Amy Bucher & Geoff Alday

Episode 66
Brave UX

Integrating Behavioural Design & Product Design

In this episode of Brave UX, Amy Bucher and Geoff Alday unpack how they’re integrating their behavioural and product design practices, the ethical considerations of applying behavioural design to AI, and how designers can apply the COM-B model to change user behaviour.

Highlights include:

How is designing for behaviour change different to other forms of design?
What are the ethics governing your AI-infused product design decisions?
How have you integrated product design with behavioural design?
Has Government use of coercion worked to increase vaccine uptake?
What is the COM-B model and how can designers us it to affect behaviour?

March 29, 202201:10:20

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Who are these people?

Amy Bucher, PhD

Amy is the Chief Behaviour Officer at Lirio, makers of the world-leading behaviour change AI platform that unites behavioural science with artificial intelligence.

Before joining Lirio, Amy was the Vice President of Behaviour Change Design at Mad*Pow.

Amy is also the author of “Engaged: Designing for Behaviour Change”, published in 2020 by Rosenfeld Media.

Geoff Alday

Geoff also works at Lirio, where he is the Director of Product Design.

Before Lirio, Geoff was the Director of Product Design at Ruby, a financial services startup, and at Watershed, a learning analytics platform. He was also Product Design Lead at Emma, the well-known email marketing and automation platform.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guests today are Dr. Amy Bucher and Geoff Alday. And boy did we have a bit of technical difficulty getting to this point, but we are so pleased to be here. And that's right. This is a special episode. This is the very first time on Brave UX that I am hosting two wonderful guests, and speaking of which I probably should introduce them, Amy is the Chief Behavior Officer at Lirio, makers of the world leading behavior change AI platform that unites behavioral science with artificial intelligence.
Geoff also works at Lirio, where he is the Director of Product Design. Together, Amy and Geoff are working to integrate the behavioral design and product design practices as well as standup a UX research function to support both. Before joining Lirio, Amy was the Vice President of Behavior Change Design at renowned Boston-based design agency MadPOW. Amy is also the author of Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change, published in 2020 by Rosenfeld Media. Alongside an undergraduate degree in psychology from Harvard, Amy also holds a Master of Arts and a PhD in Psychology, both from the University of Michigan.
Geoff's journey to Lirio has seen him take on the challenge of directing product design at Ruby, a financial services startup, and at Watershed, a learning analytics platform. Before watershed, Geoff was a Product Design Lead at Emma, the well-known email marketing and automation platform. Rumor has it that Geoff is also a skilled character artist and musician, and we were talking off air actually, weren't we about this, Geoff? And you play the guitar and the mandolin. So a bit of extra stuff there to put in the intro. And now after being in our collective calendars for about three months and having just suffered through about 40 minutes of technical difficulties to get to this exciting point, I am pleased to welcome Geoff and Amy here with me for this conversation on Brave UX today. Amy, Geoff, welcome to the show.
Geoff Alday:
Thanks. We're pleased to be here.
Amy Bucher:
Thanks for having us.
Brendan Jarvis:
I am so pleased that we are here. As I said, [laugh] and Amy, I have to say, first of all, just a big congratulations on your recent promotion.
Amy Bucher:
Oh, thank you so much. I've been really thrilled about the opportunity of being able to lead the behavioral science team here. It's definitely one of those things. I think if you're a behavioral scientist in industry, I mean, this is the dream. So really excited to be able to do this at Lirio.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, and Lirio sounds like a fantastic company. I've been doing a bit of research as you can imagine, and we'll definitely get into all of that. But before we do, I had to ask you, I noticed on your fancy new chief behavior officer profile on the Lirio website that your favorite musical artist is REM. Yes. And I was curious about this, were they an instant favorite?
Amy Bucher:
Oh boy. I've been a fan of theirs for so long that I actually don't remember. I got into them in high school. I mean, they were already around for quite a while before then, I'm not that old, but that their earlier albums from the eighties were just kind of right for that teen moment that sort of brooding putting the tape in my Walkman and walking around the neighborhood listening to the music. I mean, I remember always liking them, but I don't remember the first time I listened to them.
Brendan Jarvis:
Best song.
Amy Bucher:
So my favorite album there's this new adventures in [affirmative], maybe leave. I really like the song leave from that album. I take it you're a fan as well.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, yes, I do like REM. They're not right up the top of my list, but there is an interesting brave UX two degrees of separation connection here. So a few, well, it must have been a couple of months ago now, I interviewed Greg Bernstein, who's a user research lead at Conde Nast, and he actually has a connection through to REM and that's he's design album covers. And the way he got into that is at his local record store, he got talking to Chris Bill Heimer, which was the creative director for REM and designed their record covers. So I just thought that was a neat little two degrees of separation. So I suppose there's very cool, there's a road road in there somewhere to REM through Brave UX. And
Amy Bucher:
If you can score me the introduction, we'll be friends forever.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, we'll see. I can't promise anything, but you never know the power of podcasts. Amy, I also noticed that your chosen quote on your profile page is one from Min mink, I believe is how you pronounce the philosopher and that quote as I
Amy Bucher:
Believe so.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I'll give the quote now, which is there's never been a person who could straighten others by bending themselves. Tell me about that.
Amy Bucher:
I have liked that quote. So in college to fulfill one of my common core requirements, I took a class on Confucian humanism. So world religion. And that quote really struck me at the time, although the version I originally read was there's never been a man. I actually updated it myself for the website. And if you look back at my career and a lot of the writing especially that I've done, I really think there's an important role for authenticity in terms of behavior change, happiness, professional success. I keep coming back to this idea in different ways about really being true to who you are and making sure that the things that you value, the things that are important to you, surface through your work and through your relationships. And so to me, that quote speaks to that you really need to be true to the fundamental essence of who you are to be successful, whatever the success means. And that to compromise on that ultimately won't achieve the objectives that are right for you. So I just like that quote because to me it comes back to just being really true to yourself and being true to your values.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I would seem knowing what I know about your mission, having read that on your own personal website, that you've managed to find an organization where you can really be true to your values and deliver on that mission that you set for yourself.
Amy Bucher:
Absolutely. I, I've actually found as well most of my career has been in the healthcare space. And part of that is because it is really important to me to use my skills and my talents to help people have a better life. And I feel like it's a pretty easy sell that connecting people with healthcare, helping them adopt healthier behaviors, finding ways to fit that into their own lives, that to me is a pretty clear good. And when I've explored job opportunities outside of healthcare, I've immediately felt like, oh, that mission might not be there for me.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I can see that there is quite a clear line between what you're doing in health or the change you're trying to affect in behavior in health, and a positive outcome for people where it might be a little less clear in non-health related industries. Now, Geoff, I just wanna come to you briefly before we do jump into all the good stuff that's happening at Lirio and some of the work that you've both been doing there. I understand that when you are not directing product design, Geoff, or playing music that you are fond of making and publishing video games,
Geoff Alday:
I have two kids and watching how they gravitate toward video games, gotta be really curious about five years ago. And so I took it upon myself to really learn how to make video games. And so last year I released two pretty small video games just to make sure I could do it. So yeah, it's a great creative outlet for me. It kind of mixes design, interactivity, interaction design, storytelling, music, art. It kind of brings everything together into one place. So it's just a lot of fun to use that as an outlet for myself.
Brendan Jarvis:
I actually watched a play through of one of the games that you've released and it's called The Interview. Now, I don't wanna give away too much myself, but could you just give us a bit of insight into what the interview's about?
Geoff Alday:
Sure. So it's really a way to poke fun at traditional corporate job interviews and it's about interviewing a place that you don't want to work.
Brendan Jarvis:
Is it based on some sort of bad experience that you've had in the past?
Geoff Alday:
There are a few things in there that are based off of either stories I've heard other people tell or those I've experienced myself.
Brendan Jarvis:
I love the corporate posters that are Thanks the game. I'm just going to call out a few here for people. So one says, do your job without passion or not at all. There's another one in there that says in the end, you can only blame yourself. And my favorite one was a twist on Always Be Closing, which I think you dropped the C and it says, always be losing. So I just thought that really appealed to my sense of humor. Anyway, what is it? It's a bit of a horror game though, isn't it? It's actually quite dark, it's a bit twisted. What is it about the expression through horror or making an interactive horror game that you particularly enjoy?
Geoff Alday:
I think what I really enjoyed watching was just watching a lot of those playthroughs and there were a lot of them, probably two or 300 people have put videos out there at a game and watching those moments where I tried to design a kind of spooky moment or a scary moment, and they reacted as I expected them to. So as I think there's an interesting parallel between that and UX, you try to design these moments intentionally to get someone or help someone do something very similar. And so I think those moments for me are really very satisfying. There's a whole community out there that creates these really small horror kind of spooky games. And so it is, it's a big pool to do research from, frankly. So a good another reason to be putting that game out there. And I spent two months building it. I wanted to get that out there and do research, and I'm really big on putting something out there from a prototype standpoint and getting feedback on it. And that was an expression of that too.
Brendan Jarvis:
One of the funniest moments I saw in the play through is when the player pressed the button on the wall to sort of initiate the experience after you're in that opening scene and didn't realize that they were staring at blackness because they were still facing the wall after they've de descended. And it went on for about 10, 15 seconds and as if they were waiting for something to happen, and then they realized that they just needed to turn around, which again, I suppose is the beauty of putting a product out there. You realize all the weird and wonderful ways that people are going to use it differently to perhaps what you'd actually intended. So now Amy, I also read on your profile that you love reading fiction, especially thrillers and horror stories apparently. Have you played the interview?
Amy Bucher:
I haven't. Although listening to you talk like that's on my list to you today, especially because I'm traveling, so I have nothing to do tonight except play the interview.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh], do it. Good. It won't take you very long, will it, Geoff? It's not particularly not.
Geoff Alday:
Yeah, it's for sure.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Oh good. So let's talk about designing for behavior change. I understand that what we're talking about here in very layman's terms is the application of behavioral psychology to the design process, but what does it actually mean? Aren't all design efforts at their core trying to purposely affect the behavior of the people that they're for?
Amy Bucher:
Yes, I think so. I've used a metaphor in the past talking about designing for a behavioral change of a pair of sunglasses where a behavioral designer is doing many of the same activities, maybe all the same activities of other sorts of designers because every, there's no one behavioral design skillset. I've worked with behavioral designers who are primarily content designers who are primarily interaction designers, but what we are doing is we are deliberately using frameworks and theories from behavioral science. So our process starts by identifying what we call target behaviors, the things that we want people to do differently as a result of interacting with the thing that we design. And our term for that would be an intervention. And then we seek to understand the barriers that people experience with respect to those target behaviors. What are the things that make it hard for people to do?
What gets in the way and as well as what makes it easier? Are there things in the environment or in their mental models about this behavior that make them more likely to take action? Because we wanna capitalize on the things that work. And once we understand that many behavior science frameworks will actually provide a solution set. So whatever you find in the research, there's typically some evidence base that says, okay, well now try these sorts of solutions in order to get people to do that behavior. And so it's really following that process, going back to the literature to make sure that we're bringing in the evidence in the way we design. I mean, one of the things that we also do find sometimes is there isn't always a strong evidence base. And that's where we do try to do our own primary research where we work with user experience researchers to try to generate that evidence base ourselves as well as I think we all know that the context that we're in really matters.
So if I'm looking at research around a behavior of getting a colonoscopy or having a vaccination from let's say five years ago, that might be very different than now because we're in the middle of a global pandemic, and that's really affecting the way people experience their healthcare. So sometimes there's also value in generating our own research just because of changing times, changing context, just knowing that people are different across different parts of their life. But generally it's really going back and pulling in those established theories, frameworks, and evidence spaces that I think distinguishes a behavioral designer from other sorts of designers.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I want to come to a model that I know you're particularly fond of, which is the combi model in a minute. But before we do that, I wanted to suggest that this doesn't sound like the type of design that's done inside of a two-week sprint
Amy Bucher:
And no, well, not [laugh] laughing and we do
Brendan Jarvis:
Too. Let's go to Geoff. What, what's on your mind?
Geoff Alday:
More of what we're doing at LiRo is unique and really we work in program increments typically. So from our process standpoint, and so great weeks, we do work four two week sprints and that includes the behavior designers and the behavior scientists, and they also work in that program increment framework. They lay out the work that they're going to do over that eight weeks. And yes, it does break down into two week sprints, but I think kinda spans beyond two weeks depending what they're working on.
Brendan Jarvis:
So it sounds like they're working within the structure, but they might have a broader cadence than just trying to fit specific design work into two weeks.
Amy Bucher:
So for example, on a typical behavioral design project for us, the behavioral designers, we start by doing some initial discovery where we frame up the target behaviors and then we create what we call a strategy matrix where we are writing down all of the barriers, all of the facilitators that we found with respect to that behavior. So we're looking at the literature, we we're potentially doing some of our own primary research and already here it may or may not fit that two weeks. So if it's a behavior that is fairly straightforward or we have a lot of experience designing, we do a lot of work with preventative screenings. And so the behavioral design team here really understands how to very quickly understand what's going on with a particular type of preventative screening. We might be able to actually generate that entire strategy matrix and it would tell us which solutions to build into our libraries and so forth. We could do that within a single sprint. However, a lot of the projects that we're working on are larger than that, or it might be a new behavior that we haven't really had a lot of experience designing around, or even something like Coronavirus vaccination right there, that was a very new behavior when it rolled out a year ago. And so in those cases, the design challenge may take a little bit longer.
Brendan Jarvis:
I was curious to know whether or not there are certain design challenges that are more appropriate for behavioral design than others. Are there any particular areas of design where you wouldn't look to apply this particular way or approaching how to change someone's behavior?
Amy Bucher:
There's a slide that I show sometimes that is just, it's like a two by two. And I basically look at the complexity of the behavior, how embedded in context it is from kind of light to very embedded. And I think that at the lower end of that range, it's kind of overkill to use a full behavioral design process. And so that might be things like clicking on a link. And this actually gets to your question earlier, don't all designers try to change behavior? Because that's a great example of anybody who's designing a webpage with a call to action wants people to take the behavior of clicking on that call to action, but to sit down and bring in a psychological framework to design a webpage like an e-commerce site, perhaps that's fairly straightforward and simple and has a limited number of products. I wouldn't recommend that you use that full behavioral design process.
