Your Real Competitor Isn’t Another Brand—It’s This.
What Lyft, One Medical, and Brazil’s Treasury learned about human behavior that you could steal.
In this issue of The Brief:
Your biggest competitor is not who you think
Job opportunities
Things to watch, read, and explore
Take the Design Better listener survey for a chance to win a 13” MacBook Air.
Your biggest competitor is not who you think
By Kristen Berman, Design Better Expert in Residence and co-founder of Irrational Labs
For a decade, Kristen Berman worked closely with top tech companies to drive behavior change. Kristen and her team leverage the latest behavioral-science research to design products people use and love. This article is a summary of a few of their latest findings.
What predicts if you will work out today? Not if you're on a diet or downloaded an app. It's if you worked out yesterday. And what predicts if you worked out yesterday? If you worked out the day before that.
For product managers and designers, this has consequences. Your customers are more likely to do what they did yesterday than try something new—like download your app, enroll in your product, or pay you money.
Doing nothing is always the easiest path. So how do you get people to do... something? John Mulaney says this best:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Behavioral science studies these behaviors at the crossroads of psychology and economics, examining how cognitive, emotional, and social factors influence decisions and actions. More importantly, it offers proven strategies to overcome inertia. Through behavioral design—the practical application of these insights—companies can help users break free from the status quo without trying to change their minds or preferences.
This approach focuses on shaping the user's environment in two key ways:
Making something cognitively easier to do (reducing barriers)
Making something more appealing to do (increasing immediate benefits)
When applied correctly, these methods increase conversion, retention, and revenue. Our Irrational Labs team has seen this firsthand, partnering with companies like LinkedIn, Intuit, Salesforce, Airbnb, Optum, Paypal and Walmart to address tough conversion challenges.
Here are three examples of how behavioral design can increase conversion and fight the status quo.
1. Lyft—Make it clear that not taking an action is actually taking an action
1.8X increase in adoption
Lyft's Women+ Connect is a feature that increases the likelihood that women and non-binary drivers and riders will match. Despite high initial requests and positive reviews, only about 50% of eligible drivers had opted in.
Lyft wanted to ensure people noticed the new setting and opted in if interested.
We designed three push notifications that leveraged different mechanisms to drive conversion:
Simple reminders: Despite good intentions, life gets in the way. This notification stated the benefit and explained how to opt-in.
Confirm settings: This notification told people Women+ Connect was turned off and prompted them to confirm preferences. This framing is more transactional—not selling, but focused on settings.
Focus on use-case: This notification explained when and why drivers might want this feature (e.g., driving at night). Concrete examples help drivers appreciate the benefit.
All notifications improved adoption rates compared to the control group. But asking drivers to confirm their settings resulted in the highest tap-through rate—a 173% (2.7x) increase in feature adoption relative to the control and a 1.8x increase compared to the neutral message.
The behavioral science takeaway
First, when people don't engage, it doesn't mean they don't want what you're offering. They may simply have been busy. Our first reminders had a 10% average tap rate and second reminders averaged 7%; people need multiple opportunities to notice and act.
Second, prompting users with "Is this correct? Tap to review" encouraged reflection. Rather than trying to convince them of the feature's value, this simple question highlighted that inaction itself was a choice. When users realized not deciding was effectively choosing to opt out, they were more likely to take deliberate action.
Irrational Labs has achieved similar results when encouraging decision-making. We avoid sales pitches and instead highlight people's inaction—like fixing profile errors or completing setup.
In a rational world, we'd all be motivated by the benefits of our actions. But sometimes we're more motivated by completing what we started.
2. One Medical—Reduce psychological friction (even if you add logistical friction)
20% increase in engagement
Imagine you're a healthcare platform wanting to encourage preventive doctor's appointments. You know regular check-ups lead to better health outcomes.
One Medical faced this challenge and asked for our help. They succeeded at enrolling new members in their healthcare platform, but these members weren't booking appointments.
Did people not want appointments? Unlikely—they had just enrolled in One Medical!
