Hi everyone, my name is Patrick Akio and if you're interested in
how organizations influence behavior, this episode is for
you. Join me today.
It shows the book he transitioned from behavioral
economy and he's now solution architect over at Rabobank.
Very cool. I'll put all his socials in the
description below, check them out.
And with that being said, enjoy our episode.
It it feels like we have a baby. Because right now, whenever we
go to bed, my girlfriend and I, the neighbors have now a kid and
the kid is screaming and the middle of the night crying like
it's it's probably a few months old and it's like the IT sleeps
with the window open. It's like it's right next door,
basically. Yeah.
So my girlfriend's like, Nah, no kids yet.
Just because. Just like.
Nah, no, you get. I mean, it sounds scary and
things like these, they might be might demotivate you a bit from
like, getting a kid, but. At that point, yeah, sometimes
it's really rough, but you also have these really nice moments
that make up all the bad stuff. Yeah, not saying that you should
walk out of the studio and like get started.
Just saying that sometimes the things that seem really scary or
seem really annoying tend to be a lot less when it is actually
the case. And sometimes things that seem
really minor, they tend to be quite challenging.
So. It's a roller coaster, That's
the only thing I can tell you. And every kid is different.
Every parent is different. So it's always a challenge, I
think. Yeah, yeah, you get that.
Be be careful when you go with your hands on the table, by the
way. Otherwise, otherwise it's fine.
Recordings already running. I was wondering how you got into
kind of behavioral psychology, because I mean, even how you
describe the behavior of your kid, it's specific to behavior
and you're recognizing your own behavior in them.
I like behavior. How would you get kind of
interested in that in the first place?
Yeah. So when I was, I studied
economics, Yeah. And in my bachelor's program, we
had a course on paper economics, which was a really nice course.
And it showed me that everything we're doing as economists
doesn't always fit in models. At least we try to put
everything in models, but we need to make a lot of
assumptions, and some of these assumptions make a lot of sense.
Because when you try to abstract something in a model, you try to
take away the stuff that doesn't really matter, but it should
still make sense in like a general sense when you're
designing this model. So in this behavioral economics
course, they explained to me that sometimes the assumptions
we make in these models might not be realistic.
So in a lot of traditional economic models, they say that.
People are fully rational and if you have enough people that at a
certain point we converge to rationality, which is an easy
assumption. Mathematically it makes a lot of
sense and you can model stuff really neatly, but it doesn't
always make sense and I spend more time with Bayville
economics in my masters. So when I was graduating, I
wrote my thesis on how can we help selfemployed people to
start saving for their retirement if they want.
And it was really nice because you have so many expectations
based on what you've learned in the past year, and a lot of them
were wrong. So yeah, So in a sense, yeah.
So you're confronted. And the the nice part is that
you have a lot of research done on how people behave and how
people react to certain stuff. But if you try to replicate
those studies, then sometimes they don't make sense because of
cultural differences. Some people react differently
and then it also motivated me that okay, we might not have a
general truth saying that if we want to do this then we it's not
deterministic. Saying that if we do this with
the person A response will be B. But it showed me that we need to
experiment. You need to try stuff and if you
try more stuff then you can see the result and then you can move
forward with doing other new stuff.
So I think that was the best lesson I got from studying
economics, that it's nice to abstract stuff, it makes sense,
it makes easier to explain things.
But the behavioral side gave a lot more body to the things I've
learned. And also that doing experiments
and trying things makes a lot of sense, because the things we
know might not always be the case in our specific context.
And. After I started working, so I
first got a job as a macro economist.
I wanted to do more on the customer behavior side, which I
think it's really interesting. But working in a large
corporation, it's difficult because I might want to do a lot
of experiments. It sounds super interesting.
People get excited, but you have rules.
You cannot just play with customers because you have to be
careful with your customers. You cannot just.
Try stuff and see. Well, let's see if they do or
don't like this. So I try to do more and more on
this within the boundaries of my company, but it's still
challenging because yeah, not everything is feasible.
How are you going to measure a lot of stuff?
Sometimes the technology is not there because your tech stack
doesn't allow to do certain experiments.
Sometimes you notice that. People don't take part in your
experiment or actively avoid it. So then your data is biased, So
how are you going to solve this? So it's a really interesting
topic. When you read it in books it
makes a lot of sense and you can always say there are like some
generic behaviors that might apply to a lot of people.
But if you want to investigate it in the context of your
company, then you should experiment.
And you should experiment a lot. And the most important part in
doing your experiment is putting a lot of.
Time and effort to your experimental design.
Yeah, because the same thing with software processing data.
Garbage in, garbage out. If you have bad experimental
design, you get bad outcomes. And if you need to evaluate
those and make policy or ideas on this bad design, you have bad
policy. So that's a little bit of, yeah,
background of how I started with.
Behavioral science and moving towards actually trying to apply
it in my daily job, Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I I like behavior and I think I've always enjoyed kind of
seeing behavior and and seeing it in myself and kind of
analyzing it. Why do people do the things they
do? And where I've really seen it is
where I kind of got into the e-commerce domain or people are
trying to optimize conversion right.
Conversion is an order. When someone places an order or
does an action, whatever defined as an action, that means it's
good. And we do everything within a
funnel. We experiment within a funnel or
we make decisions that change the funnel to kind of push
people or to have people behave in the way they want or the way
we want them to. And usually it's to spend their
money. That's what it boils down to, to
buy something. If it's a subscription software
as a service, a product, at the end of the day, usually that's
what it there, that's what it's there for.
And in there, I've seen a lot of experimentation and I've also
seen a lot of assumptions where people just don't experiment and
even experiment design, as you've said, when people are
experimenting and we've made a bad design on what we're
actually experimenting, the data that we're collecting, usually
it's, I wouldn't say it's wasted effort because we're still
learning from it, but we have to redo the experiment basically,
because we don't have the data we were looking for.
Yeah. So and how do you solve this?
