{13} Behavioral Economics & ChatGPT

Featuring Pierre Jacquel and Travis

Pierre Jacquel

PhD Student in behavioral economics by day and UI/UX designer by night. I love roasting landing pages 🔥 UI/UX and Science based tips. Cat and chess lover.

Q: What are you working on?

A: I am working on a complete Notion template to help makers to roast their landing page themselves!

Q: I'd love to learn more about Notion templates. I assume your landing page roasting template doesn't automatically check for issues. Is it a checklist to help people to look for common issues? Could you walk me through the workflow?

A: I have not totally decided on every aspect of the product, but yes the main part with be a checklist you can use to evaluate your site. For each item you will have an explanation of what it is important, some tips/advice, and examples from real pages.

I will also provide a guide on why and how to build a landing page, with a deep psychological explanation of how people make decisions and what the consequences are on the way we should design our pages.

And the last part will be some Figma templates and layout to help people to build the perfect landing page! :)

I still have many work to do to finish it, but working on it every day! I hope the product will be in alpha for the end of the month.

Q: Behavioral economics is something more people should pay attention to. I've attended a few events with Dan Ariely presenting. It's fascinating to see what motivates behavior. There are a lot of implications related to product development, and in your case, landing page design. Please share an example of how you might incorporate behavioral economics into a landing page to increase conversions.

A: Oo you know Dan? He gave a talk at my university a few months ago! My research is attached to a new stream in psychology called "ecological rationality". For us, people are not "biased", but they have mental heuristics that could be more or less adapted to deal with uncertainty in certain environments.

Let me give you an example: social proof. We rely on social proof when we have no other information about something, and some reliable people do.

If a friend told my sister that the guy she is dating is known for being a wife beater, should my sister trust her friend or "wait to have more data"? In this context, social proof is relevant.

But if my sister tells me that we can cure cancer with some fruits because she knows someone who did, should I rely on this social proof here? Probably not.

So it depends on the environment and the problem. There are no biases, just a mental toolbox with different tools that work well under some circumstances and poorly otherwise.

A key feature of ecological rationality is what we call "satisfacting heuristic": people choose an alternative if the outcome is higher than a satisfaction threshold. We don't "optimize" across all alternatives. We seek something satisfacting enough.

I use this feature to think about UI/UX design: the environment is uncertain, people don't know about your product, and they don't have hours or unlimited attention to evaluate it. Our job as a designer is to show users the right information they need at the right moment so they make the best decision for them.

A landing page is not here to "convert or make money". A landing page's job is to show to the user the value of your product. I have a user-centered approach. My first question is always: what the user wants to do? What does he need to know to take the right action?

I design for the next year, not the next click. If you have a 100% user-first vision, you will win the long game. :)

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Travis

Founder Serpjoy - Product designer and indie maker building SaaS since 2011 • Insights on audience building & growth marketing 🚀

Q: What are you working on?

A: I'm working on Serpjoy - the stress-free SEO platform for creators.

Q: It has to be hard to stand out in the SEO space. Do you believe the competitive edge of Serpjoy is an approachable brand that speaks to people who might feel uneasy about the messy world of search?

A: There are so many SEO tools out there at differing price points, and they all stress me out! I’ve been building websites for various clients in different industries for over a decade, and they all have the same requirements to get ranked. I wanted a tool that addressed those basic needs, but was also joy to use every day - just the right amount of information and nice, uncluttered UX.

I launched a SEO competitor data tool in 2017 and the user base has just kept growing, so I know how hot the SEO market is - after all, everyone needs a website! The major takeaway I learned from serving over 10,000 users was that SEO data without a simple explanation and guidance on how to work with it, is next to useless!

These are the areas that Serpjoy excels at - clean data, simple guidance, and clear marketing opportunities that won’t overwhelm you.

Q: About 20 years ago, I worked for an SEO shop called Blizzard. I remember various content generation techniques that produced a high volume of low-quality content. People were worried that the results page would be flooded with garbage and make it impossible to rank. The search engines evolved, and the impact was fairly minimal.

ChatGPT feels fundamentally different. How do you think it will impact search in the short and long term?

A: ChatGPT is great for several reasons; it banishes blank page syndrome, it can write catchy headlines, and it takes the pain out of creating topical content maps. What it isn’t good at is doing keyword research (remember that it doesn’t know anything before 2021!) and writing content that is a joy to read. A good blog post needs several things; high intent search keywords, several outbound and inbound reference links, and helpful content - none of which ChatGPT can create at the moment. So like you saw with Blizzard, the impact is going to be fairly minimal in the short term. When GPT-4 comes out though… who knows!

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