We already know so much from best practices in UX, and we can do that with less firepower, but something like transitions of care. So if it's a big healthcare metric in the United States to avoid being rid readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of having a procedure. So healthcare systems providers are really focused on keeping patients healthy enough to stay outta the hospital for at least 30 days after they've had a surgery. That can be a really complex problem to solve. And that's a place where I'd say absolutely you wanna bring behavioral design to bear, even though there are also many best practices around things like keeping patients adherent to their medication schedules or physical therapy or other things that they're prescribed. Really thinking about that, that whole set of behaviors in context could benefit from having those professionals focus on it.
Brendan Jarvis:
And you mentioned vaccine hesitancy just a little earlier on as an example of something that Lirio is working on, and I just want to bring in here LI'S purpose, which I'll quote from the website now, is to combine the power of behavioral science with artificial intelligence to drive positive behavior change for the betterment of all people. And as I mentioned, you are trying to tackle this challenge of how do you help people to become more motivated to have the vaccine if they're feeling hesitant about it? And the company itself has stated that the biggest roadblock to achieving widespread vaccination isn't distribution or other logistics, it's vaccine hesitancy. And I think we've seen worldwide and in particular in the US that this isn't a small issue and it's got wide ranging repercussions for other people, even those that are vaccinated. If we have a population that is struggling to reach that 90% or whatever the threshold is, that's desirable. What is the Lirio vaccination solution and how is it seeking to solve this problem?
Amy Bucher:
So we have a product called Precision Nudging, and it is essentially artificial intelligence powered messaging that is designed around the barriers that people experience toward a behavior. Our artificial intelligence is able to understand something about the people that it's messaging and select the right message based on what it understands about that person. And then it uses a reinforcement learning algorithm, so it actually gets smarter over time based on whether or not somebody responds to that initial message. So if you look at our engagement data, you can see that the agent just gets better and better over time at delivering the right message to each individual. So with the Covid vaccination solution that we built similarly to our approach across all of our solutions, really looked at the barriers that stopped people from getting vaccinated. And we built the solution when vaccines were first becoming available.
So one of the really interesting things about it is that as the situation has changed, we've actually updated this program I believe twice as well as developed a new library for the additional shots, whether it's a booster shot or another in the primary series for an AM immunocompromised person. And that was interesting because that third shot has a different set of barriers from the first two. But what we find in doing that research, and I don't think this will surprise anybody who who's paying attention, there's a real mix of barriers that people experience, and some of them are definitely overcomeable. There are people, especially in the beginning when vaccination was new and they were relatively difficult to get, who were really just concerned about availability. They weren't sure how to manage it logistically. They might have concern about side effects, wanting to wait and see how others responded to the vaccine. And then of course there is a whole group of barriers that are related to a mental model that doesn't accommodate this. You have a political aversion or that sort of feeling, which is a much more difficult set of barriers to overcome certainly, but particularly with that group of people who are more, I'm not sure how to get it, I'm on the fence. I could be persuaded that that's where we can really make a difference.
Brendan Jarvis:
Geoff, we, from a product design point of view now, where did you get started with something so important, such an important critical issue that the product actually makes a positive difference? Where did you get started with the product design of this?
Geoff Alday:
Sure. So really once Amy's team is, once they start developing a solution, I tend to get involved pretty much at the beginning to really understand contextually where they're going and to understand those behaviors that she described, understand who the audience is we're trying to reach. Typically it varies spitting on who our clients are. I try to understand the communication channels we're using. Vaccination is available via both email and text message. And so while Amy's team is creating content both text-based content and image-based content, which is interestingly, LRI also creates custom images for each of those behaviors as well and pairs them up with a textual based content. I take those ingredients, so to speak, from design standpoint and really try to map out that journey visually pretty quickly so that everyone involved in that journey is aligned and understands what that journey's going to look like depending on which channel we're using to communicate with.
And so that's a mixture of email message, mockups, text message, mockups. We use number of landing pages or webpages as well in these journeys. So to support them depending what the behavior is. It could be a scheduling behavior, it could be what we call a commit behavior. I think there's a number of these things that we produce and then use in the journey. And so I create those along the way so that again, we have a central visual, so to speak, of what that journey looks like from start to finish and that it helps serve a lot of different purposes. It helps that team understand what it's going to feel like, helps our clients see what their patients are going to experience. It helps us in our QA process when we're actually building this out and deploying it to test these solutions, which we do thorough testing with before we start sending a single message to a patient.
It really just helps paint that whole picture. And so as far as the solutions are concerned, the product design really kind of fits in that piece. We recently, to Amy's point earlier, we we've started doing more definitive user research as well. So we're actually talking to patients and understanding their barriers more directly than just looking at academic or research papers and those types of things. Or in addition to talking to the actual clients of ours, the health systems, the providers of these health services. So we're adding this third component of actual true user research, which is really exciting. So that's already proving to be extremely helpful in the development of these solutions.
Brendan Jarvis:
Is it unfair to say that the behavioral science research that, I don't wanna sound unfair here, Amy, but that almost comes down from the ivory tower, and again, I'm being intentionally provocative here. This is then translated when it gets to, when Geoff gets his hand on it and his team gets their hands on it into something that is then tangible for the business clients users, patients, people to actually understand what you've discovered and uncovered about them then has translated into something that can affect change through a digital product.
Amy Bucher:
No, I think that is fair actually, and I don't know if you noticed this week, but there was a new study that was published, Katie Milkman and I wanna say 37 other behavioral scientists collaborated on a mega study of nudges for flu vaccination in partnership with Walmart pharmacy. And of course we immediately pay attention to something like that. That's the sort of evidence-based that we like to use in building our programs. And in reflecting on it, we see a lot in common with what our covid vaccination data shows, the types of nudges or behavioral science approaches that seem to work. There's quite a few in common, and there are some that are different too. And first of all, I will say that study, they did produce something tangible. They did a text messaging campaign over the course of a week that touched almost 700,000 people.
So that that's something quite tangible. But we're translating that type of evidence into something that's a little bit different. And one of the things that I really believe is that we are also generating an evidence base of our own that works in tandem with that sort of research. I mean, they're doing things in a very controlled fashion. It's for purposes of research, they're able to do it immediately at this large scale because of the partnership with Walmart, where we're working in a smaller scrappier capacity in some senses. And our goal, we do do research and we do have I R B approved research studies that we hope will ultimately result in publications and more of that traditional contribution to the literature. But with the covid solution in particular, our primary goal was to get it out into the market and help people get vaccinated. So it is a different sort of approach. So yeah, I think it's totally fair to say that we're translating the academic research into something that is, it's a little bit different. It's intended for deployment right away into the market, whether or not that results in research findings. But I do think that if you look at the gist, all we are together generating a lot of insights about what it takes to get people to take action around vaccination
