several customers that a pain point was extremely painful then you could be more confident this was worth solving than one highlighted by only one customer. Likewise, observing customers do something provides stronger evidence than customers saying they do something. Here you prioritise the most important needs with the strongest evidence first. Something to watch out for is when your team selects an observation that has strong evidence but isn’t that important of a need or pain to customers. Teams can be blinkered by numbers and end up over-investing in time wasting-opportunities. Number three – The Opportunity Matrix B The third method swaps out evidence for fulfilment of the need - how satisfied are customers with their ability to fulfil the need/solve the pain with the solutions they use today? By matching this with the importance of the need/pain we can select those observations that we understand to be the most important and unmet for our customers. You can then overlay the strength of evidence across this ranking to make your final selection even more robust. And to take it to a whole new level and really de-risk your selection you can test your prioritised observations, written as need statements, in quantitative research with customers. This is something that Antony Ulwick shares in his book Jobs To Be Done, 2016. I hope you find these methods useful. #designthinking #humancentreddesign

The best products don’t start with features. They start with empathy. Too many teams build from the inside out. They jump straight from idea to execution.  Then wonder why adoption lags or feedback stings. Design Thinking flips the process. It starts with the user, not the roadmap. At its core is one powerful question: 👉 “What does this person truly need?” The 5 phases of Design Thinking help you answer that step by step, with real users in mind: 🤝 Empathize → Watch how people use products → Ask, don’t assume → Uncover unspoken needs → Understanding comes before building. 🎯 Define → Turn insights into a sharp problem → Frame it from the user’s perspective → Be specific → A well-defined problem reveals the path forward. 💡 Ideate → Generate lots of ideas → Mix bold with practical → Build on others’ thinking → The breakthrough often hides behind the obvious. 🛠 Prototype → Create quick, scrappy versions → Sketches, mockups, or demos → Speed > polish → A rough prototype beats a perfect theory. 🧪 Test → Put it in front of real users → Watch where they get stuck—or light up → Refine or pivot fast → Testing separates assumptions from reality. Design Thinking isn’t a straight line. 🔁 You’ll loop back.  🧠 Rethink.  🤝 Adjust. But every cycle brings you closer to something people actually want. Because products don’t win on features alone. They win when they’re built with empathy at the core. 👉 Repost to help more founders turn empathy into better products. Follow Christian Rebernik for more on startup leadership and product thinking.

Build it and they will come? 🤔 When product teams launch a highly-requested feature, they tend to expect users to engage with it. But things don’t always work out that way. 😬 This is what Lyft discovered when they launched Women+ Connect. Despite the clear benefits and the demand for the feature, not all drivers who were eligible were opting into it. 🔍 The challenge? Simply telling users about a feature isn’t always enough to drive action. When Irrational Labs partnered with Lyft, here’s what our brilliant behavioral scientist Isabel Macdonald, PhD and team learned, working closely with Robyn Bald and Kirsten M.: 🚀 A simple shift in messaging—based on behavioral science—can massively impact feature engagement. Irrational Labs tested several behaviorally-informed messages and all outperformed the control. The winning message? “Just checking. Looks like you are not opted into Women+ Connect. Is this correct? Tap to review.” What this does: The question creates a desire for resolution and nudges the driver to take action (versus do nothing). The result? Compared to the control group, this approach got 173% more opt-ins from new drivers. 📈 So, what’s the takeaway for product teams? 👉🏼 Product success doesn’t come just from building great features. You have to frame them in ways that resonate with your users, capture their attention, and motivate them to act. 💡 Curious to see how small changes can lead to massive impact? Check out the link in the comments to learn how we helped Lyft get great engagement with a great feature. 👇🏼 #BehavioralScience #ProductManagement #UserEngagement #WomenInTech #IrrationalLabs #Lyft

I often see someone expressing curiosity about #BigData or survey results like this: "how does that break down by gender?", or "does this skew toward low income?" I believe these are inevitably biased questions. The issue is that these #demographics are being used to assign cognitive processes. A "low income" person is "worried about paying rent." Or a "woman" will be "taking a social or empathetic perspective." Neither of these cognitive assignments is true for everyone of that demographic. Often these demographics are too high-level to influence a person's interior cognition, even contextually. For example, "spanish-speakers" are a huge population with as much variety as the whole population of any country. But I have seen product teams in the US associate "spanish-speakers" with "migrant" and "low-income." And then teams go create solutions with broad assumptions and not enough details to truly provide a variety of valuable support to people in their variety of contexts & thinking styles. Here's one way to do better in our thinking about strategy and product & service design: 👉 Start with much more nuanced #contexts to explore, like "person with diagnosed early stage pancreatic cancer, who can access good care, and wants to" or "person taking unpaid short-term care of an adult who is related to them." 👉 The next step is to understand the variety of thinking styles within these nuanced contexts, by adding #QualitativeResearch to your knowledge-creation process. Qual + Quant 👉 Of course I recommend listening sessions about what cognition and emotion went through people's minds in those nuanced contexts. It is true there are versions of qualitative data that do not lend much understanding. A researcher will know the difference. 👉 A thinking style is a person's core cognitive/emotional #approach to their early stage pancreatic cancer or to taking short-term care of their adult relative. And this core approach can change! 👉 Then ask, "how can we support each thinking style?" and "do we want to support all of them?" 👉 As a way of discussing the variety within your org, you can make up #characters that represent the thinking styles. Try making up two characters that represent the same thinking style. Explore this well, because it affects your strategy. 👉 Note that thinking styles are never construed as negative, nor as a personality. "The Grumbler" is not a thinking style. "Worried I will be committed to more than I had planned" is a thinking style. In the case that your org chooses not to support a particular thinking style: 👉 Skipping a thinking style will be part of your strategy. It's an important sign of maturity within an org to formally recognize this as your strategy and define why. 👉 You might include here a point at which the org will eventually turn toward supporting this thinking style. 🌱 ⏤ 📩 Sign up to my newsletter: indiyoung . substack . com

