Our first meetup of the summer was about how to “design for behavior”. Lacey Picazo, the CEO of ZoCo Design, helped us understand what that actually means!

We’re all aware of how much easier it has become to build new features thanks to AI. So in a world where we’re awash in data and can ship features all day, how do we know what will really resonate with our customers? We can survey customers and pour over our analytics reports, but if we implemented every feature that came out of that process we’d overwhelm consumers with a fragmented and confusing product.

Lacey talked about how one of the most important steps of moving these (potential) insights into intelligent action is to document our biases. Understanding both our own biases and getting closer to the customer to understand theirs is the way we move from just having a big pile of data to something actionable and meaningful.

Human curiosity remains at the core of this process. We know that people’s actual observed behavior frequently doesn’t match what they will say in a survey, but it’s a human asking “why?” those two data sources don’t match and coming up with hypotheses to investigate that allow us to build products that succeed.

As usual, the crowd had some great questions and Lacey was ready with insightful answers of her own! She also provided her slides and encouraged folks to reach out to her if they want to talk more.