The Behavior Change Podcast by Lirio explores the various ways humans can leverage behavioral science to personalize our messaging, engage our audience, and drive better behavior at scale.

Transcript

Greg Stilestra:

Welcome to the Behavior Change podcast by Lirio, the program where we explore the marvels of behavioral science and ways of applying it to make a better world. I’m your host, Greg Stielstra.  

On today’s program, we’ll talk with Mike Rapp. He’s VP and Senior UX Designer at Regions Bank. Previously, he served in a similar capacity for beachyapp.com. He was the UI lead at Results Physiotherapy, the Southeast’s largest physical therapy organization. He’s been a graphic designer and a brand strategist and he’s done it for ad agencies, record labels like Benson, Sony, and even at his own firm. He’s also a personal friend of almost 20 years. 

Today we’ll look at user experience and user interface design in general and for email in particular. We’ll have our conversation with Mike in a moment. But as always, we’ll begin with a bias brief. 

 

Bias Brief #149 – Omission Bias 

Which is worse: Getting vaccinated against a disease and dying from the vaccine side effects or skipping the vaccine and dying from the disease itself? The two choices have the same horrible outcome—death. And yet somehow one option seems worse than the other. If you get vaccinated and die, it’s like you contributed to your death. But if you skip the vaccine and die, it’s like the disease is to blame. The difference illustrates the cognitive distortion produced by omission bias. 

One study found that parents who did not vaccinate their children feared that vaccinating was more dangerous than not vaccinating, even though the risks from the vaccination were lower than the risks from the disease. This shows that omission bias can cause people to make irrational choices, rather than appropriately weighing the odds of each potential outcome. But omission bias can be used for good.  

The best way to convey how omission bias can be used for good is through a first-hand example. Lirio created an email campaign for a hospital system in the northeast to encourage more women to get regular mammograms. We carefully designed the calltoaction (CTA) to avoid the negative influence of omission bias. Most email campaigns offer a single call to action button. For example, it might say schedule your appointment. But presenting only one button treats the failure to schedule an appointment as an act of omission, a non-action for which the reader feels less responsible. 

To make recipients more accountable for their choice, Lirio’s email contained two CTA buttons. The first said, “Yes, I’m in,” and the second said, “No, I’ll wait.” This made either choice an act of commission. The two buttons led to separate landing pages. If a recipient clicked, “Yes I’m in,” they were given a phone number to schedule an appointment.  

If they clicked, “No, I’ll wait,” they were given multiple options. They could reconsider and click to schedule a mammogram, let us know that they’d already had a recent mammogram, say they weren’t interested in cancer prevention, or provide some other reason for opting out. Emoticons communicated injunctive norms, behavior seen as approved by others. 

Out of the almost 200,000 emails delivered, the campaign generated 55,451 unique opens, 4,267 clicks, resulting in 435 inbound calls, and 131 confirmed appointments. Perhaps the most interesting insight was the value the “No button added to the campaign.  

After initially clicking “No, a total of 47 women change their mind and selected, “Actually, I do want to book a screening.” By framing the decision to skip a mammogram as an act of commission, Lirio’s approach change women’s attitudes and persuaded many to schedule screenings they otherwise might have skipped. 

The takeaway: omission bias can often lead people to make the wrong choice when it comes to healthcare. However, using choice architecture to design the way alternatives are presented, can leverage omission bias to drive better results. 

 

GS:

I wanted to ask you Mike, what’s the difference between UX and UI besides a single letter? 

Mike Rapp:

Yeah, that’s a really common question that’s being asked everywhere. So, UX stands for user experience and UI stands for user interface. So, even though they look and sound similar, they are actually very different things. They are really only related to each other.  

A user interface is literally the layout and design of a screen that invites a user to interact with a digital product. User experience design is about strategy. It’s not as much about how things look, but how people interact with the thing. It’s not about design and as much as it is, how that thing works, and what role the customer plays in that actual interactive process. 

So, a lot of people think that UXers get hired to make things look good. And the truth is, if you’re doing it right, we help you make it work right. 

GS:
Let’s back up for a second and take a moment to define user experience or UX, for those who may not be familiar with the term or know what it means and how many people are actually working in that field. The one-on-one please. 