Because. Yeah, working in a large
corporation. But you do something, you get
like a budget for doing an experiment, that you get certain
results. You know that these results
might not be as reliable as you think, but how do you get the
people around you to accept that you want to redo the experiment
to get some proper results? It's it's really.
I mean first of all, I I try and emphasize on why we do
experiments in the 1st place right?
If the goal is clear and before doing this experiment, I didn't
know we weren't going to have a kind of a clarified answer, then
we still have kind of this undefined answer, right.
So if we still want to achieve this goal, we still need the
data that kind of contributes towards that.
And usually that's enough for people to say, OK, we'll redo an
experiment, right. And the experiments that we do,
we do a lot with AB testing where there's not really a lot
of costs that's involved there. We basically split the group of
users that we have traffic wise and then we AP test versus an
old feature or a new feature basically whatever we have now
versus whatever we want to introduce or whatever we want to
remove. Usually it's introduced because
we introduce a lot of stuff, way more than we remove basically.
But yeah that's I haven't had discussions when it comes to
budgets for kind of larger experiments.
Usually they're on a smaller scale where me or someone from
the team can actually fully implement the experiment and
then we can see what the, what the payoff is at the end of the
day. Yeah.
Have you had any kind of experience with budgeting and
kind of larger experiments in that way?
Yes, as in that I couldn't get budget.
Yeah, that was there was an interesting talk, but then I
tried to do like a gorilla experiment.
The idea was that usually we assume that if A is better than
B&B is better than C, that A is also better than C So what I
tried to do is we did an. A survey where we compared
different features. We wanted to add just small
features that you could add to a dashboard to show some
information about financials. Yeah.
And then we asked customers multiple questions just
comparing the two separate features, saying do you prefer
A, do you prefer B. Very simple questions.
And my point was that I wanted to show that.
The preferences of customers are not always consistent, because
everybody's always like, yeah, but if A is doing well, that
means that C doesn't matter. And after doing this research
with quite a big group, I saw that while customers would put A
/ B and B / C in a lot of cases they preferred C / A, which was
really confusing. And then I said, You see that
you even though I'm a big fan of experimenting.
And collecting data. Sometimes the data doesn't tell
the entire story. And then we move to interviewing
because I think it's a nice way to enrich your data.
Because sometimes collecting data shows you what is
happening, but it doesn't explain why it is happening
exactly. And then getting some additional
data from interviews makes it way more interesting to do
experiments, because you can also explain why this decision
is made because. In a vacuum you would say, yeah,
this doesn't make sense because we picked this one over this
one, so why would it be circular?
And then the interviews made way more sense.
So yeah, they gave this extra dimension of knowledge, allowing
us to make better decisions on which features should we
actually provide to our colleagues.
So that was a lot of fun. I like that a lot as well.
We did interviews as well with one of the kind of e-commerce
websites I worked for and there was like, OK, we start with
Google because we we're not going to start with our website.
They don't even know what what it's there for.
Start with Google and we're going to see how we compare the
price points and kind of the brand image that a certain
company has versus another company.
And then they start, they put in the Google search.
They do exactly the product that we want them to search.
And I was there in the background, and the interview
process was facilitated through an external company.
And then they see the website that I'm building, basically,
and different, more established websites, like you might say
Amazon's in there. Bowl's a good kind of Dutch one.
And they always go to either Bowl or Amazon.
They're like there. I knew it would be cheapest
there. Well, if you actually look at
the price point, ours would be cheaper.
But because of the kind of image they have, they would
immediately go there and then it would be, yeah, that's a hard
battle because then you're kind of already a few points behind,
even if you have a better price point.
Their kind of default behavior and the brand image they have,
it lends them, it trends them towards the companies that they
already go to. And that interview process gave
us a lot more insights on we need to get people also to the
website before they even enter the file, basically.
Yeah, which was pretty cool. Yeah, that's really interesting
because have you ever done interviews yourself?
Yeah, but only uni. Okay.
Yeah, so. I did some professional
interviews for my company and it was incredibly difficult and so
these interviews were mainly on usability testing and the hard
part is you cannot ask questions that already no steer.
Yeah, you can steer, and what made it even more difficult is
if you're. Part of the team that has
designed something and you want to test.
You're really excited about something.
You're biased as hell. Yeah.
And the hard part is you cannot say like you should really press
the button on the side and you see the customer struggling.
Like, I don't know what to do next.
It's like, can you help me? It's like, no, no, you decide.
I would love to, but I can't. And it makes it super
complicated to do proper interviews.
So what we saw when we were doing interviews that.
The people who were disconnected from the actual project were
most likely to be better interviewers because they had no
personal skin in the game, because they just wanted to do a
good interview and they didn't want to prove that what they
have designed is the best thing ever exactly.
Which is Which is hard, because it's also nice to have a chat
with somebody who was excited about what they built instead of
an indifferent interviewer, completely objective and be
like, yeah, I don't care what you pick.
Exactly. And the hardest part is when you
see somebody looking at you who is absolutely struggling and
asking you for help multiple times and you just can't say
anything because that means that there needs to be done something
on the flow because apparently it doesn't make enough sense for
the customer to get from A to B on their own.
So it's hard. It's hard, but I think it's
super valuable because it tells you so much more than just
making heat maps in the flows you're designing.
Yeah, yeah you agree. Have you have you kind of had
trouble letting go of things that you would think would
benefit kind of the flow or or conversion or behavior in that
way? Because I can give you an
example like if we're, if we're developing features can be a
generic ecommerce site, right. Someone can have an idea and I
can be like, yeah, I can see that and then I mean like
coincidence. I'm the person that builds it
and since we're A/B testing, I'm building this thing as fast as
possible. It's probably code wise not the
most beautiful because I know I might be able to throw it away
at the end and then when it comes out like it didn't matter,
then I'm like and we remove it. That's it, we don't need it
apparently doesn't make a difference and nowadays I don't
have any trouble throwing away some stuff.
I'm like there less is more basically.
But before, if we would work on a feature, let's say for a few
days and then we would put it out, I'd be like, man, I really
thought that would that would help and I have to throw away
all that work basically, yeah, yeah.