We conducted a behavioral diagnosis of the enrollment process. While logistical friction was minimal (just a few clicks to view available appointments), psychological friction was significant. New users had to understand the types of doctors offered, locate facilities, and choose from 15+ qualified doctors—decisions that added mental complexity.
Our proposal was bold: extend the onboarding process. We added logistical friction to reduce psychological friction, introducing a step prompting new users to book immediately. Rather than presenting 15 doctor options, we suggested only one. Instead of both in-person and virtual options, we offered only virtual appointments.
Compared to the status quo control flow, in which users ended with the One Medical home page, our redesign drove a 20% increase in first visit bookings.
The behavioral science takeaway:
Choice isn't always problematic, but too much choice—selecting a doctor, location, and time—can become overwhelming, leading to procrastination and inaction. To simplify, we retained a single choice: selecting an appointment time. We moved this key action into the onboarding process, making it easier for users to act when motivation is highest.
3. National Treasury of Brazil—Create a decision moment by asking "which" not "what"
4.3X increase in investments
In Brazil, treasury bonds offer consumers protection from risk and high inflation. However, around 80% of investors miss continued earnings by not reinvesting when bonds mature.
Irrational Labs partnered with the National Treasury of Brazil and B3, the main stock exchange. They asked us to help investors avoid earnings lapses. The experiment drove 4.3 times more scheduled reinvestments compared to the control. How?
The status quo was to do nothing—if investors did nothing, money returned to their account. Our challenge was to fight this inertia.
In one condition, we simply reminded investors their bond was expiring and offered the option to reinvest. Sometimes attention alone is a barrier, and people just need a prompt.
In the next condition, we changed the default from doing nothing to making an active choice. Instead of prompting "Do I want to invest?" we reframed to "Which bond should I choose?"
This mirrors a parenting technique focusing on productive choices: rather than asking "Do you want to put on a coat?"—which leads to a yes/no decision—asking "Which coat would you like to wear?" shifts toward constructive options.
Similarly, we presented investors with three bond options similar to their previous one and asked, "Which bond would you like to reinvest in?" This shifted focus to selecting a bond rather than deciding whether to invest.
Investors who received the Active Choice email were 13 percentage points more likely to complete reinvestment compared to those in the Attention condition. This led to twice as many reinvestments as the Attention condition and a 4.3x increase in reinvestments compared to sending no email.
The behavioral science takeaway
The default for most decisions is to do nothing.
To combat this tendency, we need to help people make decisions. One route is moving potential customers from “do I need this” to “which one do I need?” Companies intuitively understand this—most pricing pages offer multiple product options. With one option, customers think “do I like this or not?” With multiple options, they consider “which one do I like most?”
This small change moves people from doing nothing into doing something.
Want to beat the status quo?
These interventions didn't just appear. Behavioral design follows a process. We don't just interview users—we conduct in-depth behavioral diagnoses mapping decision-making environments, collect data on existing behaviors, and review literature to understand user psychology.
Behavioral scientists go beyond what users say they’ll do (or want) and focus on what they actually do and the psychology behind it.
The secret to changing behavior and beating the status quo isn't convincing people to care about your product. Even if they love it, they may not use it. Instead, design an environment where using it feels like the natural choice.
And this works. See case studies at IrrationalLabs.com for more examples.
Want to learn more? Irrational Labs has worked with top companies (LinkedIn, Discover, Roche, Paypal) to drive behavior change at scale. Let’s chat: kristen@irrationallabs.com and sign up for the Irrational Labs newsletter to get more case studies.
Job opportunities
Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Digital Designer
Things to watch, read, and explore
Listen: People fear public speaking more than death. Matt Abrahams shares insights from his book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot, on the latest episode of the Reconsidering podcast.
Read: Vicki Tan’s new book, Ask This Book a Question, takes a choose-your-own-adventure approach to answering big questions about career and life.
Read: Fast Company asks, “Is design dead?” We don’t think so!
Explore: Reve is an AI tool trained from the ground up to excel at prompt adherence, aesthetics, and typography.
Explore: Our interfaces have lost their senses. So beautiful!
 | A guest post by
|