MR:

You know, I’ve taught workshops on UX. And usually we start out by saying all the things that user experience and design is. And it’s usually page after page after page.  

There really isn’t a singular definition for this job. But essentially what we do is we try to reverse engineer problems, so that we ultimately are solving customer or user problems, rather than just meeting a stakeholder demand or a deadline or a budget to get something done.  

There’s a lot of ways to go about that. There’s lots of tools that are being developed and used successfully to help unlock these secrets in the process. A lot of it is plain, old-fashioned research. But a lot of it now, especially if you’re working in digital product design, is prototyping. 

GS:
And testing of the prototype. 

MR:

And test testing, yeah. So essentially, if you’re working in a digital product, environment, user experience design is essentially the process of iteration that starts with a user need that then goes to wireframing, which is crude layouts and testing of those wire frames, meaning showing them to real people. And then going back to the drawing board and changing those, showing them again, getting more information, going back to your screen, changing it again, until you have a reasonable idea that you’re probably on the right track. And then you go to what we call highfidelity prototypes. 

So, there are several really good software programs that enable high fidelity prototyping. Most UI, user interface designers which tend to work in user experience and product design, use Sketch as their primary layout tool and then a program called InVision, which creates interactive physical prototypes. 

GS:
You can click it. 

MR:

Yeah, it’s a clickable prototype now. So, once you have a high-fidelity prototype, then you actually test with real people again, who hopefully are most likely to be your customers, right? And then if you know how to do it, you know how to ask the questions that don’t lead to predetermined answers.  

And if you do it right, they tell you what you did right and what you did wrong. And then you go back and iterate again. And then you keep going until you find something that you believe is reasonably certain to solve the problem. 

GS:
When you’re trying to help people make good decisions, how important is it to understand how they make decisions? 

MR:
Yeah, I mean, in user experience design, we have a lot of things that we do to help us understand the user intent and what they really want. You try to work backwards until you help the customer really tell you what the real problem is that they want you to solve it. 

GS:
Give me an example. Maybe from your work. 

MR:
Yeah, I’m trying to think of a good story. Like when I was when I was at Beachy, we talked about having a calendar. 

GS:
Beachy[app].com? 

MR:

Yeah, Beachy appBeachy is a software system that enables beachfront organizations to do eCommerce physically on a beach. So, we created a proprietary beach map like seats on an airplane or seats in a movie theater. And folks that are running the beach, working on the beach, carry that app around on an iPad and run eCommerce on the beach.  

They can not only book you into a chair, they can rent you an umbrella, they can rent you bikes or parasails. It’s a fullfunctioning, very proprietary eCommerce platform created for that specific use case. 

So, there was some talk about we need a calendar. Well, what is a calendar supposed to do for the consumer? Yes. And the consumer in this case is a young man or young woman who is on the beach running the app. It’s essentially a B2B product.  

Whad a lot of discussions about what a calendar should do for the Beachy app. And eventually, I talked to the ops guys, which eventually sent me to some of these people working on the beach. And so, we ended up talking about  they didn’t ask for a calendar. They weren’t asking for a calendar.  

They were asking for a way to see inventory for products in the future. They wanted to see available inventory. 

GS:

They didn’t want a drill bit; they wanted a hole in the wall.

MR:

Well, they wanted to know like, if somebody says, “I want to run a two-seater bike on next Thursday,” they wanted an interface where they could easily see that a two-seater bike was or was not available next Tuesday and know how many were already rented out, how many were going into repair, right?

They weren’t looking for a calendar. They were looking for a way to manage inventory. And perhaps a calendar interface is a way to do it. And so, we started working backwards at that point. When we started to talk to them about managing their inventory, all kinds of other things started to come up, which were crucial, absolutely crucial. We would have made the wrong product—for sure. We found out that products have to have skews, which they don’t yet.

So, you have to not just know that there is a bike, but there is this bike available, because that specific bike is currently rented to someone else. And they have to make sure that bike is back in inventory, or it’s not going to be available to rent on that day. All of a sudden, I’m starting to think we have a lot of problems to solve here before we can do a calendar.

