Vidhika Bansal: Applying Behavioral Science to Content Design – Episode 148

Vidhika Bansal Humans are notoriously fickle creatures, hard-wired to behave in unpredictable ways. This makes experience design work challenging for both managers and practitioners. Vidhika Bansal has led both UX research and content design teams. Her unique background in both the behavioral sciences and UX design gives her a unique toolkit for bridging the gaps between unpredictable human behavior and useful digital experiences. We talked about: her work at Intuit as a UX manager focused on content design the scope her work to apply behavioral sciences to design how understanding anxiety can help designers increase user confidence in product flows the "say-do" gap in human behavior and several ways it manifests in design work two common barriers to smooth journey flows - information overload and decision fatigue - and how to craft a "choice architecture" to address them the importance of ensuring that you're providing and gathering the right data as you help users make choices "behavioral science thinking" - a lens through which you can see your design work differently three truisms about human behavior that guide her work people have limited attention humans' tendency to take the path of least resistance humans are social beings who want to be liked, to belong ways to kindly and ethically engage users: progressive disclosure, instilling confidence, providing choice-making guardrails, etc. how adopting a behavioral science thinking mindset can help you design more effectively and ethically Vidhika's bio Vidhika is a Group Design Manager at Intuit, where she leads teams of talented designers and researchers building QuickBooks. She has a background in cognitive science and cares deeply about designing for real life. In her past (more like parallel) life as a consultant, she's helped shape product strategies for a wide range of clients from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies to stealth startups. She's also a frequent speaker, advisor, and coach for in-house teams and conferences worldwide. Vidhika is convinced that words are magic and that stories — including the ones we tell ourselves! — can change the world. She feels strongly about empathetic leadership, ethical tech, and the power of human connection. She also really likes pasta. Connect with Vidhika online Twitter LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/TEQAnREQiOI Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 148. Left to our own devices, we humans routinely make a lot of what behavioral economists would label irrational decisions. Our job as content designers is to help users make good Vidhika Bansal. Vidhika Bansal spans the worlds of behavioral science and experience design. Her unique perspective helps her cultivate in her content-design and UX research teams the kind of thinking that bridges the gaps between messy human thinking and helpful digital experiences. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 148 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really excited today to welcome to the show Vidhika Bansal. Vidhika is a UX group manager at Intuit, where she focuses on content design. She migrated into that from research. Vidhika, welcome to the show, and tell the folks a little bit more about your work there at Intuit. Vidhika: Yeah, sure. Thank you so much, Larry. Excited to be here and excited to be recording this. So at Intuit, like Larry said, I used to lead a research team, and last year transitioned to leading a content design team. So I consider myself fairly multidisciplinary and work on... Try to dabble still in research, bring a behavioral science lens to things, sometimes focus on interaction design too. And right now I work on QuickBooks, and so my team gets to... We all get to focus on businesses that are in that mid-market space,