How to use behavioral economics to design products that change behavior (for good)

How to use behavioral economics to design products that change behavior (for good)

PDMA St.Louis | March 9, 2021

Today’s product leaders often rely on the word of their customers when building their product road maps; whether it’s a customer survey or a phone interview, loads of qualitative data through these methods is being collected and used to dictate how to design and develop products. Seems like a foolproof plan, right? Actually, no — a reliance on customer input and feedback is built on an antiquated model of human decision making that assumes humans are rational. Kristen will go over her compelling research that highlights just how misleading customer research. She’ll take us through step by step the process that behavioral economists go through to understand behavior and then change it.


About the Presenter

Kristen Berman

Kristen Berman studies how people actually act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational.

Bringing behavioral insights into the DNA of top companies
Kristen co-founded Irrational Labs, a behavioral product design company, with Dan Ariely in 2013. Irrational Labs worked with Google, Paypal, Facebook, Ancestry, American Family Insurance, Grand Rounds, Simple, The World Bank, Aetna, Netflix and hundreds more. They are at the forefront of bringing behavioral economics to life – in order to increase the health, wealth and happiness of users. She was on the founding team for the behavioral economics group at Google, a group that touches over 26 teams across Google, and she hosted one of the top behavioral change conferences globally, StartupOnomics.

Research that drives positive outcomes
She co-founded Common Cents Lab, a Duke University initiative dedicated to improving the financial well-being for low to middle Americans. Under Kristen’s leadership, Common Cents launched over 50 experiments with companies, touching tens of thousands of people.

Thought Leader in space
Kristen’s work has been featured in The Stanford Innovation Review, TechCrunch, and Scientific American. She co-authored a series of workbooks called Hacking Human Nature for Good: A practical guide to changing behavior, with Dan Ariely. These workbooks are being used at companies like Google, Intuit, Netflix, Fidelity, Lending Club for business strategy and design work.

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