BI Beat: The Psychology of Intuition and UI

The BI Beat is a monthly column written by the Behavioral Insights unit, featuring insights, examples, and interviews from the field. Behavioral Insights is funded by the U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL).

In recent posts, we have discussed how systems thinking can help unemployment insurance (UI) programs. Designers (like you!) can uncover innovative and low-cost solutions by considering the whole system, including staff, software, legislation, and claimants.

So far, we’ve seen how systems thinking can reduce improper payments by clarifying language and cutting unnecessary claimant decision points. Today, we offer another approach—making systems more intuitive.

Intuitive Systems

Watching a toddler with a smartphone is fun (especially when it belongs to someone else). Sometimes they just mash with sticky palms, but other times they use the device—and use it well. They swipe; they press buttons; they skip to new songs.

Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, said: “Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” 

Smartphones are exceptionally complicated machines, but somehow they’re still intuitive. Can UI programs tap into this same kind of intuition? Yes!

Psychology of Intuition

First, we have to ask: what is intuition? Intuition is a like a mental folder of scripts, like computer programs, that run automatically as we go through the world. Scripts might be activated by objects, people, places—anything we might encounter.

Some principles of intuition that are particularly useful for designers include: 

• Affordances (e.g., a big red button). An affordance is something that communicates its purpose just by how it looks. Most people don’t need training to use affordances; buttons just want to be pushed and door handles tell us whether to push or pull.
• Schemata (e.g., mental how-to manuals). We assemble mental process maps of how tools and situations work based on prior life experiences. Without much thought, we know how to pick up a hammer and bang in a nail. To get food at a restaurant, we know to sit, wait, and order.
• Norms (e.g., rules). We also get expectations about proper behavior from our family and communities. These may be laws, like which side of the road to drive on, or niceties, like saying hello when you see a friend. Again, we’ve practiced following these cultural norms, so we act properly without much thought.

The huge benefit of intuition is that it makes navigating the world easy, without wasting mental resources. Scripts just run, and we just act. The downside of intuition is that if the world deviates from our expectations, we make mistakes and get frustrated. We’ve all pushed a door that needed to be pulled, waited to pay at a restaurant when the cash register’s up front, or felt shunned when a colleague didn’t wave back.

Intuitive UI

How does this relate to UI? When applying for unemployment benefits for the first time, claimants bring scripts with them, ready to be triggered. Even UI beginners have intuitions about how UI appears to work, how it will work, and how it ought to work. They expect to click buttons, fill out paperwork, receive status updates, and so on. 

Careful UI systems designers can take advantage of these scripts and make the claimant experience feel more intuitive. If we understand common claimant scripts, we can align our programs’ processes with them. Typically, this is done through user experience design, which includes meeting with claimants to talk about--and more importantly, watch--how they react to processes and documents. 

When the system is more intuitive, claimants will make fewer mistakes, leading to fewer improper payments.

One great example of a state trying to make UI more intuitive comes from Florida. There, the state renamed “Unemployment Insurance” to “Re-employment Assistance.” This modification changes the mental model people have when applying for benefits. Rather than thinking of the program as “money for when I’m unemployed,” claimants think of it as “money to help me find a job.” The name itself provides a more accurate intuition of the program’s purpose, and even implies the requirement to search for work. Pretty slick!

Sprinkling Intuition

UI designers can access claimant intuitions in any of the principles described above. 

Here are a few more examples:

• To add affordances, we can include visual elements that intuitively communicate the meaning of a notice or letter. Adding icons, checkmarks, warning signs, and color can inform somebody’s intuition even before they read.
• To align with schemata, we might consider reframing where UI asks people to do something unusual. For example, claimants may have difficulty reporting earnings in weekly certifications because people typically think about their take-home pay, not their pre-tax earnings. Moreover, people aren’t expecting to do a lot of math when filing. Instead of asking for income, we might instead ask for someone’s hours worked, wage rate, and tips. This will get us to the same information, but more in line with people’s experience.
• Lining up with claimants’ expected norms can be tricky; everyone has an opinion of what “should” be done. But one interesting insight is that claimants expect to be coached when submitting UI claims. States might tap into that perception by providing in-the-moment instructions with forms, like tooltips. They might also fine-tune communication, especially around negative adjudication decisions, to be precise about what mistakes claimants make, so that they can improve.

Of course, not every aspect of UI can be made intuitive. Sometimes all designers can do is explain the way it is. But by focusing on what intuitions claimants bring, we can make the overall process simpler, clearer, and less frustrating for everyone involved.

Frustration is Useful

Nobody likes frustration, but that’s by design. From the perspective of evolution, frustration motivates us to get up and fix things wasting our energy. States can harness claimant frustration to the same end. 

Through surveys, focus groups, and user testing, states can follow frustration to uncover points in their systems that are not intuitive and may be leading to improper payments.

Work With Us

Reach out to Behavioral Insights at integrity@naswa.org to learn more or for help improving your systems to guide claimants’ behavior. This program is funded by the U.S. Department of Labor.