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Product Design

Product Design

We use the psychology of decision-making to create innovative solutions that drive behavior change.

OUR APPROACH

Behavioral Design

We use behavioral science to inform product decisions.

Behavior change is hard. A few customer interviews alone won’t crack it. Too often, teams start the product development process by asking people what they want or would use.

At Irrational Labs, we use a process call behavioral design. We study the environment of decision-making to create hypotheses about user behavior.

I feel like we've been given a pair of X-Ray glasses to see a hidden world driving user behavior. These insights and tools will shape how we build experiences for the foreseeable future.
Ryan Murphy
Director of User Experience at Indeed

Case Studies

Merit America: Doubling Career Track Course Completion Rates

How do you help students navigate financial commitments and complete career-transforming programs? Merit America teamed up with Irrational Labs to reimagine the loan process, using behavioral science to simplify complex steps and reduce cognitive overload. The result? A 100% increase in course completion rates, with more learners now able to pursue higher-paying jobs.

Doubling New Engagement With Lyft’s Women+ Connect Feature

How do you capture attention and motivate more users to engage with new features? We partnered with Lyft to test messaging that would do just that—and increased new driver opt-ins by 173%. Read to find out how we did it.

How can we ensure cancer patients consistently report their symptoms for better care? Discover how we used behavioral science to transform symptom tracking, enhancing patient engagement and improving healthcare outcomes in our redesign of a digital patient monitoring platform.

How to Boost Product Engagement with the Endowment Effect

Want to boost cryptocurrency adoption? Learn how our insights and ‘The Satoshi Experiment’ can help unlock behavioral science’s potential in product development.

How do you get consumers to choose payment methods that are better for their financial health? And how do you shift cultural norms to improve financial behavior? We partnered with a top Brazilian bank to solve this challenge through behavioral design—driving a 73% increase in autopay among account holders.

How can we enhance communication to increase participation in the RESEA program and improve job seeker engagement in finding meaningful employment?

How do you help people repay loans faster? Common Cents Lab, a Duke University initiative co-led by Kristen Berman, Wendy Da La Rosa, and Mariel Beasley, worked with EarnUp to do this using behavioral insights.

How do you make physician reports easier to parse and more useful for providers? Learn how we worked with Belong Health to hone in on a critical source of data overload for physicians.

How do you increase new patient engagement? We designed a suite of behavioral interventions for Belong Health that accomplished this. Read on to discover how we did it and what we learned.

Could telling people when they’re spending more than others help them spend less? Common Cents Lab partnered with Arizona Financial Credit Union to learn how social proof can impact financial behavior.

How do you get more users to convert if you have a very long funnel? Common Cents Lab partnered with Kiva to find out—leading to $190K+ in additional credit for LMI small business owners.

How do you leverage tax refunds as an opportunity for long-term financial security? Common Cents Lab partnered with San Francisco fintech startup Digit to do just that.

TytoCare logo

We designed interventions for the TytoCare device and user journey that drove a 120% increase in devices sold and a 65% increase in completed medical visits.

TytoCare case study

We leveraged behavioral design to improve member and product outcomes with Credit Karma Money Spend, Credit Karma’s checking account.

Our prompts successfully reduced flagged content shares by 24% when compared to a control group.

How can you encourage patients to make doctor’s appointments? Our changes drove a 20% increase. 

One Medical Case Study

We drove a 3x increase in the likelihood of applying on time for FAFSA.

We worked with Uber to design, launch, and test a savings wallet for all Uber drivers.

Our experiment reduced overdraft fees by $36.

How can we redesign financial planning to better help low-income Americans succeed? We helped design an SMS and human financial coaching app.

Can we improve auto loan repayments? We helped decrease loan defaults by 69%.

How do you pressure test new feature ideas? We dry tested a new feature concept to get real data on adoption rates.

How can a city improve its citizens’ financial health? We did a rigorous assessment for Orange County, FL.

We worked with Steady on the questions: How can we increase engagement? Our experiment drove double-digit increases in bank account linkage.

How can we reframe the concept of loneliness and prevent people from becoming lonely in the first place? We designed an experiment to drive meaningful conversations.

We do it all. Our team supports you from concept to code.

We insert behavioral science into the high-level strategy and the small details of design and copy.

Literature Review
UX Testing
Behavioral Diagnosis
Experimental Design
Quantitative Concept Research
Data Analysis
Design Mock-ups
Copywriting

Interested in the science of decision-making?

EXPLORE MORE

Our Services

From concept to code, explore how we get our hands dirty with research, product, and marketing challenges.

Our Areas of Expertise

Learn how we are helping change behaviors across the domains of health, education, finance, and more.

Join our Bootcamp

Understand your customers’ choices and learn how to change their behavior for the better — in our 8-week online Behavioral Design course.