I was working on a fintech project (gonna be vague as it's not yet released).
The legal team told us we couldn't use default choices anywhere, as it could count as giving financial advice. Fair enough. So we designed the onboarding, and there was this choice the user had to make before we could create their account.
During testing, we found people were getting really stuck on this choice, to the point of giving up. The choice actually had quite low impact, but it was really technical - a lot of people just didn't understand it. Which makes sense our users weren't financial experts, which was our target user. This choice was a new concept for the market, so we couldn't relate it to other products they might know. The options inside also had quite a lot of detail when you started digging into them, detail we had to provide if somebody went looking for it. Our testers would hit this choice, get stuck, feel the urge to research this decision, get overwhelmed, give up.
We spent so long trying to reframe this choice, explaining it better in a nice succinct way, we even tried to get this feature removed entirely - but nothing stuck.
Eventually after lots of discussion with legal we were allowed to have a 'base' choice, which the user could optionally change. We tested the new design, and it made a significant difference in conversion rates.
Huzzar for nudge theory! Right? Well, maybe. I think it's a bit more complicated.
- The new design was faster. There was less screens with simpler choices. It went from a 'pick one of 5' to a 'heres the default, would you like to change it?'. Was it just the speed that made a difference?
- The user was not a financial expert, and the company behind the product was. In some sense was the user just thinking 'these guys probably know more than me I'll leave it at that'. Imagine trying to implement this exact change on something the user is an expert in - say like your meal choice in an airplane. I imagine most people would think "How rude choosing for me! I'm an expert in what I feel like eating I want to see all the options".
- It had less of a cognitive load. Like the whole onboarding flow was already really complicated, just reducing the overall mental strain to make an account may have just improved the whole experience. E.g. if we had removed decisions earlier in the flow, would this one still have been as big of an issue? We never had time to test it, so I can't say for sure.
- Lack of confusion == confidence. For the users who didn't look at the options and took the default, did they just feel more in control and confident because they weren't exposed with unfamiliar terms and choices? They never experienced the urge to research.
Like at the surface level this new design worked great, so job done. But it's hard to say definitively it was because of nudge theory. I don't think you can really blindly say "oh yeah defaults == always good" and slap them on every problem - which is why the design-test-iterate loop is so important.
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.
"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.
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.
> The new design was faster. There was less screens with simpler choices. It went from a 'pick one of 5' to a 'heres the default, would you like to change it?'. Was it just the speed that made a difference?
If you're just going from "pick one of 5" to "pick one of 5 but there's a default", I wouldn't expect one or the other to be "faster". Was the new design more different than that?
As for the rest, I think the beneficial features of the design are predicted by nudge theory. "Providing a credible default reduces cognitive load and confusion on the path to a decision, as the user can just trust the defaults have been set up reasonably" has always been the theory for why nudges work.
The first version was a screen with 5 choices, and detail about each choice that you'd have to scroll through. The second version was a simple "We've set this up for you" screen with two options, continue or customise. If you hit customise, you'd get shown the original five choice screen.
What I mean by it being faster is you could get to the next step of the process with both reading less text, and seeing less choices (just two buttons not 5). Cause if you just slapped the continue button (which most people did), you'd skip the whole explanation of all the choices.
