Changing Consumer Behaviour with Georges de Boeck

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.