It gets easier. I think it also has to do with
experience and age, because when I just started working,
everything you would do was amazing because you would come
out of university, you would have all these ideas and like,
I'm going to change the world and then you start working, then
I'm. At that point you, you know, OK,
I'm not going to change the world.
I'm just happy to make a difference.
And you have all these amazing ideas.
And if you design something or if you have an idea and you try
to share it, then you get all these different roadblocks.
And in the start, it's really difficult because when you're
studying, then every new idea you have and showing that you're
proactive is already enough. The teachers are like, yeah,
that's great, Figure it out. But when you start working, you
have rules and you have frameworks and you have
different departments who have different ideas, and then all of
a sudden all your ideas might not be feasible and it's really
difficult. But after doing multiple
projects or writing articles or doing data analysis showing that
it doesn't work, at a certain point you learn to accept it.
And I think it's just a moment of growth.
But getting there, it was really difficult, I can imagine.
Let me, since you touched on it, I I just had a conversation with
Carlos and he said organization wise, there's already by default
probably too many processes that kind of kill innovation or
creativity, right? And I gave him the example.
If you're trying to start building something, a product or
anything, you don't take all the processes off the shelf and
start working towards those processes.
Not you just build, right. You just do whatever you think
you do to kind of make it happen.
You don't implement it with processes in mind, and I do feel
like I mean even how you laid it out.
If you come from uni, you go into an organization by default.
There's already a bunch of processes and that might slow
you down also. Have you felt kind of similarly
about that? Yes, where to start?
I mean it's yeah uni is 1 big sandbox everything.
Every idea is worthwhile exploring unless the idea really
doesn't make sense, but. You get all this freedom to
think about the things you want to do and all the great ideas
you have. And then when you start working,
you have to deal with certain rules, internal rules, external
rules, and that already slows you down in a certain way.
On the other hand, giving certain boundaries to what you
can do or can do makes it way more interesting to come up with
a nice solution. And I think that's the
challenge. So.
Coming up with nice ideas in a vacuum is always, well, I
wouldn't want to say easy, but you have all this freedom and
you can do whatever you want. But then giving the limited
tools you have within your company, try to come up with a
solution as nice as you would have in the sandbox environment
and then becomes way more challenging.
But I think that's also super rewarding.
Yeah. So it was hard again in the
start to get used to the fact that you have these boundaries.
But at a certain point you see them as, yeah, they can give
some guidance in where you can go.
Also I think that company should give the space to experiment a
bit, give sandbox environments technically.
So you can try some stuff and sometimes maybe do a bit gorilla
and then afterwards check if okay the idea that we have is it
actually allowed in the context of our company.
Maybe even do research outside of the company without a label.
So then you can just prove that the idea that you have is a
really good idea and it has been properly tested.
But is it allowed within the confines of our company?
So there might be room for growth.
I know that a lot of people also like to take their own
initiatives and just try stuff. So there's a balance there.
I want to motivate them to experiment.
But also in my current role, I cannot always allow them to
experiment because there are certain rules.
So sometimes now I'm limiting people in experimenting and just
trying stuff, so that's that's difficult.
I used to be on the other side of the table.
Yeah, I can imagine. I I like your perspective though
that it's more glass half full than half empty in that case, in
that it will also result in a lot of fulfillment if you still
make it happen basically. And processes can be seen as
boundaries. I mean, I agree with that.
I think sometimes there's too many processes also depending on
the organization, but when you then still make it happen, it's
probably a great feeling. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And this stuff. And the most powerful thing is
that if you do this together with people who are already.
Familiar with the process and you can help them change it and
improve it. They're also really happy
because sometimes people consider these processes as the
boundaries. But if you can just just move
them a bit or improve them a bit, I think that's also really
nice. It's it's and easy to introduce
something new and say this is completely better.
But optimizing what we currently have is also really nice way of
working. Yeah, yeah, I fully advocate for
that. If you optimize what you have
already, it's kind of tweaking and improving what already runs
well, right? If you're if you're looking at
what you're kind of good at, usually what you're good at, you
can get better at eat more easily than picking up something
you're awful at. Like I can't do any tennis, no
paddell, no squash, no nothing. If I had it in a racket and I
have a ball, it's awful. I can play football, I can play
a little basketball, probably I can get better at those.
But starting from behind is harder than improving what is
already good. Yeah, but I do think that.
And maybe that's also part of the challenge, right?
So when you're done studying, you have the idea that you're an
expert on a certain topic and that you want to become better
at more things, that you widen your profile, that you become
more of a generalist. And then as you start working
more and more, it makes more sense to move to being a
specialist because it's really hard to.
Differentiate to show what you're really good at.
And then in the past, I always used to challenge myself having
the feeling that, yes, I'm really good at this part of my
job, but it should really get better at this part of my job.
And it was really difficult getting better, as you said.
But at a certain point, I noticed that it's better for
everyone if I start leveraging my talents more than trying to
become better at the things I'm not really good at.
And. Yeah, that was.
That was a nice realization because you also can use your
personal talents more and maybe the things you enjoy more and
don't focus too much on okay. You might not be the best public
speaker, but do you want to be a public speaker?
No, but it's expected from you, okay.
Is that really the case? Maybe you should discuss this
with your mentor or your manager, because it's nicer that
you feel good in your job and doing the things you like and
the things you're good at. And challenging you on stuff
you're not good at, while you don't even want to grow in in
that part anyways. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, you can do it. You can probably do it.
I think you can do if you set your mind to it, find a routine,
get better at public speaking, for example, even if you don't
have the aptitude for it. But you have to want to do it,
otherwise it's never going to happen, right?
You can force it with discipline people that are very
disciplined, but then you're still forcing it like it doesn't
make sense if you don't find enjoyment in it.
Yeah, yeah, totally agree. When it comes to conversion, I
had this thought leading into this conversation because I
think some companies might completely overdo conversion
optimization as well and kind of changing behavior.
And I have an example that I, I we've tried HelloFresh, right.