As we reach the final month of the year, it’s a good time to reflect on how we’re combining Science and Design. When I started to integrate behavioral science into how products and experiences are designed, it became clear how much value a systematic, evidence-based approach can bring to organizations. One principle I emphasize with advisory clients is the importance of working from a well-formed hypothesis.. why, because testing structured hypotheses helps de-risk decisions and saves resources compared to relying purely on instinct. Behavioral theories and frameworks provide a way to identify the drivers and barriers that shape how employees and customers experience your organization. Moving beyond “behavior theater” means focusing on the actual behaviors that matter, and mapping what enables or constrains them. Creating a behavioral blueprint is one effective way to do this, it’s a visual artefact that maps the behaviors happening at each stage of an experience, alongside the behavioral drivers and barriers. These could be everything from beliefs, fears, and skills to policies and social norms. I know most organizations understand functional barriers well, but the personal and emotional ones often remain invisible.. and these are the areas where behavioral insight adds the most value. You can develop these maps in many ways, as long as they’re grounded in a solid behavioral model. If you’re looking for inspiration on how to structure these artefacts from a design perspective, these books are a great starting point: -This is Service Design Doing: Marc Stickdorn, Adam StJohn Lawrence, Markus Edgar Hormeß -The Design Thinking Playbook and Toolbox: Michael Lewrick -Mapping Experiences: Jim Kalbach -The Service Innovation Handbook: Lucy Kimbell -The Journey Mapping Playbook: Jerry Angrave -Strategic Design: Giulia Calabretta -Testing Business Ideas: Alexander Osterwalder & David Bland As this year closes, how are you developing better experiences and closing gaps?

I just spoke with Elijah Woolery and Aarron Walter of the Design Better podcast about the hidden forces that drive product adoption and behavior change. Here's what product managers and growth leaders need to know: 🧠💡 Humans don't act rationally, and the environment affects behavior more than attitudes, preferences, or beliefs. This isn't just theory—it's the foundation of effective product design. A few insights worth noting: 🔄 Your biggest competitor isn't who you think. It's the status quo—what users are already doing. The biggest predictor that I'll exercise today is whether I exercised yesterday. 👁️ Don't ask users what they want; watch what they do. Brazil's stock exchange thought their users needed better information about expiring bonds. The problem? People don't remember expiration dates from 10 years ago. By focusing on the behavior (reinvestment) rather than awareness, we increased bond reinvestment 5X. 🎯 For truly successful product engagement, focus on what I call "uncomfortably specific key behaviors" rather than abstract metrics like retention or engagement. At One Medical, we increased bookings by 20% not by asking people to "get care" (who thinks that way?) but by recommending a specific doctor. ✨ Your users don't come in with fixed preferences—you help create them. The Significant Objects Project sold junk shop items on eBay with compelling stories, turning $50 worth of items into $3,500. As a product leader, it's your job to help users understand value, not assume they already know it. ⏱️ Present bias is real: Chime switched from "save money on overdraft fees" (future benefit) to "get paid two days earlier" (immediate benefit)—and saw dramatically better conversion. I run Irrational Labs, a behavioral economics consultancy with Dan Ariely, where we apply these principles to help products drive meaningful behavior change. What hidden forces are affecting your product experience? Listen to the full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/efB6FD_6 #BehavioralEconomics #ProductDesign #GrowthMarketing

𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐠𝐥𝐞 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐟𝐢𝐱 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐬. Their research on personal health agents wasn't meant for physical products. But buried in their framework is the blueprint for how consumer health should actually work. They identified the key elements that drive sustained health behavior change. 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘺 𝘧𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘴: ✅ Appropriate timing - interventions that fit into existing routines ✅ User empowerment - increases agency, not anxiety ✅ Coherent synthesis - connects individual actions to overall health ✅ Informed suggestions - based on individual context and data ✅ Guided goal setting - actionable, measurable outcomes ✅ Feedback incorporation - adaptive to what's actually happening These principles apply perfectly to physical health products - but almost no one is building this way. The future of consumer health isn't about products. It's about systems. 𝘐𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘩 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵: ↳ Interpret your environment and health data together ↳ Provide informed, personalized guidance ↳ Embed into routines you already have ↳ Create continuous feedback loops ↳ Empower through clarity, not overwhelm This isn't about making "smarter" products. It's about designing user-centric platforms that treat health as continuous, contextual, and personal. The companies that win will be the ones that stop selling products and start building health infrastructure for your life. Invisible. Embedded. Adaptive. Empowering. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬 𝐝𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐟𝐮𝐥 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐞𝐬? 🔬 Study: Google Research, 2024 | "The Anatomy of a Personal Health Agent" #HealthTech #BehaviorChange #ProductDesign #ConsumerHealth

