8 Behavioural Biases That Could be Hurting Your Engagement

Here are eight Behavioral Biases that could be stopping your customers from engaging or buying from you.

Now, I see the below biases crop up ALL the time with my clients. So understanding them is crucial when we're trying to figure out where their customer experience is breaking down, or if I'm working on any type of product experience. 

 In this article, I've added some questions you might want to ask yourself and your team to help mitigate these biases. 

Let's get on to the biases…

1. Hyperbolic Discounting 

💡 Our brains are hardwired to value immediate rewards over long-term rewards.  

👉 Ask yourself: Are we showing the immediate benefits of using our product, not just the long-term? How can we show both? 

2. Status Quo

💡 We prefer to follow the status quo rather than something that is an unpopular choice. 

👉 Ask yourself: How is my service or product framed? How can we help our customers feel like buying it is a normal, popular choice? What could we explore in terms of design and language to do this?  

3. Choice Overload

💡 Too many options within a digital experience can slow down decisions and make customers feel anxious, confused, or frustrated. 

👉 Ask yourself: Do our customers seem confused by too many options at any point in their journey through this product/service? How can we narrow down some of the available options or help them make a faster decision?

4. Goal Gradient Effect 

💡 We are motivated by how far we have to go until we meet their goal. 

👉Ask yourself: Are we making it clear to customers where they are in their journey? (e.g., purchase, onboarding, achieving a goal etc) Do they know how far they have to go to get to the finish line and see results in our product/service?

5. Loss Aversion

💡 We’re more motivated to avoid losses than to pursue gains.  

👉Ask yourself: Are we presenting any feature changes, price changes or anything else as a loss? How can we frame it as a gain?

6. Ambiguity Effect

💡 We avoid options we consider to be ambiguous or to be missing information.  

👉 Ask yourself: Are we setting customer/user expectations throughout their journey? Are we mitigating any uncertainty they might be feeling by providing all the information they need?

7. Ikea Effect

💡 We place a disproportionately high value on self-made products. 

👉 Ask yourself: Are we making our customers/users feel like they have a part in the creation of the product or service? How might we ask for their input to show they have a part to play in the product build? 

8. Functional Fixedness

💡 When we limit a person to use a product only in the way it is traditionally used.  

👉 Ask yourself: Are we showing all the non-obvious ways the product can be used? Are our biases limiting the use case of our product in any way?