A study by J. Michael McGinnis of the National Academy of Medicine found that 40% of premature deaths are the result of our own choices. Our decisions around food, exercise, drinking, and driving are literally killing us (and sometimes others).

We’re bad at making decisions that are good for us.

1. Increase the immediate benefit to taking any action: forced choice and present bias

People (you, your users, your customers) all want to complete things. By making people feel closer to completing something, we delivered a bigger immediate benefit.

By focusing a user’s attention on “completing” setup, we boosted conversion from the base of 7.1% to 15.9%.

When we feel like something is ours (the “endowment effect”), we may be likely to value it more.

Experiment with designing products that allow the user to more quickly feel psychological ownership (a form of endowment). Your product is already theirs, and by not taking action, they may lose the opportunity to benefit from it.

Day 1 is the day your users have the most momentum they will ever have. Catching them at this moment with the right features and mental model will drive higher opt-in rates and engagement than at any other time in the user’s lifecycle.

We find that too many teams start cold and conduct focused interview groups. User interviews can be helpful, but small samples are noisy, and even one misguided answer can lead to misdirection at the critical early stages.

When designing for behavior change, the most important thing is—quite literally—to pick the behavior you want to change.

Most teams we work with focus on engagement and retention but fail to make a clear and unified hypothesis about the most important action to drive this.

To drive a key behavior, we need to reduce the barriers and increase the (immediate) benefits. Translation: Humans tend to follow the path of least resistance and respond to immediate incentives