How uncertainty for your customers (that you created) impacts product-led growth. 4 insights with solutions.

I'm a behavioural scientist. I've also worked in tech as a Product Manager/Head of Product for the last 10yrs. Recently I've been auditing (i.e. "roasting") products for startups for a while and here's one thing that keeps jumping out at me - uncertainty.

I mean uncertainty in the Behavioural Science / Behavioural Economics sense.

If you're interested in a full audit of your Product Experience that will uncover these issues and more, check out the-poe-things.com. For more insights like these follow me at twitter.com/the_poe_things or check out the new blog at the-poe-things.com/blog.

TL;DR

there's a few suggestions at the bottom on where to find and how to fix some "uncertainty issues" you might not be aware you're even creating for users.

Resources

There's lots of great books and resources on Behavioural Economics: Misbehaviing (Richard Thaler), Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely), Influence - the psychology of persuasion (Rober Cialdini), and Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman). There's also Freakonomics (podcast and book).. even movies, like Moneyball, tell the story of real-life systematic biases (in Baseball) and how hard it can be to break down those barriers, even when you have good data.

What is uncertainty?

People are reluctant to click a button if they're not sure what it will do. When faced with a lot of unfamiliar words, images, and overall UX design it can make people feel uncertainty towards the app. Is it right for them? Why can't i find how to do X? What does Y mean?

Scientific studies (by Kahneman & Tversky, and also Thaler) were some of the first to show that people were not "rational" decision makers in the way that classical economics had suggested. People made psychologically biased decisions, but often - and this is the part that amazes me - in predictable ways!

In other words - people act illogically. A lot. But many of those illogical choices are actually observable, measurable and predictable.

Look at your product's onboarding and the main experience. In fact, look at the whole product experience, including settings and even the landing page.

Look for these 5 examples of uncertainty

1. Language

Are you using terms that you're not explaining? Is your copy clear and direct, or are people unsure what you're talking about?

Don't make people figure things out, you need to tell them exactly what your point is. Trying to be clever can lead to a lot of uncertainty and people coming away with the wrong idea from your landing page (especially the very cryptic hero headers and sub-headers people come up with).

2. Icons

There are visual and cultural aspects to getting icons right. Often, I see developers choose an icon library and then use something that feels "close enough" when there's nothing specific in the library. Think about the icon for "open this link", you know the one - it's a little box with an arrow coming out of it. Visually it's very abstract, but we've all seen it so much online and in apps that it becomes culturally ubiquitous.

Go look at your menu icons in your product: are they obvious to 99% of people or will they create uncertainty and doubt?
Are the meanings of your icons easily learned and easily recalled if the product isn't used in a while? If not, your product might as well be in a language that's foreign to your users - it's the same experience!
Get a good designer to make (or copy) a better icon design that might be more obvious. Check out https://thenounproject.com/ where you can type in any concept or noun and see lots of examples to use, buy and learn from.

3. Expectations

People have what is referred to as "rational expectations" about the future. That means they carry expectations at the feature level (what they expect a feature to do) and at the product level (their expected ROI from using your product). That means there's a lag that you won't see coming. We do this in relationships all the time when we think "if this relationship doesn't get better in a few months, I'm leaving". It's the same with your product.

Spend a couple of days fixing small and annoying bugs. These build up over time. I'm using a service right now that if another one came along with less bugs and a better UI (there isn't one currently) at the same price (or a little more), I would switch. My certainty about that company's ability to fix simple and annoying bugs created an uncertainty about whether I want to be their customer anymore.
People's expectations can be based on what they interpreted from your marketing in the first place. Are you over-selling and over-promising? That could be setting much bigger expectations than you think. If you made people believe that your product will save/fix/change their life or business in some way and it's not doing that.. or at least it's not happening in the way they expected - you're introducing a wedge of uncertainty about your product's ability to deliver. That will reduce retention and increase churn for sure.
Help people see the value of your product. An email summary, maybe you can share some insights about their progress in a dashboard. Help them see somehow that your product has value. Remember, the price is what they pay, value is what they get.

4. Information overload

Ever seen an actual animal "caught in the headlights"? That's what people look like when they are faced with a lot of new information or a new product interface. That's why (good) onboarding really works and why bad onboarding and a steep learning curve creates activation and retention issues.

Go and look at every icon you're using in your menus - how many of them are necessary?
Consider doing an "AI attention analysis" tool such as https://www.visualeyes.design/ on your product and landing page. Where are people getting distracted? You can reduce the amount of things fighting for people's attention (and adding to the overwhelming sense of uncertainty about what to do next) by putting things behind main or sub menus.
Make sure you are following basic design principles like alignment and positioning. If things are close together, people will see them as related or as a group. When they look closer and see that those icons/buttons/options are not related intuitively, they will then feel uncertain about those things or worse - uncertain about your product's ability to provide a good user experience. This could then relate back to impacting their expectations (see #3 above).

Thanks! DM me with any questions here or on Twitter twitter.com/the_poe_things

Let me know if you implement any insights from here and if you see or hear any change from users or in your growth.