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 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, and trying to help them navigate our product better.
Larry:
I bet we have some QuickBooks users among the consultants and the freelancers. But you just mentioned both that you're multidisciplinary, and that one of the things you bring to this practice that we all have is this multidisciplinary lens on the social sciences, specifically on the behavioral sciences, and applying that in our work. Can you talk a little bit just about, what's the span of behavioral science that you draw on in your work? Because you think first of psychology, but I think you've talked in the past about there's more to it than that.
Vidhika:
Yeah. I think psychology, specifically cognitive science, social psychology, I think those are the areas that I lean pretty heavily on and am most interested in and have nerded out about over the course of my career, and even before that. So I think those are a lot of it, the focus. But I think there's other fields that come into play, for instance, like anthropology, sociology, any field that helps observe and understand how humans behave, both individually and in relation to each other. I think all of those... I think it's really important to take our information and our cues from the various fields, because what we find is, I think there's a ton of overlap, and it's really nice to be able to triangulate those insights to guide our work and our lives.
Larry:
That's it. I hadn't thought about it that way, but I think that's right. You come from a variety of perspectives. You have better odds of getting at the actual truth of the situation that you're dealing with. And to that point, one of the things that a lot of people in content design and the design world and the tech world in general right now are dealing with is anxiety. And that's one of the things you talked about. I think we first connected when you did your talk at Button last fall, and you talked about anxiety from a couple different angles. And like I said, just with the current... We're recording this in spring of 2023, when it's rough times out there in the job market and the design world in general. But taking off on the idea of anxiety, one, coping mechanisms, and two, how it's applied in design practice.
Vidhika:
Yeah. So I think that we're definitely in a tough spot right now in the tech space, and like you said, Larry, there's a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear. I think there's the sense of almost operating in survival mode, because there's tons of uncertainty. We don't really know what's happening next.
Vidhika:
So I think that manifests obviously in our personal lives, but I think in products, and I talked about this last fall, I think there's ways that we as designers, as content people, as researchers, whatever craft expertise you're bringing to the space, if you are touching a product that is going to be used by other people, I think there's a huge opportunity to try and reduce the anxiety that is in those product flows for your users, and instead trying to increase their confidence. So I always like to preach around, increase user confidence over just conversion. Because I think that there is this... We're all pretty used to seeing it where it's like, "Hurry, only seven spots left," or, "You have five minutes to complete this transaction." And there's a lot of false scarcity and the sense that everything has to be done now and urgently in products.
Vidhika:
And while sometimes it is going to make someone click the thing faster, buy the thing more immediately, I don't think it always makes for good decisions. And I think that if you can instead try to infuse more of... Have a more abundance mindset about your product, and if you feel like your product is actually bringing value, and you're able to prioritize making the user feel confident about how they use it, about whether or not they should make a decision, about a certain SKU or whatever it is that you're trying to get them to do, I think users actually feel more... They feel better about the decisions that they made, and those decisions tend to be more sustainable. They're less likely to have buyer's remorse, they're less likely to feel like they were deceived or shamed or guilted or tricked into doing something.
Vidhika:
So I would love to personally see more of that, because I think we have tons of... We have so much privilege and power in the roles that we hold, and part of that is in affecting how people are feeling. And when people are already feeling this base layer of anxiety, why add to that in the solutions that we build?
Larry:
Right. And as you're talking, I'm thinking about... At least, maybe it's just the circles I'm running in these days, but there's so much more increased focus on trying to get to genuine human-centered design. And a big part of that is customer journeys. And if you're thinking about advancing on a customer journey, that idea of having confidence about going forward, versus committing a transaction in the moment, it does seem like a more genuinely human way to operate too. Does that make sense?
Vidhika:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Larry:
Yeah. One thing about this... That's a fairly, I guess, straightforward way of thinking about some of the interesting things about human behavior. Because the thing I love about all this is that humans are such interesting creatures, that we're kind of predictable, kind of unpredictable. But one of the other things I've heard you talk about that's in that family is, you call it the say-do thing, like this sort of... It's not so much not an integrity thing, but we're prone to say one thing and maybe not do exactly that. Can you talk a little bit about that dynamic and some of the examples of it you've encountered?
Vidhika:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's one of the things that researchers especially struggle with a lot, because sometimes someone might say something when you speak to them in an interview, and then their behavior in actuality may not map up.