GS:

So, what I hear you describing is a common mistake. I see people start inside and work outside, I see them start from where they are and work toward the end. My experience is more valuable to start with the end in mind, Stephen Covey. And approach it from the outside in the consumers perspective of this operation.

MR:

Yeah. And I would say that that is very difficult to do, no matter what the circumstance. I have worked, as you know, in at least dozens of marketplaces and scenarios. The inside-out, or distribution, mindset is the default of the human brain. It is the default. It is what we run to.

We see a problem, and the problem is a business problem. And that’s what we do. We have a business that has a problem. So, we try to fix the business problem. And we assume that it’s the customer’s problem.

And that’s where user experience designers are coming into play. The user experience designers are saying, “Let’s slow down. Let’s back up. Before we start building software, let’s find out if this is the problem, actually the problem to be solved. And once we start working down that road, what other problems are we finding? And then how do we create an experience that solves that problem?”

GS:

Now the process you’re describing, and I think most people would say there’s somewhat familiar with it, but they would associate it with the development of complex websites, or applications perhaps. I bet they rarely think of it in terms of applying to email messages, but it does.

MR:

Yes, it does. In fact, I’m really describing digital product design, but the kind of the greater picture is called service design, which is a methodology that isn’t based in actually designing screens but designing a service for people. For example, if you did service design for a restaurant, a service designer would figure out what colors to make the napkins and how to arrange the chairs. But that whole way of thinking about what the user is going to click on or respond to is really what we’re talking about here.

And as it relates to email design, I think email design, email is really a filter. Now, customer … People use email as a filter. And if you view it as a filter, then you don’t get so worried about packing every piece of information you can imagine in your email. It’s meant as a handshake, and an introduction to go learn more. I believe there’s a real art to email.I have done more email than I would ever want to admit.

GS:

You kind of just did.

MR:

Yeah, I know. I was in charge of the creative work for Gigis Cupcakes USA for quite a while. My partner and I started working with them when they were tiny, like maybe eight locations. And we built their entire infrastructure, digital infrastructure and marketing, to the point where we were doing millions of dollars of eCommerce, and also my partner was doing social media.

And we were working with My Emma, which is now owned by Campaign Monitor, to do email marketing.

So, when we started working with them, their email list was zero people. It was a number very near zero.

GS:

It’s what we call an upside opportunity.

MR:

Yeah. You’d call it that. Once we’re really in it, I believe, and William would be able to tell you for sure, I think our email list was pretty darn close to half a million people.

GS:

Interested in cupcakes.

MR:

Yes. That is actually a very, very good way to say it. That’s actually the way to say it. Not necessarily buyers of cupcakes, certainly not necessarily lovers of cupcakes. Interested in cupcakes. And that was sort of the secret that we discovered in working with Gigis and Gina.

We realized that our persona … “persona” is kind of a fancy word for type of customer. They just really liked the idea of cupcakes. Like a lot of people didn’t even like to eat them. But they liked looking at them. They liked the idea of it.

GS:

Cupcakes as art.

MR:

Yeah, I always knew that Gigis was a style brand. It wasn’t a food brand. And so, once we realized that, it was just an entertainment product at that point that tasted really good. And they did taste good. They were extremely well made. Gina did a terrific job. But once we realized it was entertainment, then we treated it like entertainment.

GS:

But you still were obligated to convert people interested in cupcakes into people who ate cupcakes.

MR:

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I mean, when we were at our heyday, we were one of the top 10 senders of mail in the entire Emma ecosystem, which is a staggering number when you really consider it was millions a week. We were sending at least a million messages a week. And we had granular lists driven by market, by type of product, by specials, by all kinds of different … We even did catering at one point, where a catering had become kind of the money part of the business. And we would tailor our messages to those specific personas.

GS:

So, what were some of the design rules you lived by and why did they exist?

MR:

Yeah, that’s a great question. If you went to five different really good email designers, they would all sort of tell you slightly different things. I can only tell you what I believe and why, and I can tell you what worked. First, I’ll tell you what doesn’t work.