We got like a coupon in the e-mail that set out, you get a
bunch of boxes for a lot of lower amount, probably half what
you pay normally. But then on the website, I can't
cancel my subscription anywhere. I have to call customer service
or open up a chat box, and they can only cancel for me.
So companies have now made it super easy for me to subscribe
to something, and it made it very difficult to get rid of
that subscription completely. And when it seems like I've
canceled, no, I still have a box that arrives somehow at my
doorstep the next week. Like I feel that companies can
very much overdo it now as well when it comes to conversion
optimization. Yeah, but it's costly to get you
as a customer, right? So.
Giving you boxes half off cost them a lot of money.
So from a business perspective, I understand why they make
certain decisions. As a person, I find it really
annoying. Yeah, right.
Yeah. So sometimes you have the
subscription and I'm like, okay, I want to get rid of the
subscription and you go to your profile page and then it's like,
oh, you have your subscriptions or payments and you go there and
it's like, oh, you want to cancel?
Please contact our customer service and you send an e-mail
to customer service. You never get a response.
Try to find the phone number. The phone number is somewhere
hidden. On the website.
So getting you hooked is quite easy now because they offer you
all these nice things to become a customer.
But getting rid of the company is becoming more and more
challenging and sometimes it's it's too much, so it's too much.
They make it way too complicated.
On the one hand, they try to profile themselves as being
customer focused. We want to do optimal customer
service. However, we're impossible to
reach. Yeah, that maybe the two
customers that customers that can actually speak to you, they
get excellent service, which is nice.
But the other 90 customers that are still trying to find your
phone number, they might not get the customer service that they
want. So in that respect, I sometimes
think that customers are focused too much on obtaining customers
and. Maintaining them or keeping them
in a bad way instead of just being a good company.
Yeah, it's easy for me to say as an individual because I don't
have my own company. But as a consumer, sometimes I
feel like you're just trying to trick me into buying something
or staying with you instead of actually providing me something
awesome. Why?
I want to be a customer with you, yeah.
And I feel like the hard part to measure is kind of brand damage,
right? Reputational damage And because
it like leaves a sour taste in my mouth, I talk about it.
I'm like, I like HelloFresh. I don't like kind of their
service though. I can't get rid of it.
I like the boxes. I like the concepts.
I think it's too expensive. I'm also Dutch, like can do
cheaper and then I want to cancel.
I cannot cancel like the brand damage from that.
I don't know how much that is. It's probably hard for me to say
how, how to quantify it. And I don't know if that's kind
of a known decision on their front that what they do, kind of
the behavior that they create or making it really hard to cancel
something might also leave reputational damage.
Basically, do organizations go that far, you think in their
decision making and why do they implement the things they do?
You would expect it right, that they would at least consider the
fact that okay, if we do this promotion, yeah, seven out of 10
customers are Okay with it. They might get stuck and some of
them are a bit annoyed. But three out of 10 are maybe
super annoyed with us and they have their own network and they
yeah, spread the fact that they're not super happy with it.
So I you would expect that they would take this into
consideration because I had a really bad experience with a
telecom provider in the Netherlands and I will never be
a customer of them again. Never, even though if they would
offer their service services free.
I wouldn't even become a customer.
Yeah, principally. Exactly.
And it just had to do with the fact that when I had a
subscription with them, where I used to live was a blind spot on
their coverage map, so I couldn't get service at home,
which was really annoying. And then I called them and they
had. Like this clause saying that
okay, if you are in a blind spot then we can break open your
subscription and you can move to a different company where you
don't have this issue. So it's something that they
offer apparently and it was really difficult to break open
my subscription and move to a different provider even though
it's something that apparently they offer.
So at that point when I finally closed the contract, I called
their customer service again and.
Explain the situation and saying I'm never, ever going to be a
customer of you ever again. No matter how good of a deal you
will provide me, it will not happen.
Yeah, it's done. Yeah.
And I think a lot of people in my proximity got affected by it
because I was complaining a lot, which might not always be as
fair. But yeah, I was really
frustrated. And when they asked like, oh, we
consider this provider. Would you consider them?
Never, Never. And I'll tell the story and
they're like, oh, I never want to experience this.
You will most likely not experience it.
Because if you check their coverage map, yeah.
And the probability that you are in a blind spot is really small.
But what if it happens? Yeah, just what if?
And then you see that people avoid these like big risks with
really small probabilities. And they're like, yeah, what if
that happens? Then you're an outlier.
Yeah, but if you if you're just thinking about it doesn't make
sense, you can check it up front on the website.
But still people are like, yeah, but what what if, what if?
It's always difficult to take these really low probability,
high risk chances into into your mind.
Think about the lottery that. Even though we know that the
probability that you win the lottery is super duper small, a
lot of people have the feeling that if you buy the tickets at
the end of the year, it's like this.
This is going to be this is the year next year, I'll say goodbye
to my boss. I'll buy a home somewhere in
South Africa, live between the lions.
I don't know. But this is the year.
Even though deep inside, we all know that it's most likely not
going to happen. Yeah, it's really, really
complicated, but. Maybe it's a combination of like
bad judgment combined with hope that.
Yeah, that you just have some things that you want to get rid
of or want to improve in your life, and then putting in a lot
of effort to getting it done is difficult.
But winning the lottery would be a really nice way to just bypass
all the work. Yeah, all the hard stages, like
just take the elevator. It's.
This is it. Yeah.
Yeah, you're done. Let me take the elevator.
Yeah, that's hilarious. I think it's I I was going to
send you this before this conversation actually, but I
forgot to do it because I knew we were going to talk, get into
behavior and especially conversion in that way.
But there was an interesting article I saw.
It's about a company called Blender, and I don't know
exactly what services they provide, but let's say they're
sauce company. I know that for sure.
And they made their subscription as easy as possible to cancel.
You could find it everywhere. You don't want this anymore.
Cancel here, done. Few clicks, you're done.
You're out. And otherwise it would be
monthly to subscription. And I talked to the girl that
because I was gonna do podcast episode with her can't do it cuz
she's remote and I only do people in person now.
