Comment by richdougherty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by richdougherty | Hacker News Reader

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I think all of those things you listed are kinds of nudges. They are changes in the "choice architecture" that steer the user to an action.

In the context of government, a nudge means influencing people to choose something desirable, while still leaving open the option for people to choose what they want (hence preserving liberty). In contrast, a non-nudge solution would be a law or regulation that forces people into the desirable option or perhaps a tax on a certain choice.

In your UI, an example of a non-nudge solution would be removing the other options, effectively forcing their decision. Another example of a non-nudge would be charging different fees depending on their decision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#Definition_of_a_n...

"A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not."

A nudge has to push the user towards one certain decision over another, that's the whole point. It's opinionated. The factors I listed aren't inherently opinionated, we could've tried to improve them without pushing the user to a specific choice:

E.g. speed: We could've removed earlier parts of the onboarding to make the overall experience less long, or compacted the UI so it was visually easier to skim the choices.

Expertise: we could've assured the user before the choice, that all options were good cause we're the experts and that we would've give you a bad option - so don't agonise.

Cognitive load: We could've reduced the info we showed about each option, or hidden it away behind a modal, or re-written it in plain english. The legal team told us we had to use the legal descriptions of the choices, which included technical language.

Confusion: We could've made an visualisation of the impact of their choice, that changed as they swapped between each option - showing them them a more tangible outcome of their choice. It was a complicated concept to get, so the addition of a visual aid instead of just written descriptions might've helped.

To be clear - I'd be surprised if these things would've worked, and I'm certain setting a default made a difference. The point I'm making is that I don't know for sure how much of a difference. The change to implement the default, by my eyes, also improved the overall design in these other ways as well. We didn't isolate it down to exactly what made the improvement, we were just happy it happened.

The point I'm making is you could quickly skim read this story of a team stuck on a problem, who after implementing defaults found their conversion rates jumped 11x holy shiiiiiiii- and it sounds like it's all thanks to nudge theory. It's exactly like a case study you'd see in a co-design agency's portfolio.

But in the actual real messy world of designing interfaces, it's just always a bit more complicated than that. No change is truly isolated, tested in a controlled, academic fashion. You just design your best shot each time and see what works. Because of this, it's hard to truly definitively say an improvement was because of a nudge. Best I can do is, "I mean probably" haha.

There are some good points you raise, and I think you're really testing the nuance of what nudging is. But nudges are perhaps more basic than you're thinking.

Nudges don't need to steer the user to a specific choice, just a behaviour change. Sticking with a conversion flow counts as a behaviour change.

Nudges don't need to be simple or understandable. They can be a set of complex changes where causation isn't clear. They just need to get results.

The only really hard requirement that would rule out a nudge is if you forced a choice or used financial incentives.

If you read the Nudge book you'll see that it's a political book, really. The authors introduce nudges as an alternative to hard regulation. Instead they propose that governments consider influencing behaviour in a softer way, but still leave the escape hatch open for people with strong preferences to choose what they want. This strikes a balance between state involvement and principles of liberty. (Or at least that's their argument.)

Because of this framing a nudge is defined mostly by what it isn't. It's not a nudge if it forces a user to a choice; a nudge is anything you do that changes what users do without forcing them.

This is what you've done with your series of changes that resulted in increased conversion. You've left all the choices open still, so users have as much freedom as before, but you've managed to predictably change user behaviour in a way that aligns with your goals. In other words, you've nudged them.

Oh interesting, I had no idea it had such a wide scope, thanks for the explanation. I learnt about nudges via a uni course, it sounds like parts were lost in translation. I should check out the original book.

> that alters people's behavior

I've always understood this part of the description to be more than a single one-off choice, so none of that around the decision point in the financial product would count.

I think any alteration to behaviour is open to nudging, but perhaps you can explain more?

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