What doesn’t work for most products is using email like it’s a newspaper. So, if you use email to make sure everybody knows everything all the time, you’re just an unsubscribe machine at that point.

People use email as a filter. And just because they’re on your email list doesn’t mean that they necessarily are interested in everything you have to say to them. It doesn’t mean they want off your email list. It just means they’re filtering. So, you should respect that and work to their filter.

GS:

And filter for them to the extent you can.

MR:

Work for their filter. So, when it gets really practical … If there’s any designers listening, I can just say this is how I’ve always done HTML email: I treat email like a miniature website. And what I mean by that is, when I say miniature, I mean smaller physically, but also less dense. So, I view rows of content in email, and I see it as a way of saying hi, and inviting people to have more information about a specific thing that they mightbe interested in.

GS:

First date.

MR:

First date, but also a reminder. A thank you. A don’t miss out. A special. It’s a conversation. It’s an ongoing conversation. And of course, the implication there is you’ve got something on the other side. So, each row would have one call to action.

GS:

So, when the user replies, they’re engaging with the email, in effect?

MR:

In a sense, what I’m inviting them, this is the way I’ve done it. What I’m inviting them to do is usually click through to a page at a website in which a transaction can take place. And I’m promising that-

GS:

And transaction is not always financial.

MR:

That’s exactly right. It’s not always financial. It could be informational.

GS:

But it’s an exchange.

MR:

Yes, it’s an exchange of information that they are willingly giving, they are willingly participating in it. So, the really good emails also give the user a promise. It’s a subtle promise that you are kind of almost telling them what they’re in for by the design of it, by the language you use.

Like you don’t want to say, “Hey, learn more about this great new cancer drug,” and then you click through, and it’s an 8,000-word study about cancer. If it’s a cancer study, then your target market is probably going to be a very specific cancer doctor. And they aren’t going to want that much information about it.

GS:

So, artificial intelligence and the ability to make a relevant match between a message and a recipient—valuable?

MR:

Yeah, I mean, I would say that any intelligence is valuable in that scenario. And the more granular you can make it, the better. And the more specific you can be about what you’re promising, the more likely you’re going to get a response that you intended.

GS:

Earlier, you talked about iterating design and testing those various versions with the consumer. Can you foresee a future where that process happens automatically with an artificial intelligence agent?

MR:

The people that I read and respect are convinced that that’s going to happen. I just am not smart enough to figure out how.

GS:

I don’t think we have time for that.

MR:

Yeah. I’m old enough to I remember people promising all kinds of things that … Doomsday.

GS:

I’ve given up on flying cars.

MR:

Yeah. Actually, it’s a really good example because, truthfully, the telephone made flying cars irrelevant, essentially. I didn’t really want to drive to see everybody. I just want to talk to them. Not everybody you want to sit in the same room with.

So, I think that we’re definitely headed toward … not just headed toward it, we’re in the era of machine learning for sure. I mean … we’re trying to help machines figure out human behavior for sure. Varying degrees of success, in my opinion at this point, we’re still pretty early.

GS:

So, let’s make it more simple. And let’s suppose we’ve got some people listening who have been sending email. They’ve kind of taken it for granted and have just been doing whatever. And you’re about to advise them on a handful of simple design changes they can make that will optimize the conversion rate of their messages. How would you advise them?

MR:

Well, I would … And I’ve had to do this. So, when I went to work at Results Physiotherapy, they were not sending meaningful email to patients at all. And our team worked on a plan to change that.

I think the first thing to do is to figure out what your key messages, which are really calls-to-action, need to be over a long period of time, and create a calendar—a flexible calendar so that you can learn and modify that calendar as you go forward, as you learn what people want to respond to.

You need to have a really good sending system that tracks clicks and opens, and you need to learn how to use it. And you need to have a good relationship with the people on the other side. I can pretty much guarantee you if you show an interest, they’ll show an interest in you and they’ll help you.

From a design standpoint. Try to have a very simple header. I’ve made the mistake of trying to give customers options for everything in the header of email. That’s not the purpose of it. You’re talking to people that have opted in to your ecosystem. They don’t always need to know how to get everywhere.

