Great article on Human Behavior Hacks

Found an amazing article on ways to use human behavior in your favor.

Build Your User Base with These Human Behavior Hacks

Framed as a discussion on how startup companies can best develop new products or services that can succeed, it provides some clear examples on how to tease out the truth from your target audience.

One of the critical recommendations is to avoid the trap where you believe you know exactly what your customer is looking for. Without data to support your suppositions, you could be dangerously exposed. This could be a fatal error if you bet on a solution and you turn out to be wrong!

Confirmation bias is perhaps the most common obstacle.

Confirmation bias manifests in a few ways:

• Only talking to people we think will agree with us.
• Writing off people who don’t agree with us as idiots or haters.
• Asking questions designed to support our hypothesis.

The author recommends having a neutral party take notes so that the interviewer can concentrate fully on the interview. At the end, they can compare notes. The note taker may be able to point out subtle changes in tone or interpretation.

The PM might say, “I think they really liked our solution.” And the engineer, freed up to really hear the call from a different perspective, might reply, “I’m pretty sure they were just being polite.” That’s how you counteract bias. You start small and take it interaction by interaction.

Other issues are hindsight bias (I knew it would work all along), supportive bias (sunk cost defense) or hyperbolic discounting (more weight to now than the future).

One other surprising method is to avoid asking about the future. Instead, ask about what people have done. They are more likely to be honest.

You want to capture quantitative data about what happened in the past. It won’t lie to you.

This is an area that’s especially sensitive to negative judgment from others. People want to idealize their future selves. They want to believe in their ability to work toward those goals. So when faced with past behavior that runs contrary, they might get defensive. They might be dishonest. You have to phrase your questions to make it acceptable for people to give answers that may not be perfect or socially acceptable.

“Instead of asking someone if they let their kids use an iPad (an assumed negative behavior), ask them how many days in the past week their kids used an iPad,” says Alvarez. “Most people will answer honestly because you already implied that the answer won’t be zero — and that it’s not zero for the other people you’re talking to.”

Overall, I thought it was excellent!