But regardless, she said she advocated for that.
She had to pitch it. Everyone wants against it, but
she really leveraged the data showing that it was going to
benefit the company. It was going to optimize
conversion even more. And I think their conversion
like increased substantially by quite a lot by making it as easy
as possible to cancel. And it goes into every human
judgment like there is everyone's like make it cancel.
That doesn't make any sense. Probably they were like, don't
you see what hell fresh is there?
It's nowhere to be found. And when I read the article, I
was like, OK, apparently people also appreciate it.
I guess I don't know if it's cancelable effortlessly, maybe
they take the subscription more easily.
I guess rational how do you say that Rationally I would say no
that that would never work, but then the data shows that it
actually does work and act in practically it also works.
Apparently we can also do good things with our data.
Yeah, for me in in a sense it it.
It does seem like a really good solution because now we as
consumers are aware of the fact that it's really hard to get rid
of subscriptions. So not making it difficult to
get rid of your subscription can become a unique selling point
compared to the past where everybody would make it easy to
get rid of a subscription and then.
Smart companies would take advantage of the fact that,
yeah, if we can send you into this maze, we can keep you as a
customer for a few extra months. Yeah.
So I think it's a really clever idea to like turn around what we
have considered to be normal and provide good customer service
and be rewarded for it. I think it's really cool.
Do you think that happens often? Because I was talking to this
with Carlos as well previously and we talked about the YouTube
recommendation algorithm, right? It's awesome.
YouTube recommends you whatever you want to watch or whatever
you've watched or content that is similar to that.
But then when you just want a fresh perspective or kind of how
do you say that, discover things, the recommendation
system is all of a sudden against you.
And now companies are spinning up and one of the USPS is we
don't have the YouTube recommendation system.
It's like something that's going well and people are getting
frustrated with that part. And then another company spins
up and their USP is like, we're not that, we don't do that or we
do the opposite of that. Wow.
I feel like it's kind of similar to where companies are really
good with their service. They make the cancelable thing
really hard to do. And then there's a company that
makes it effortless and all of a sudden people like, yeah, that's
what I want now, yeah, have you seen that as well and other
things. Wow, To be honest, I really
don't know. No right?
No. It's nice design and especially
with stuff like social media platforms they.
Those are designed to keep you engaged as much as possible.
And you notice it wherever you're walking or anywhere you
are in the world right now. As soon as somebody's bored for
like a microsecond, they take their phone out of their bag,
excuse me, And yeah, they start scrolling.
And then sometimes I'm like, yeah, I don't even have.
A feeling anymore of what type of content I'm consuming because
it's just so random, but apparently it's completely
catered to me because you keep scrolling.
So it's like this malicious design to keep people hooked to
your application and then in between splice some apps in the
hope that they will buy something.
And it's, yeah, from a business perspective, it makes a lot of
sense. But as human, I wouldn't want to
make something like that because yeah, you want to.
Let people do things they like because they like it, and not
because they're hooked to your platform.
Exactly. And it would have been nice if
more companies would move towards a different system where
they're really looking at how can we make customers happy
instead of getting them hooked. But apparently it just works
because it keeps on working. You see it in social media
platforms, you see it in game design that micro transactions
even though. You wouldn't think that people
would spend a few €100 on a game, that there are these
wheels who spend thousands, thousands upon thousands of EUR
on a single game. It wouldn't make sense in your
mind, like how can I convince somebody to spend thousands of
euros to have like a silly hat in the game?
I don't know, but apparently it works.
So why move away from something that works?
You need to take additional risk with no certain reward.
And you cannot leverage existing knowledge on how to get people
hooked. So I think it's super brave if
companies take these risks, design new stuff to make people
happy and they earn money with it.
I'm totally fine with it. I think it's really nice, yeah.
Do you have an example of a company that has done that?
Cuz if you don't, I can name one which I saw recently actually.
Maybe you could start, so give me some.
Have you have you played Pokémon Go?
Yeah. Now the Pokémon game came out
with a new Pokémon Company, came out with a new game.
I don't know if it's Game Freak still, but it's called Pokémon
Sleep. Now The game rewards you in like
in game currency or whatever, based on the amount of sleep
that you have. So it shows you like which
Pokémon you slept and you get items, and with those items you
can probably get Pokémon. I haven't played the game.
I just read this stuff and people are sleeping more and
then I'm like people sleeping more.
That's a good thing. And this game apparently rewards
you for the more you sleep. Now people overdo it because
people are taking sleeping pills to kind of kind of sleep more to
get more items and stuff like that.
So it can also be harmful in that way.
But this game leverages something that you should do
basically and rewards you for it with in game currency, like it's
completely gamified sleeping. If you love Pokémon, you have a
terrible sleep schedule. You download this game, you try
to be good at this game, you'll probably sleep better.
I love that concept. Basically.
I think that's awesome. Maybe we should have told Ash so
you become a Poco master when you sleep more instead of in the
woods. Yeah, I think it's really nice.
So you you saw the same thing with Pokémon Go.
At the start everybody was walking outside and connecting
and it was really nice. But then what always happens is
people start gaming the system because yeah, I could have like
a 10 kilometer walk to go to these pokey stops and collect
these items. Or I could put my phone on my
record player and put it in motion so my G PS:.
Thinks I'm moving so I can game the system and then it's like,
yeah, but where's the reward then?
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, you can also bypass a
lot of stuff just by paying. And then the question is like,
where do you get the reward from this game?
Is it from the fact that you go outside, connect to people?
Feel healthier because you get more sunlight because you
exercise, or from the fact that you have enough stuff in your
back backpack so you can catch as many Pokémon as you want.
So it's a balance and I think there's something to say for
both of them. So if people want to pay for
certain services within games or platforms, I think they should
be able to do so. However, it shouldn't.
Reduce how much other people can benefit from the platform or
that game. So cosmetics in video games I
think they're fine because they don't affect the game play.
They don't reduce the fun you can have as a non paying
customer. But if you start offering power
ups or different stuff, different weapons, whatever, for
payments, then you're giving an advantage to the people who are
paying money. And I think that's bad design.