GS:

Wouldn’t lots of options in an email be an indication that you have not properly segmented your list? If you’re trying to give something for everybody, then the audience you’re talking to is by definition too broad?

MR:

Yeah, for sure. And you’re likely to get a very poor response. In fact, I would say you’re likely to get unsubscribed pretty quickly.

GS:

So, better to focus the message and then match it to your audience through segmentation.

MR:

Yeah, in fact, our challenge has always been to have one message.

GS:

Per email.

MR:

Yes. It didn’t always work out that way, which is fine. But when we started with one call-to-action, if we had a second one, we knew why it was there. So, as an example, when I was working with Results Physiotherapy, we would do learning seminars throughout the country where our clinicians would come in and teach specialty things like trigger point dry needling. So, our main call to action was: sign up for these seminars.

But it was a little bit of a fishing expedition, because we were really… one of the side goals was to recruit new clinicians. So, once we started to work on it, we realized, “Yeah, this is really a little bit of a lost lead.” What we really want is to get these young clinicians to go to the careers page.

So, once we started doing them, we had a second row of content that said, “Hey, would you like to join our team?” Cut to the front of the line, so to speak. And we got great response. So, it didn’t bother me that we had two calls-to-action. We just tracked them independently. We had different landing pages, and we knew what we were fishing for … and we caught fish on both sides.

GS:

And they were related. Both of those things were relevant to the recipient.

MR:

Yeah, they were. We learned through talking to our clinicians that some people might be interested in a particular event but can’t come. It doesn’t mean that they’re not interested. They just have something that weekend or they’ve already been to that seminar. But they would like to change jobs. Like, they would like to be at a company that was doing those sorts of things. So, that’s a good example of learning your personas. And learning what the real problem is to be solved.

GS:

Someone listening wants to learn more about UI-UX design in general. What resources would you recommend?

MR:

One of the things I love about the user experience market is how giving and open the whole community is to help others learn. We are all learning. And that’s not just a statement, it’s the truth.

So, if you’re interested in UX, probably the best place to start is Envision. I think it’s invisionapp.com. They have the best blog in the entire design business. And they are a phenomenal company.

GS:

As you would expect.

MR:

Yes, but they are a phenomenal group of people. They are giving, so giving to the design community, and their blog is amazingly informative. I mean, even if you’ve been doing user interface design for 15 years, you’ll learn something every time you go to that blog. I get a lot of people that are just interested in UX. They think it sounds interesting, maybe they’d want to be involved in it.

There are almost, I would say every city in America now has a UX meetup group. At least one, if not more than one. They’re free. And these are fun, interesting people. And I hear people say, “Oh, I just don’t know anything.” Good. Because that’s who’s going.

We’re all learning. Don’t be afraid, because we are all learning. And everybody is excited about people that want to learn. So, go. Just go. That’s the best advice I can give.

There are also service or user experience design jams that are held all around the world, usually on a schedule. I think they happen quarterly. We do it here in Nashville and it’s a weekend. It’s a full Friday night, all day Saturday, and most of the day Sunday jam. And it does not matter if you know anything about UX. It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever used Sketch. In fact, we don’t even really open a computer for the most part.

We teach design thinking, from beginning to end. And at the end of the weekend, every team all around the world has a project that they upload and present. So, you go from Friday night knowing nothing, to Sunday afternoon having done an actual project that was prototyped and tested. It is fun and intense. And I guarantee you, you’ll meet people that are passionate about it. Check it out. It’s a great way to learn it.

GS:

You’re passionate about it. So, Mike Rapp, thank you for being a guest on The Behavior Change Podcast by Lirio.

MR:

Thanks for having me.

GS:

You’ve been listening to The Behavior Change Podcast by Lirio. Lirio provides an email-based behavioral engagement solution that uses machine learning and behavioral science to help organizations motivate the people they serve to achieve better outcomes. On the web at Lirio.co (L-I-R-I-O dot C-O). Or follow us on Twitter @Lirio_LLC.

The thoughts and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the person speaking. The opinions expressed are as of the date of this podcast and may change as subsequent conditions vary. There is no guarantee that any forecasts made will come to pass. Reliance upon information in this podcast is at the sole discretion of the listener.

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