Brendan Jarvis:
And that action around vaccination is to get vaccinated. And I was curious to know, based on the way that the product works and your intention, when you put a message in front of a person that's tailored for them, how do you know when you've closed the loop? What does that reporting or that metric look like?
Amy Bucher:
We received data back from the organizations that we work with about so specifically with Covid vaccination, we learned within 24 hours if they had scheduled a vaccination appointment, and then if they had actually completed that appointment and with the way that most healthcare organizations did covid vaccinations, they would automatically schedule your second shot when you went in for your first. So we kind of knew the whole cadence that way. One of the challenges with Covid vaccination though, is that people can go other places as well. They don't have to go to their doctor to get the vaccination, so they might go to C V S or Walgreens or wherever a city run vaccination site. And so one of the things that's really interesting about our program I wanna say we have about 11 or 12% conversion to vaccination, but we know that that's low because we don't have the data back from those third party sites. So been when we're messaging around mammogram, people don't just go to the corner drugstore for their mammogram. So we have a much more reliable source of data there.
Brendan Jarvis:
It must be incredibly rewarding for both of you to actually see the product deliver outcomes almost instantaneously.
Geoff Alday:
Yeah, it is. And really that's what drew me delirium to the earlier point. It's difficult sometimes to understand really the impact you're having on people, humans out there in the world by really understanding that we genuinely are making a impact positively in someone's health and their life. It's extremely rewarding. It's challenging in dealing with the constraints we have to deal with clients and circumstances and politics and all those things. It's definitely challenging, but hearing that good news at the end of the day, it is. Great.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, well let's talk about the politics without necessarily getting into partisan politics. So I'm very mindful and wanna be respectful of listeners and their views. And also I don't wanna get anyone in any trouble, so please just engage with me is best you possibly can. But one of the things that I've observed here from New Zealand is that governments across the world, including my own government, have tried to motivate people to get vaccinated through a variety of methods. And they have included coercion, and I would also argue restriction in their toolkit to try and nudge people to making that decision, which per my personal belief is a very positive decision to make. And it helps to protect people around us that might not necessarily have the option to. That's my view. Is there a cause for the use of these tactics of coercion and restriction though? Have they from a motivational standpoint, helped to get people across the line, or have they help people to dig in deeper to their already held beliefs around the vaccine and what it represents for them?
Amy Bucher:
With the huge caveat that our solution at Lirio doesn't speak to this because we are not creating any coercive circumstances, we're not really involved in the policies around vaccination. So just as a behavioral scientist who's paying attention to this, I would say it's actually doing both. So I think there are some people who are becoming more entrenched in their beliefs when they feel forced, and that that's a natural reaction to feeling like you're losing autonomy. And there's just so much research across so many different realms of behavior that shows that people will absolutely double down if they feel like they're being forced along a path that they don't wanna walk. But I think there's also, at least in the United States, there's been a number of high profile organizations that have had vaccine mandates for employees. And you will see these news stories about X number of people threatening to quit, but almost always when they run the numbers on that, it's a very small percentage of the overall population.
So you're seeing 99% plus of people in some of these affected employee groups who are actually going through with the vaccinations. And I've heard this as well in articles from restaurants and stores that it's easier for them when there's a mandate. And this is usually around masking, which is, you know, can't see if somebody's vaccinated, but you can see if they're masked, it gives them some coverage to enforce. If there is a restriction in place where if it's just up to them to come up with their own policy, then it's much more difficult because they have to be the bad guy. At least in this other case, they can say, oh, it's not my fault, the city's making me do it. And I live in a city that has actually a brand new vaccine mandate to eat at a restaurant or to go into certain types of establishments.
So I'm watching this unfold where I live real time. And if you're a person who's on the fence about receiving a vaccine or you're part of a group that has really politicized it and thinks poorly of it, I believe there are some people who are feeling that they're covered by being able to say, oh, I had to do it for my job. And that way they don't have to take the personal brunt of going against the end group and their beliefs. So I don't know where it nets out overall because there's people who go both ways, but
Brendan Jarvis:
In terms of they're able to save face by putting it back to being a mandate and therefore their behavior is out of their
Amy Bucher:
Control. Absolutely. Yep.
Brendan Jarvis:
I mean, coronavirus is obviously a virus. It spreads very rapidly, it has very poor health outcomes for people that have comorbidities and also others that don't actually as far as the evidence that I can see. But I was curious to know whether or not, if there wasn't such an urgent need to protect the population through vaccination, whether or not coercion and restriction would've been methods from a behavioral science point of view that would've been deployed as early and as harshly as they have been. And in most Western democracies?
Amy Bucher:
Honestly, I don't know. I mean, I think we're in an interesting moment in time as well, just with vaccines in general, being more politicized than, and I don't know, I feel, I'm almost not even certain about saying this because I feel like you do always see these things. Like there's photos of the 1918 flu and people protesting masks then, so it's like everything old is new again. But I just remember as a little kid not being a big deal that every year you had to go and get your vaccinations. And I recently actually found my vaccination card that is from my early childhood, and every single year we'd bring it back to the doctor and they would pencil in which shots I got and what the date was. And I feel like it was maybe when I was in college or so that I started to become aware of this very vocal contingent who were anti-vax, broadly speaking. And so it does feel like it's having a bit of a moment, even if it's not a brand new force.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's been my experience as well. And one of the themes that we've explored on the show with previous guests has been this notion of ethics and tech. And as people that work in this space, what responsibility do we have to, I suppose, determine the positive outcomes that our products are having on large sways of population? Now, I understand that ethics is also being in healthcare, probably something that's quite top of mind for what you are doing at Lirio, but I was curious about this when it comes to product decisions more broadly speaking as to how do you approach the lens of ethics in a commercial context where there are other factors in the organization, a profit motive for example, to influence that influence the design decisions that are made both at a product design level, but also at the kind of behavioral change that you're seeking. This seems to me like it's quite a tricky tightrope to walk, but I could be completely wrong about this. Is it a tight rope or is this actually really clear cut and there's some really well-defined guiding principles for the work that you do as a behavioral scientist and also Geoff as a product designer, is this really easy for you to know what's good and what's bad in terms of the decisions you're making?
Geoff Alday:
Generally? I think it is pretty easy to know. It's fairly intuitive. I think most people, if you take an objective viewpoint, can easily tell right from wrong. We've heard the horror stories out there about how technology and AI in particular can be used for profit. How do we make more money? And I'm proud to say that really we don't take that stance here, really, we're looking at how can we positively get someone to go get a screening or go get a vaccination or to do something, take a step toward having a better quality of life with their health. Some of the content we create may seem different than typical marketing content, which is something we have to work with our clients a lot on, not as, I think if you could look at a lot of websites out there in the world, you're going to read the same thing, but for a different person.