Because you're just focusing on your paying customers and then
maybe if you would have these cosmetics, then sometimes you
can convince a customer who isn't paying like Okay.
I think this company is doing something nice.
I will pay some money to help this company to stay afloat
instead of being forced into needing to buy something.
You see a lot of malicious design tricks when it comes to
getting people to pay something in.
For example mobile games. So apparently when you want to
buy something in a mobile game then you get this pop up from
your phone saying do you actually want to allow this game
to make a transfer for you So you can do in in game purchases.
But if you do one purchase then the next time you don't get to
pop up anymore. So like this hurdle to actually
buy something becomes a lot lower because the first time
they do like this super awesome discounted package where you
just need to pay $0.99 or you're like, OK, I get a really good
deal for the $0.99, but that's only their investment to get you
into the paying customer pool. Exactly.
And then it becomes easier because when you're sitting on
the couch late in the evening and you you're like, yeah, maybe
I should buy it, you can buy it with one click, it becomes a lot
more difficult to resist the urge to start buying because you
don't have this feedback anymore from like, hey, do you actually
want to purchase this anymore? So it's it's smart, it's really
smart design. But it's also, yeah, I think it
it's kind of kind of evil. Yeah.
Is it? Yeah.
To be honest, is it ethical? Basically, yeah, probably not.
They do it right. When your currency runs out as
well, your resources are out. You're like, I'm done.
Then the thing pops up. It's like a good deal, yeah.
And and they have like this layers of currency stacked onto
each other to make it even more complicated.
So if I want to buy this, I have to pay in diamonds and then I
have to buy some silver links and then buy another currency
and then I can buy the item. So at a certain point you don't
know the monetary value of this item anymore.
It's like, did I pay €17.00 for a digital hat?
After the currency conversion, yeah, exactly.
You need like an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of how
much money you spend on this particular hat.
Again, it's it's really smart design because the the added
complexity just deters people from thinking about how much
they spend. But yeah, is it ethical?
Is it nice to trick people into spending more on things they
might not need? Yeah, and I think that's an
interesting debate. Yeah, that's a hard one.
I mean, especially in gaming, sometimes companies are labeled
evil because they they make certain rates or certain it's
usually rates too low or like. The things are too pricey or the
game is too hard for people that don't spend any money.
But then people still love the game, play the game, they just
hate the company that makes the game.
Like it's a weird dynamic in gaming.
Honestly, what I've seen so funny thing because I I did a my
my thesis, I did on free to play app games and exactly what
incentivizes people to purchase stuff in free games basically.
And a big factor there was exactly as you said, you have to
be able to play the game as is. Without paying, that's one of
the biggest contributors to people actually.
Then taking the step and making a payment and purchasing an item
in the 1st place. So that's the baseline.
Basically the game needs to be playable and then probably
within the game they can facilitate certain behavior and
experiment in that way. When your stuff runs up, maybe a
popup helps, or when there's more people that are already
paying and they interact with each other, I don't know what
happens, but I feel like companies leverage then a lot of
that data throughout kind of. Being more aware of behavior and
like customers, manipulating consumer behavior and stuff like
that, Nudging, sludging, all that.
Are you more like aware of when a company is doing it?
It can be in a game, can be not in a game, can be a marketing,
communication, anything. So sometimes at the start,
you're not really familiar with the tricks they're they're
pulling or the smart ways they have to convince you to buy
something. I know that I have some
weaknesses, so sometimes I put books in my shopping cart.
Yeah, many books. Even though I already have a
huge reading list and I have books stacked at home, knowing
okay, I still have to read these books.
But people tell me, oh, this is really an amazing book.
It's for for your work. It can be amazing for your
personal life. So you should read.
OK, put it in my shopping cart. And then sometimes you get this
reminder. It's like, hey, we found
something in your shopping cart always.
Did you lose? It's like, no, I didn't lose it.
Like that one. Yeah, it was intentional.
I wanted to put it there because maybe I want to buy it, and then
when I move it to like a favorites list, it disappears
forever. Because then in a year I'll look
in the favorites lessons. Like I don't know who told me
about this book anymore. So then it just.
Disappears. Yeah, it's gone.
But sometimes I just have these impulse by because the company
knows that it's at a certain point, like maybe they know when
I usually buy stuff like this, so they send me the reminder at
the exact time that they know. Like I'm yeah, I know that that
they can trigger me into actually buying it.
So that's that's a difficult one for me.
It's like they know that you're hurt so we can we can get them
then. But on the other hand, you know
that if companies offer you something really nice for really
low price to get you on board or to they give you a major
discount, then usually it has to do with the fact that either
they just want to get me on board and then afterwards it
becomes more expensive or this company doesn't earn money with
the fact that they sell something besides my data.
And what's tricky about that is so Google has a really nice
feature where you have a Gmail account, you can add a plus in
your Gmail with a small extension.
So I usually add the name of that company where I'm
subscribing in my e-mail account.
And when I subscribe for something or I buy something
there afterwards, I can see if I get emails from different
companies on that e-mail account.
I know Okay, that company is selling my information.
Yeah. So I'm never going to buy there
again. And it happens quite a lot and
it makes it easy to track. But it's also, yeah, it's not
nice to see that a lot of companies are doing it.
So it's like. Administrative work, Yeah, But I
do know that, OK, some companies can be trusted and some can be,
so I try to avoid them. But you don't know this upfront.
It's not like I'm going to look on review websites or ready to
check, Hey, is this company going to sell my data?
I don't know. But I really dislike the fact
that they tried to sell you a nice product at a nice rate.
And you're like, OK, this seems like just one transaction.
I pay you some money, you give me a nice product.
Give me the thing. But apparently I give them some
money and my personal information, which is being sold
so they double dip. They can earn money only twice.
Yeah. While I'm not aware of it, which
I think is, yeah, it's not great that we're moving in this
direction more and more. Yeah, yeah, sometimes I don't
wanna give my data either. So then when I have to.