To me, UX is nothing but the psychology of people interacting with their environment, including products and services, studied across multiple levels, from individuals to groups. UX is not a toolset, role title, or a checklist of methods. It is a way of understanding human behavior in designed systems, unfolding over time and shaped by context, constraints, and social dynamics. That is why learning UX is not about mastering Figma, running a few usability tests, or memorizing heuristics. Those are execution skills. The foundation lives elsewhere. I believe, if you want to truly learn UX, these are the fields you need to study: 1️⃣ Cognitive psychology. This is the backbone of UX. Perception, attention, memory, mental models, decision-making, learning, and cognitive load explain why users behave the way they do and why many designs fail even when they look clean. Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience, by E. Bruce Goldstein, Greg Francis, Ian Neath, 5th Edition https://lnkd.in/gy8vWpN9 2️⃣ Human factors and ergonomics. UX is about fitting systems to humans, not humans to systems. Human factors teaches you how physical, cognitive, and environmental constraints shape interaction, error, fatigue, and performance. Introduction to Human Factors and Ergonomics, 5th Edition by R S Bridger https://lnkd.in/gmxqJU7k 3️⃣ Behavioral science and decision science. People do not behave rationally. Biases, heuristics, habits, and context drive real behavior. If you ignore this, your designs will look logical on paper and fail in the real world. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman https://lnkd.in/gZgzzRuF 4️⃣ Qualitative research methods. Interviewing, observation, diary studies, and thematic analysis are not soft skills. They are structured methods for uncovering meaning, motivation, and breakdowns that metrics alone cannot reveal. Qualitative Research Methods for Psychologists - Constance T. Fischer  https://lnkd.in/gK4aWQvy 5️⃣ Quantitative methods and statistics. If you cannot measure behavior, variability, and uncertainty, you cannot make defensible decisions. UX is full of noisy, small, messy data. Knowing how to analyze it properly is a core skill, not a bonus. Handbook of Statistical Modeling for the Social and Behavioral Sciences - Arminger, Clogg, Sobel https://lnkd.in/gT5tcKSu Finally, domain knowledge. Healthcare UX is not fintech UX. Games are not enterprise tools. UX does not exist in a vacuum. You must understand the domain you are designing for. The biggest mistake I see is treating UX as a design specialization. At its core, UX is applied psychology in complex systems.

Healthcare brings together people who care deeply about supporting others during challenging times. Translating that empathy into the physical environments where care happens requires intentional techniques, regardless of your role. Here are approaches that create truly empathetic spaces: Observing Beyond the Obvious Watch the Transitions - Don't just observe the main event. Watch the family member who gets lost returning from the cafeteria, the nurse searching for supplies between patient rooms. These in-between moments reveal where empathy is most needed. Notice the Workarounds - When staff tape signs over official wayfinding or families create makeshift privacy barriers, they're showing you where the space fails. These adaptations are acts of empathy. Observe Across Time - A space that works at 2pm may fail at 2am. Consider the night shift nurse, the anxious family waiting through surgery, the patient who can't sleep. Listening Differently Ask About the Hard Days - "Tell me about a day that didn't go well here" reveals what people actually need when things are difficult. Listen for What's Not Said - When someone says "it's fine" but their body language says otherwise, you're learning about unmet needs they may not feel comfortable naming. Create Space for Unexpected Voices - The environmental services worker knows things clinicians don't see. The family member who stayed overnight has insights day staff miss. Experiencing the Environment Walk the Journey - Physically walk from parking through registration to appointment, experiencing every confusing sign, every uncomfortable wait, every moment of uncertainty. Sit in the Waiting - Spend real time in waiting areas. Feel the anxiety. Notice the lack of privacy. Experience the acoustic chaos. Empathy requires feeling, not just seeing. Try the Space During Distress - Navigate wayfinding while upset. Have a private conversation in a "private" space. Test whether someone could cry without everyone noticing. Engaging with Complexity Seek Out Conflicting Needs - The family who needs to talk versus the patient who needs quiet. Empathetic design acknowledges and manages these tensions. Design for the Everyone - True empathy means considering cognitive differences, cultural practices, sensory needs, and varied family structures. Consider the Staff Experience - Burned-out staff can't provide emotional support. Spaces that sustain caregivers support better patient care. Translating Understanding into Action Prototype with Real Users - Mock-ups with actual patients, families, and staff reveal what works before construction begins. Design for Dignity - Does this preserve privacy during exposure? Maintain autonomy during dependence? Support connection during isolation? Return and Learn - Visit completed projects after occupancy. Empathetic design includes the willingness to learn from mistakes.