Different companies say the same thing on their websites and they slightly change it a little bit. The colors may be different, the brand may be different, but generally they're saying the same types of things if they offer the same types of services. And so really our content looks different than that. And it is geared toward getting someone much to take and action, taking the next spec of action for them to toward their, through a better health. And so really it's not hard to see, and we've had product decisions come up even around the behavior science type tactics that we can use. And we have some pretty in depth discussions about what is this the right thing to do here? Is this the right approach to make on this screen or in this email or this text message? Does this really meet our mantra, so to speak, that we wanted to be positive about this? So I think it's pretty easy for us to work through those discussions. And
Amy Bucher:
I've actually seen Geoff probably more than anyone else at Lirio be quick to speak up when we have those moments. And I'll also, a thing that was really important to me, I mean, I've been very interested in AI for quite a while, since well before I joined Lirio, although I've learned so much more about it since working here than I knew coming in. And I had some concerns about the ethics as well when I was interviewing and first talking to the team here. And I asked everybody I interviewed with to talk to me about ethics and their perspective and wound up actually feeling really energized and excited by the way that people at LiRo think about it. But one of the things that was really important to me is that we're not using AI to throttle the care that is recommended for people. We are looking at what is clinically recommended, what does your provider recommend for you? And then given that recommendation, that is the outcome that we would like to achieve for you, what is the best way that we can motivate you to get there? So it's not about the outcome, it's about the path to get there. And I think that means that we're avoiding some of the ethical issues around restricting care. When AI makes a decision that maybe doesn't give somebody the optimal care that they need, we are not playing in that area.
Brendan Jarvis:
So for example, you mentioned that one of the major metrics for healthcare providers is after surgery, that patients are kept healthy within that 30 day window. And I could see that that could potentially be exploited by dissuading people to come back and visit the center or the clinic or the hospital within that window, through ai, through nudging, potentially there's a risk there. How formalized is this scrutiny around the decisions that are made are made in terms of the AI and its application to the product, given that what you are doing has the potential to do so much good, but it also because of its ability to scale you could see how it could also lead to some pretty poor outcomes for patients as well.
Amy Bucher:
We have a lot of effort internally right now around our own data and how we interrogate and review our own data. And it's partly in the service of that so that we can be very quick to detect if we are not achieving the desired outcomes, which really are for people to appropriately utilize care. So we don't necessarily want to sell them more care than they need, but the care that's recommended to them, we want to connect them with it. And so we found that by staying in close touch with our own data, we're able to quickly detect if there's something going awry. Are people not having the visits that we would expect just based on historical movement and what we know is going on in that patient population. So that's one mechanism that we've looked at. I am not an expert in the AI itself, but we do have a chief AI scientist and a really talented team of PhD trained AI scientists. And I know that they are also interrogating our algorithms with respect to ethical issues. Chris Simons, our chief AI scientist, often says there is no bias free ai, but what's important is that you understand the bias that is built into it so that you can make appropriate decisions about how it's used.
Brendan Jarvis:
I wonder if one of the appropriate decisions that the business has to make is also who it seeks to serve in terms of its client base. If you are taking a stance on what you believe is a positive ethical outcome for patients through the technology that you deploy, I don't imagine that view is always shared by all of the potential customers or clients that you could have. How intentional are you being at evaluating the outcomes that potential clients have and therefore what you both contributing to in the work that you're doing at lirio?
Amy Bucher:
Yeah, I work pretty closely with our growth team as a subject matter expert. And I have to say, I feel like this is almost dodging the question, but it's true. We're, we're not really encountering a lot of potential clients who want to misuse our technology. I think we're at a stage right now where the people who have heard about us, who are interested in what we do generally share our objectives to get that appropriately utilization of care. So it's a primarily provider systems and they really are looking to improve their health outcomes among their members, among their patient populations. So I'm sure that we have at times, encountered organizations that don't share our mission and I'm sure we will again. But for the most part, it does seem like we are primarily talking to organizations that we feel really good about working with.
Brendan Jarvis:
I remember watching something of you, Amy, speaking about your time at MadPOW and how it was only a handful of potential clients at the agency that you had to it's had to say no to cuz it just wasn't a good fit. So it's great to hear that same lens as being applied here. Just before we move off ethics and jump into the practices that you and Geoff are both building and trying to integrate, I just wanted to ask one further question on ethics, which was, when it comes to the application of ethics in academia and not being an academic, I can't speak from firsthand experience here, but it seems to me that it's a lot more stringent, particularly in healthcare, you know, have separate boards that oversee some of the decisions that are made around trials, around the technology, whether it's medical or pharmaceutical, there's often many, many, many hoops to jump through before something can be released into the marketplace probably for some quite good reasons.
But when you think more broadly about the technology that most people in tech are working on, whether they're working for a large technology company or even a small startup, there doesn't seem to be any guiding set of principles or ethics or external bodies or necessarily any regulation that is applied to some of the decisions that we are making, which as we've seen, can have some quite wide ranging consequences for some pretty important institutions, including our democracies. What is it, if anything, mm-hmm that either of you personally believe would be beneficial to product design more broadly that you could borrow from the rigor and the approach that you've seen applied through academia, but also in the healthcare space that you operate in?
Amy Bucher:
So we do research trials with some of our partners, our clients. And in that case we do follow the academic moors. So we do institutional review board approval of our protocols, we pre-register our protocols and our materials. And I think that there's something about that level of upfront planning that could be applied more broadly across product design. And it's hard because you also do wanna be opportunistic and capitalize on changes in the market. I mean, one of the things that we see all the time is a customer will, who we weren't talking to all of a sudden will urgently want to work with us. And it means that we have to pivot a little bit what we're doing with the product and we don't wanna lose those opportunities. But I think that to some extent if we can really define what the product is and is not upfront and be true to that, it will help with accidental ethical missteps. I guess I'll say where you do something because it seems really cool and it's of the moment and maybe it doesn't turn out to be as great as you'd hoped. What were you going to say, Geoff?
Geoff Alday:
Yeah, I mean generally the same kind of thing. I think there are some practices we could take from academia, the rigor and these review boards and setting up how we do product design and really research in particular kind of comes to mind there. But yeah, it is a trade off. So you have to, typically product moves pretty quick. And product design research, we wanna move as fast as possible so we can learn, learn what works and what doesn't work. Is this design you're working on hitting the mark or not? What's missing? What should be added, what doesn't feel quite right? So we try to move pretty quick there. And I think that is often counter to more rigor based research practices. I think there are some things we can take from there.
Brendan Jarvis:
There is tension. And I want to come to tension now and hopefully there's not too much tension between the two of you, but you have told me that you are working to build and integrate the practices of behavior design and product design together. And I think I mentioned in the introduction that you're also looking to support both of those practices through the establishment of a UX research function. And I was curious about this. What is the shape that it's been taking and what accommodations have both of you as leaders within this organization had to make for each other and for the organization's benefit that you didn't expect when you first started out this work together?
Amy Bucher:
I started at LRO about nine months ago, and at the time I was heading our behavioral design function. And one of the things that I was surprised about initially is that we didn't have a dedicated user experience research function because, well first of all, it, it's so aligned with the Lirio mindset. We talk about the patient all the time, it, it's the focus of our behavioral design work. And yet we were very rarely going out and deliberately talking to patients. One of the behavioral designers on my team really had a passion for that type of research and advocated essentially to create this role for herself. And now reports to Geoff who's leading our user experience research organization. So one of the things I wasn't expecting to do that, I think ultimately it was for the good of all of us, but to have somebody who was so talented and such a high performer leave my organization and join Geoffs was [laugh] unexpected.
Yeah, I mean just today we were talking to a client where she's done some research for them and other behavioral designers were on, she works very closely with her former team to integrate the findings from her primary research with what they're doing with more of the desk research and the behavioral science frameworks and to see how they are able to collaborate and what that produces in terms of an output. And to see the client's reaction to it too, to really understand that for them they're getting some real value out of this integrated primary patient research. With that rich behavioral science background, it has been very rewarding. As much as initially I was like, oh, I'm joining this organization, losing my team right away.
Brendan Jarvis:
You, you're obviously the person to somewhat blame there. It seems that Amy's okay with it now, but maybe there was a few tense moments early on. What's it like for you now to have the beginnings of a UX research team, but to have someone in there that is foundational in that and is able to actually draw the dots draw the line between the dots when it comes to behavioral science? How is this helping from the ground up and form the product design process? As much as we were talking earlier about the sort of top down empirical kind of research that comes from behavioral science into the way product, the product's shaped,
Geoff Alday:
Yeah, it's obviously great. It's what we need. We've talked a lot about our behavior change solutions that we have out there in the marketplace. We also have a whole nother set of products that we and our clients use around creating this content reviewing and activating this content scheduling these communications, monitoring these communications. We have a whole nother product side there of applications that we have out there in the world. And so really it's great that we have someone that can really do that patient-centered research to understand the patients at a one-to-one level that help augment our understanding that coming from our clients and coming from the literature and at the same time be able to actually go understand once we put those solutions out there, are they working resonating with people? Where are the gaps? And really that helps feed into the product design process that we have and the product management process we have around prioritization.
It helps obviously on Amy's side of things, help understand the solutions and the iterations we need to do on the solutions to change those things. And so really it's a unique role that we have someone that can really have a broad understanding of patients and what we're doing for patients, which is really cool. Prior to having her on this team, we were doing more gorilla based you UX type things for our apps and those types of things. It'd be either product manager or myself working with clients or working with our internal users at Lirio to understand the products, whether they're working or not and what their needs are there. So it's nice to have more of a well-rounded team. Now,
Brendan Jarvis:
What hasn't worked so well? Cause you both told me off fair via email that you wanted to get this out there for the community about some of the learnings, whether they were good, bad or ugly. What are some of the areas that you, in the past, however long, however many months, nine months or so you've been working on this together that haven't actually played out the way that you'd hoped and the decisions that you've had to make subsequently to get things back on track or to achieve the outcomes you were seeking?
Amy Bucher:
Well I, so I wouldn't say it hasn't worked, but it hasn't been ideal. It's difficult to remove somebody from a role that they played very well. And I know sometimes I have asked her to do work that is more aligned with her old role because that's what has been demanded by the projects on our plate and what staffing looked like. And I have perceived that I felt tension within myself when those situations have arisen because I really want to honor this new function that we are setting up and the role that we are carving out for this person and this team. But at the same time, to your point earlier, it, it's so tempting when you have somebody who is excellent at the other job as well, who can step back into those behavioral design shoes if needed to pitch in on a project or answer client request.
We're working really hard to get some more discipline around that. One of the things that I'm really excited about is that we've actually outlined kind of two buckets of research for user experience research. One that is more general insights that we can use for product development, thinking about our future directions and another that is project specific. So as my team is working on building out a new solution for a new client, we do have some capacity to work with user experience research to inform that. So hopeful, hopefully having that more formal set of research activities will reduce some of the messiness that at least I've experienced in the role transition where I know sometimes it's me, I'm not observing the new role the way that I should be.
Brendan Jarvis:
Have you been going over Geoff's head? Amen.
Amy Bucher:
I try not to too much.
Geoff Alday:
No, no, I think it's a great collaboration. I really do. Three things come to mind around we, things we encountered along the way. The first are just education, behavioral designers, understanding what product design is and vice versa. Really understanding each other's domains, where the strengths are, where we can help each other comes to mind. And two, educating the business, teaching the business about what user research really means, what does that look like, how do you execute that, how much does it cost? What are the expectations you set there? How do you get budget? All of those things come up. And again, this is a new function that we've rolled out. So there's a lot of that. And the third hang, I forgot the third actually, but I think there was a third,
Brendan Jarvis:
Let's come to budget. Where are you pulling the budget from? Is this something, Amy that sits under your budget or is this something that comes from product? Or how have you managed to stand the function up and fund it so that it can be successful?
Amy Bucher:
So to the point I made earlier about the two buckets of research, that some of it is coming from my budget. The product supportive research comes from my budget and then the product budget supports the more general insights. And then in terms of how we structure our budget as a company, we didn't have to worry about it in terms of the headcount because we call it the factory, our product organization, the doers. So there was no need to move that cost center.
Brendan Jarvis:
So speaking about headcount, is this an area that you are actively growing? Where to next? What is this next six to nine to 12 months look like for UX research?
Geoff Alday:
Yeah, so I think there's definitely some growth opportunity there. Really depends on scale and volume of research. We already have more things that we wanna research than we have people that can do it. It's not an uncommon problem out there. I'm sure people have heard that before. Yeah, I think it's an area of growth along with probably some more product designers at some point in the near future as well. I think there's there, there's a lot of ambitious plans that we have and I think we'll need more people to support those.
Amy Bucher:
Oh, I was going to say on the behavioral science team, we're expecting that we'll need some more content designers, some more behavioral designers over the course of the next six to nine months. So to address point, we have more than enough work and very ambitious plans. So excited to grow.
Brendan Jarvis:
And when you think about traditional UX research, and that might conjure up different things for different people, but aside from the behavioral science that it sounds like you've started to integrate into the practice for lial, which sounds very sensible given what it is that you do, where do traditional methods not necessarily fall down, but where could they benefit from the practical application of some insight or some experience of behavioral science into the day-to-day that people who aren't in B aren't in a behavioral science based organization that they could apply to their practice to get to better outcomes or to better understand the people that they're seeking to serve and change behavior of.