I'll be like, no, I'm not going here.
And now I'll try and do it somewhere else where I don't
have to. Like it's it's become a hurdle
where I know it's gonna happen. I don't want to get any other
e-mail from other companies. Basically I don't sell my data.
So then I go to an option where I don't have to do that or I
have to do like the bare minimum, which again is being
used as a USB, I think, yeah, yeah, you see it more and more
and you can, oh, continue as a guest.
You don't have to subscribe. It's like, oh, that's sometimes
it's really nice because you know, okay, I don't have to
provide my information, but still like their personal
environment where you can check your orders or maybe order the
stuff you have ordered again, then it's nice to have this
environment of that company where you can see your previous
orders and what you've paid. So it makes it difficult because
sometimes it is actually beneficial to become a member or
to give your information. But the only downside is yet
please don't sell it, because I don't want you to sell my
information or at least tell me about it in a font larger than
two. Yeah, that would also be nice,
right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, one of the funniest things is I went to your ex KE
like the one you gave a few weeks back.
You must have been a little bit more than a month.
And you showed me this picture about like the walkways in
London that says like, look, right, basically.
And then I went to London. I was there a few weeks back.
I just looked at the road. I was like, yeah.
If this wasn't there, like, it's so like the opposite world where
people drive. Like I needed the reminders
everywhere to kind of change my default patterns to look for
cars on the opposite side of the road.
That was hilarious, I must say. Yeah, yeah.
So and that is again, I think really good design because it is
only made with the idea to help people.
Yeah. So giving people the reminder
that you need to look right, I think, yeah, before they cross
the road. It's just it's a nice safety
measure. People are always looking down
because they're watching on their phone.
So it makes a lot of sense to put a reminder on the floor.
I think it's awesome design and I think as mentioned before, it
even takes less paint. Exactly.
And then huge white square. So it's great design and you
have more and more like these ideas where they actually try to
help people to make better decisions, to improve
themselves. But the hard part is because a
lot of companies are trying to abuse the fact that you make
certain decisions by default or the way you act on habits, that
it becomes difficult for other companies to also help you in a
certain way. Because if you're constantly
pushed around by all these impulses and it becomes really
hard to find a direction in which you want to go.
So at a certain point, if you're.
Yeah, if you have all these impulses around you, how are you
going to make a decision? Is this actually good?
Is this trustworthy? It makes it super complicated.
And then things like crossing the road in London, it gives me
hope. Yeah, because it shows that,
yeah, people can do really nice things with behavioral design.
Just make something nice to help people to not get hit by a bus.
Awesome. Yeah, I feel like the the things
you see in cities and stuff like that.
That influence behavior. Like I've seen stuff like people
walking up the stairs and it's like a game of fight thing or
that's like looks like a piano. The the things on the piano, I
don't know what you call the keys, The keys.
Yeah, my goodness it's late. If it looks like the keys of a
piano or if if it makes a Jingle, then although some
people do it and I feel like the ones that are in cities usually
benefit like good behavior and the ones that in in software
usually benefit either a company or like a a monetary value.
Is what I've seen, probably because software related wise,
it's easier to experiment with it.
They can do so many multiple iterations and they can really
optimize it. Whereas in a city, you do it and
you're probably not going to do it again.
It's going to be there. And if it's not 100%, if it's
like 75%, you're like, it's still good.
Move on to the next thing. Yeah, and it's if you want to do
multiple experiments, for example at a train station, if
you're going to exchange the steps every two weeks, people
will get annoyed. Absolutely.
So yeah, it's really difficult to replicate the results of your
previous experiments. And yeah, that makes it
difficult also sometimes. Yet experiments can completely
backfire if they want to get you to start moving more.
I showed you the example with the stairway, showing how much
calories you burn for every step.
And in a sense, it makes you would think that people get
motivated to exercise more. Hey, you walk up the stairs, you
see, hey, how many calories have I burned when I walk up the
stairs? Especially when you're out of
shape, if you walk up a flight of stairs and you're out of
breath and you know, like this was like half a calorie super
demotivated, because you know, if you already take a glance at
a cookie, you have like gained 50 or 60 calories.
So it's it's nice design, the intention is really good, but it
can also completely backfire because it demotivates people
from taking the stairs because they consider it.
Yet it's quite a lot of effort, but the benefit is so small and
then it's difficult to explain. Yeah, but the intention is good.
They want to get you to exercise more.
And on the other hand, if you're designing stuff like this, it
doesn't change the way the habits of people are.
So getting them to do things once or twice is cool, but
forming habits so actually become healthier.
Actually, exercise more is way more difficult.
So do something six weeks in a row instead of once or twice is
way more challenging. And it's it's hard it's hard to
get people to to form better habits.
Yeah. So if you want to design
something, you can always show your results.
Hey I when we changed the stairs, we saw that 20 or 40%
more people took the stairway. Awesome.
Is this effect still there after two or three weeks when like the
funny part of your talking stairs is gone, or when a part
of the paint is already gone because of the decay that people
walking up or down the stairs? So having consistent results
with your base real design is is even more challenging and
interesting than just having this one off beneficial effect.
Yeah, you can imagine. I mean the The funny thing is I
was trying to compare. Why?
Stuff that is more physical is always trying to adapt kind of
behavior. Because if I see something like
in London look right on the floor and cars are coming from
the left side instead of the right side, what I'm used to,
then at some point I'll I'll adapt my behavior, right?
I'll always do that. I might not even look at the
floor anymore. I know it's going to come from
that side. So then my behavior has changed
completely. Like it's become a habit for me
to look the other way. If I go to my home country
again, I'm going to have to adapt if I've lived a few years
in London. And I feel like online,
digitally it's not really about changing habits too much.
I think maybe gaming companies and like spending money, that's
maybe the only part where I'm like OK, they're trying to make
it a habit for you to spend money more frequently.
But usually it's like a one, one off transaction where companies
are trying to make one off purchases and sure recurring
purchases are good, but those are not necessarily as much to
go as kind of those one offs. I feel like in person design,
city design and behavioral design in that way is more.