Amy Bucher:
Well it's funny you asked that cuz I wrote an entire book about it.
Geoff Alday:
Oh really?
Amy Bucher:
Did you? My [laugh], I dunno what a coincidental thing [laugh] to ask. No. But seriously, when I wrote my book Engaged, I went with Rosenfeld Media, which is a press that targets UX professionals on purpose because when I started my career there were not, behavioral design was not a thing, not a thing with a name at least. And so I found myself a behavioral scientist working on product teams, kind of fighting to have behavioral science seen and heard and reflected in the product. And over the years I got better at figuring out where that belonged and how to make the case for it. And eventually I got to a point in my career where people were very interested in just what you asked. Hey, I'm an interaction designer and I would really love to understand enough behavioral science to do a better job of getting people to do something.
It's not scalable to have all these one-on-one conversations with people. And over the years I had just kind of accumulated a lot of knowledge about how do you bring behavioral science to more traditional UX or design activities. And so that's where the book came from. The intended reader is somebody who has a UX background but not a behavioral science background. And I think a lot of it is just starting to be familiar with some of these frameworks and theories. You don't necessarily have to sit down and apply them as academically as a behavioral designer does, but if you have some understanding of how people are motivated and demotivated, if you have some understanding of what is a barrier, how do I think about the barriers that people experience when it comes to a behavior and what are some kind of easy design skills that I can apply to overcome common barriers?
Those sorts of things I think will help any design professional. And one of my goals as well, and I didn't state this explicitly in the book, but I also was hoping to educate people to understand when they did need to work with a dedicated behavioral designer. There's kind of a line I think that you can go up to with behavioral design skills if you're not formally trained in them or it's not really your area of focus. And then after that it might make a lot of sense to partner with somebody who is trained in that area. And so is
Brendan Jarvis:
That
Amy Bucher:
Line would realize that for me, I think in healthcare a lot of work is where you want to bring in a behavioral designer. And part of it is because the consequences to not being successful are large. And I think the healthcare behaviors are oftentimes quite complicated. They're very contextualized. I know that we're not unique in this, but we do have a unique system in the United States that's very confusing about how to obtain and pay for care. And so all of those situations make it to me like an easy case to make for working with a dedicated behavioral designer. And again, I'm probably being unfair to e-commerce, but I always use that as my counter example of where I think it's probably less critical to have a behavioral designer.
Brendan Jarvis:
It depends on whether you're a shareholder or not though. Right. [laugh] like obviously that bottom line going the right way. Just coming back to what you were saying earlier about people understanding or making more accessible to a broader sphere of design, the methods and models that you use in behavior design Comm B, which I mentioned earlier on as a model that I understand you're quite fond of. And I get the sense it's because of its ease of application into the real world, into the world of commerce that most of us are working in. What is B and how does it help designers to better understand to how to affect change in their users?
Amy Bucher:
Yeah, compi is actually a taxonomy. So it's relatively new. It was developed in the last decade by a team of researchers at University College of London. And they started by doing a mega review of over 1200 studies of behavior change and classifying what they saw in those studies. So comm B is an algorithm or not algorithm and what is the word I want here? Oh boy. This is the AI acronym. Acronym,
Yes. Yeah, I'm tired man. A comm B is an acronym. The B stands for behavior. So I mentioned behavioral designers start by defining the target behavior, that's what the B in combi is. And then c om is capability, opportunity, motivation. And those are the different classes or taxonomies of barriers that people might experience to the behavior. So when you're using com B, you're identifying the behavior and then you're looking at the barriers. You're figuring out are they capability, opportunity or motivation based. And then part of the taxonomy was they looked at all of those studies and said, okay, for capability barriers, what are the types of solutions that tend to work for opportunity barriers for motivation barriers. So it's almost like a decision tree that you can follow and arrive at a set of solutions that might work for your problem. So I really like it as you said, it's it's got an ease of use.
It's fairly easy to communicate to other people. I think it still leaves a lot of flexibility in the design, which I, I've grown to feel is really important when you're doing behavioral design. I have worked in the past with some theories of health behavior change that are very prescriptive and that's different, difficult when you get into a commercial environment because you are competing with, I don't know, the Fitbits and the garments and the Pelotons of the world and the health space oftentimes. And so I think it is important that you have some flexibility to design something that's engaging and fun and not just delivering a clinical protocol. Exactly. So combi gives you a lot of that flexibility. So I like to use it
Brendan Jarvis:
Quite a bit from a design point of view. It's less about, from what I hear, it's less about the specific application of how the solution should be designed from a product perspective, but more about giving people an architectural decision tree, I think you called it, to arrive at a solution space that is appropriate to be explored. And it's actually that decision tree that you mentioned is where I noticed in that decision tree there is the mention of coercion and restriction that I was talking about earlier on in terms of the approach that governments have taken in part to vaccine management. So that's a little tie in back to that, but I just wanted to come back to combi briefly before we looked to close the show. Cuz I realize given our technical difficulties, we're running a little bit behind that. There was this experience you had at Mad Powell, which I believe illustrated how combis applied in the commercial setting quite well. And that was an experience that you were trying to understand better health and safety in the construction industry or for a particular construction client. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Amy Bucher:
Yeah, absolutely. I loved that project. It's in the health area but it's a little bit different than anything else I've ever done. So we were hired by a company that does insurance and safety training for construction companies and they presented some data to us that showed that although overall accidents on construction sites have fallen over the last several decades, as training has gotten better and safety equipment has gotten better there's something called sif, serious injuries and fatalities. And those have remained fairly constant. So it's between 10 and 15 a year in the United States, not an absolute large number, but of course you would like it to be zero. And they wanted to understand what is going on. We've got all these great trainings, all this great safety equipment, why are people still having these serious injuries and fatalities? And they suspected it would be something psychological.
So we did use the combi framework, we were able to go to three different construction sites in different areas of the US and they differed in a lot of ways. One was a children's hospital one was a high-rise hotel in West Hollywood. One was a facility for building space shuttles actually. So an industrial facility. And some of them were union, some of them were non-union. So lots of different variables there. And what we found was that some of it was a combination of what we'll call capability and opportunity. So things like if you think about the place where they were building space shuttles, it was huge, a huge, huge piece of land. And when we talked to people there, we would hear things like, I made it all the way over to the place where I was working today. And then I realized I hadn't brought my second separate face shield cuz you wear different face shields for different activities on a construction site and it's half a mile to go back to the trailer and get it.
So I'm just going to use the other face shield for everything today. And that can lead to accidents cuz they have different coverage depending on whether sparks are flying or things like that. So there was a lot about, it's just inconvenient for me to have the right stuff and so I'll make do with what's available to me. And a lot of that can be reconciled with better planning, better setup earlier in the day. And then the other thing was there were a lot of mental models around safety that caused people to sometimes make not the greatest decision. There was this very interesting pair of mindsets that we saw where some people would say, if it's going to happen, it's going to happen. There's not a lot I can do to stop an act of God, so I might as well just live my life. And then there were the corresponding mindset or the opposite mindset was I'm young, I'm healthy, it's not likely to happen to me.
And so in both cases it led them to the same place, but it was like neither one of them really felt like they needed to take action around safety. So that one's a little bit more difficult in what we found in our research was that what seemed to overcome that was either witnessing an accident which not ideal, we don't wanna recommend that as an intervention or for hearing stories from people who had either experienced or witnessed an accident. And there were a couple of old timers that we spoke to who had seen some things in their careers and they really played a role as evangelists to help other guys on the, and I say guys because it was all guys understand why it was so important to take these precautions, even if most of the time they were
Brendan Jarvis:
Okay, we might be getting a little bit outside the scope here of behavioral design. But I was curious about belief, which you spoke about this a second ago there, people didn't believe that it was AP applicable to them because of their age or that there was something external to them in terms of an act of God that they had no control over. Which seems to me from what you were saying earlier around autonomy being important and people actually being motivated to do different things. Do our beha, and this, again, I'm not an academic so this is probably being hashed out many, many times in the past. But do our behaviors reflect our beliefs or do our, do our beliefs are they expressed in our behaviors or is there a circular relationship between these two? How do you actually unpick and change someone's mindset when it comes to safety on a construction site or hesitancy on a vaccine if they have a belief that is sort of more fundamental than just changing what they do on a digital product from being one thing to another?
Amy Bucher:
And I mean, you're right that there's just something people have talked about a lot, but I don't think there is a single right answer. And I think it depends on how much they need to reconcile their behaviors and their beliefs. But I have seen some examples where you can reframe things for somebody. And in general it is easier to create that alignment if you can point people to things that are really fundamental values. And so in my career when I've designed digital products in particular, especially where now we have natural language processing and things where we might be able to tell what people are saying in their own words, but back in the day we just had multiple choice and we would build, ask people in some of our programs, what do you value most? What drives you? And give them a multiple choice set of options.
But those are based on psychological research around core values because you do find pretty consistently across cultures, there's things that people value, family, community work. And so if you can get people to think of those things and reframe whatever the behavior is, sometimes you can get them to change the behavior. I used to work with a clinical psychologist who had a lot of success using that technique with smoking cessation cuz he said a lot of times the people he worked with who smoked, he would be able to get them to think about something. Imagine how this is going to impact your relationship with your kids in 10 years, 15 years. And it wasn't always the same angle that was effective, but if he could reframe it in terms of that he felt he could often be successful.
Brendan Jarvis:
I feel like I've heard you say in the past, it's because once we become conscious that our behaviors are out of alignment with our beliefs as a species, we actually can't deal with that. So it actually encourages us to make a change.
Amy Bucher:
So it's cognitive dissonance and it's very uncomfortable for people, but the hard part is if someone can write the new story so that they can have both, if I can figure out a new way to explain why these beliefs and these behaviors are consistent, then I can make the cognitive business go away. So the challenge for behavioral designers or for anyone who's trying to intervene is to make that more difficult to really try to rewrite that story so that the values and the behaviors truly are congruent.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, I better bring things down to a close. And I thought we'd start with Geoff for my final question and then go on to you, Amy as well to follow on. And that's for design leaders who are out there that want to better integrate their practices with one another or other aspects of the organization, whether that's product or engineering. What words can you share with them? Geoff, what is the thing that stands out the most during your time at Lirio that you feel would add the most value for people that are in a similar situation or wanting to attempt what it is that you are attempting at the moment?
Geoff Alday:
Yeah, I mean, I would say approach that collaboration like a research project. And I really try to understand and listen intently and what people are saying. The schedule little coffee chats with people that you interact with and dig deeper, understand their viewpoints and their background, their expertise, understand how design can integrate into their processes. That is really the best way to be successful at integrating design into anything. So you have to understand where you can inject yourself. And I think it helps them also understand and develop an understanding of where you're coming from, how you can strengthen their practices as well. And just be curious. Ultimately that's what it comes down to for me is that, you know, have to really genuinely want to understand another person and really what's important to them. And a lot of that's personal. A lot of that's work related. I think you just getting to know people in that way can help a lot.
Brendan Jarvis:
And Amy, what would you like to share with people?
Amy Bucher:
I will build on what Geoff said because I think that's really good advice. And in my career I found I got a PhD in psychology and sometimes that intimidates people and they have an expectation that you're going to come in and throw your weight around with that. But I took an untraditional career path, I went right into tech organizations and I didn't know anything. I really had a lot to learn. And by necessity I had to make myself humble and ask questions and have that curiosity. I wasn't going to succeed if I didn't do that. And I found that even at times where I do feel more confident, maintaining that humility and asking the questions is really important. But the fact is, as confident as I may feel from time to time, I still have so much to learn. And I've really experienced that at LiRo.
I mean, I'm working alongside so many smart, talented people who are doing work that I'm eager to understand in more detail. And one of the things that has been really gratifying about being here is, first of all, everyone is very patient with the questions. I think as a culture, really excited to share what we know and to help each other out. And so I've found that there's a lot of tolerance for even some very beginner questions that I've had to ask. But on the flip side, I've also felt like my expertise is really appreciated. And so it's very gratifying to know that I can be teacher and I can be student all in the course of the same day and it all adds into the same better outcome. So I think that's been a really important part of being effective. And where I've seen people struggle in our culture, it's often people who do wanna try to go it alone a little bit more. Like it's really part of our magic here that we collaborate closely together. We're quite an integrated team.
Brendan Jarvis:
I love it. Stay hungry, stay humble, and keep seeking to understand. That's a brilliant note for us to end on. Amy and Geoff, it's been great to talk to you about how you are integrating product design and behavioral design at Lirio. Thank you for sharing your stories and your insights with me today.
Amy Bucher:
Thank you. Thank you.
Brendan Jarvis:
Amy, if people wanna find out more about you and what you're up to, what's the best way for them to do that?
Amy Bucher:
I have a website, AmyBPhD.com. I'm also on Twitter at the same name. And then the Lirio website. I have a little page there now that I'm Chief Behavioral Officer [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
It's a great page. And Geoff, what about you?
Geoff Alday:
I have a website as well, it's GeoffAlday.com if you're interested in the game stuff. I'm on Twitter @GeoffA. Yeah, so that's the normal places.
Brendan Jarvis:
Perfect. Thanks Amy. Thanks Geoff. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Amy, Geoff Lirio, and all the good stuff that we've spoken about. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to subscribe to the show and pass the show along to someone if you feel that they would get value from these sorts of in-depth conversations. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find my profile at the bottom of the show notes on YouTube and also on the podcast platforms. Or you can just head on to LinkedIn and type in Brendan Jarvis and you'll find me. That's Jarvis, like the Jarvis on Ironman. Or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Amy Bucher & Geoff Alday

Integrating Behavioural Design & Product Design

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