Lent towards changing behavior, like habitual behavior rather
than like a one off thing in that way.
And I think you make an amazing point and I think it also has to
do with the fact that the people who work for the municipality
want to help the people that live in their city.
Exactly. And they don't benefit from
gaming their citizens because, yeah, they want to have a nice
city. So you see that also on a
government level in the Netherlands, you have like this
behavioral design department. And there are a lot of people
thinking about how can we help people make better decisions.
And they can be on large scale, but they can also be on a small
scale. And I think it's nice.
I think it's good that we leverage the fact that we know
that some people make certain decisions by default.
There's also a really nice book on it.
It's called choosing not to choose.
So the idea is that sometimes it's better for people to not
make a decision. You should let an expert make
that decision for them. If you go to the doctors and the
doctor always lays out certain options for you, and you always
have to make the decision on your own, it makes it super
complicated. This person is the expert, so
you or she should tell me this is the best treatment for you.
This can also help, but I would prefer you to do this.
So in that sense, sometimes I think that policymakers should
take into account more. We shouldn't always give people
the freedom to choose, because sometimes the things are things
people don't want to think about.
Like your retirement, it's super complicated.
Like the financials is complicated.
Thinking about stuff 30 or 40 years in the future, Super
complicated. It's already complicated to
think about Okay, what's going to happen next year and what can
happen in the meantime. I mean, who would have predicted
that a few years ago, all of a sudden we would be in a lockdown
and we would have a worldwide pandemic?
So thinking about stuff happening further, further into
the future makes things more abstract, more complicated.
And then why should you give people a lot of options on
choosing on saving for retirement and thinking about
how they should tackle this while you have a lot of experts
thinking about this, and policymakers can leverage this
more. So thinking about, is this
something that everybody should have an opinion about or is this
something an expert should make a decision?
Yeah. And in some cases I prefer
experts to make a decision. I can.
I can imagine. So the problem is when that
happens and it's a wrong decision, people lose faith and
lose trust quickly. That's the that's the only
pitfall. And once that faith and trust is
gone. It's even harder to get it back.
And then they want to make all the decisions themselves all of
a sudden. Yeah, I'm trying to.
I'm trying to figure out, like, I love the doctor example
because, yeah, the Doctor gives me options.
I have a good example, basically.
And this is where I chose for myself because I had to pull all
my wisdom teeth and I postponed it.
I don't like going to the doctor.
I postponed it for so long until I have a hole in one of my
wisdom teeth. And I was like fine.
They can fix it now, but because they're hard to like, they're
very much in the back, it's hard to brush them.
So holes are bound to happen. And I went to the doctor and I
said can we pull all of them in one go?
And they were like, we don't advise that at all.
No, make a make a appointment at the hospital, You get them
pulled on each side, basically right side, then left side.
So then I made my appointment with the jaw surgeon I went to.
The guy said, can you pull all of them?
He was like, we don't advise the blah blah.
I said, but can you can you do it?
He said I can do it. So you want me to do it?
I was like, I think so. And then all of a sudden I was
there, I was sedated, complete, and I was like, here we go,
we're going to do all of them. Right now I have to I I don't
have to go back a second time. That was basically my goal where
everyone advised me not to do it and I decided I want to do it
and I'm happy I did because I didn't have to go back.
But yeah, it sucked for a few hours.
Yeah. And and and then you're lucky,
Yeah, because sometimes people have like, jaw aches for several
days, maybe even weeks. And then if you're like your
entire face is bloated for multiple weeks and you can't eat
anything. That's the reason, yeah.
Then. Then it doesn't make a lot of
sense. So I know from experience.
So my little sister had the same she wanted to do all four at the
same time. The doctor said please don't do
it. She had.
I really want to do it because I hate going there and I saw her
struggling for like 10 days. She couldn't eat anything and it
was a nightmare, so when I had to take them out I.
Was like, no, no, not one side, just one side.
But yeah, going to the hospital, stuff like that.
For me, it's always really scary.
So that's like a bad habit of me.
If I know that I need to go to the dentist or to the doctor, I
tried to postpone it. Because for me you have like the
scala of options of all the bad things that can happen.
So as long as I don't go to the doctor, those bad things don't
happen. Yeah.
And I I tried to change that. So I had a time where like the
last years of uni, I wouldn't go to the dentist as much because I
I wasn't happy with my dentist. But I always had the feeling
that I would have a cavity after I went to the dentist.
So I tried to postpone my appointments.
And then afterwards I got some issues, like minor issues, but
those were far worse than doing the checkup.
Yeah. So.
And then I started realizing, yeah, maybe I should change my
habits. So if I feel pain somewhere, or
I detect something strange, maybe I should actually go to
the doctor instead of being stubborn.
I think, yeah, as long as I don't know.
Yeah, there's nothing there. Well, you don't know.
It doesn't harm you. Exactly.
It's like I would grow. It'll grow back.
It will be fine. It's like stuff like that, yeah.
That's funny, yeah. In Dutch culture, it's like,
take a paracetamol and it will go over.
Even when you go to the doctor. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. The doctor tells you the same.
It's like, yeah, my mom already said it.
Yeah, paracetamol and we're done.
That's culture. That's doctor culture.
This was a lot of fun, man. Was this kind of what you
expected going into this? No, I I would think that it
would take a lot longer to. Be a lot longer.
Yeah, I had a feeling like, oh, we're we're in the middle of the
conversation and I could go on for a few hours because I'm
having a blast. That's good.
That's a good thing. Yeah, it was.
It is. To be honest, I was kind of
nervous because I'm not familiar with having a microphone and
having a headphones on where you can have feedback of your own
voice, which is something I really need to get used to.
But it was a really nice way of, yeah, having conversations.
I think it's really cool. Good stuff, man.
Thanks a lot. This was a lot of fun.
I'm going to round it off here. I'm going to put all sources,
socials in the description below, check them, outlet them,
know you came from our show. And with that being said, thank
you for listening. We'll see you in the next one.