Behavioral Design Interactive Bootcamp

This course is for people who want to understand their customers’ psychology — especially for anyone interested in product management, marketing, or design.

You should take this course if: 

You are building or growing a new product, service or feature that would benefit from insights on customer psychology, and answering questions like:

• What feature should we build next? 
• How do we get customers to love us?
• What’s the optimal pricing model?

You are building products or services that ask customers to take any kind of action including:

• behavior change in domains like finance or health
• enrolling in a product or program you’re offering
• opening an email or text and then taking an action
• engaging with a product or service (and staying loyal to it)
• referring friends and family to your product

A treasure trove of insights exists about why people do what they do. The current product, design and marketing tool kits only expose us to the tip of this research iceberg. You will go deep on the psychologies that can drive you and your customers to adopt, engage and retain your product or service. You will have a variety of experiences applying these ideas to general business problems and get your hands dirty working on a personal or professional goal that is important to you! You will learn by doing, with Irrational Labs’s Behavioral Scientists and a cohort of professionals dedicated to using behavioral science to improve people’s lives.

You’ll receive live instruction and real-time feedback from Irrational Labs Behavioral Scientists & coursemates over the course of four weeks (see the schedule described above). The self-paced course is 8 weeks, and interaction with teachers is primarily through Slack, but allows you to engage with the course content at your convenience. 

If you’re looking to tackle a pressing professional challenge in a timely fashion with real-time support, the Cohort-Based Bootcamp’s collaborative structure is likely your best bet. The synchronous coaching from Irrational Labs’ scientists may get you where you want to go faster than the self-paced course.

We’ll be together for four weeks + our kickoff session on Wednesday, October 19. You’ll have four half-day sessions on Mondays + two hours of available coaching time on Wednesdays.

Required course sessions
Wednesday: October 19 Kickoff (Time TBD)
Mondays: October 24 & 31 + November 7 & 14 (all 9–10:30am PDT)
Thursday: October 27 + November 3, 10 & 17 (all 9–10:30am PDT)
Office Hours with the Course Facilitator are available after class, from 10:30—11:30am PDT.

Optional sessions course
Wednesdays (coaching!): October 26 + November 2, 9 & 16 (all 9–10:30am PDT)

People don’t always act rationally. We say one thing and do another. We even act against our best interests. Behavioral science studies these complicated, surprising behaviors. The field sits at the crossroads of psychology and economics – exploring the effects of cognitive, emotional, and social factors surrounding our decisions, and ultimately, our actions. The application of behavioral science is typically called behavioral design. 

More and more, companies are also using behavioral design to conduct user research, develop products, and design experiments that drive behavior change and growth. This course uses behavioral science to offers you an end-to-end lens for product and service development that helps teams think differently about their customer.  

This course will teach you: 

• • Silicon Valley’s insights on why your customers make decisions, including how companies actually leverage behavioral science.

• • Easy-to-learn tactics that change users’ behavior for good. For example, the ‘3B framework’ used by companies like Intuit and Microsoft to induce behavioral change.

• • How to bring behavioral economics to your organization in a scalable and ethical way, by learning when and how to conduct experiments that can drastically increase your conversion and retention rates.

• • The top psychological biases impacting you and your customers. We’ll cover many insights ranging from everything from the effect of cognitive overload to the impact of social norms (‘Everyone else is doing it’).

• • Smart ways to keep customers engaged that aren’t always what you’d expect, and a deep dive on ‘concrete-ness’ and ‘identifiable victim.’ 

And MUCH more including and not limited to LIVE instruction, team workshops, certificate of completion, access to our Slack community, videos, case studies, interactive exercises.

This course instruction will be led by Kristen Berman, CEO and co-founder of Irrational Labs. Berman has worked with dozens of companies in Silicon Valley to help them rethink their product and marketing strategies, specifically collaborating with leaders from Google, LinkedIn and Indeed to solve their toughest challenges. The day-to-day facilitation and organization of the cohort will be done by by Ryan Goble — our Chief Learning Officer.

You’ll also get hands-on instruction from Irrational Labs senior behavioral scientists and managing directors that normally work 1:1 with top companies. This team is on the ground on a day-to-day basis with top companies — designing products and running experiments.

Irrational Labs was founded by author and professor Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman. Our mission is to use behavioral insights to help people live happier, healthier and wealthier lives. Hundreds of companies have used our process to build new innovations and improve existing ones.

Companies like Google, Fidelity, Lyft and Uber, Aetna, Microsoft, Intuit, Indeed and AARP have brought us in as consultants for their product and marketing teams to drive growth and engagement. Dozens of seed or series-A startups have relied on us to help them understand their customers’ needs and build products that solve them. We are product designers and behavioral scientists. We are deeply passionate about designing our systems and our environment to change behavior for the good.

We recommend you set aside 5 hours each week for this course:
• 3 hours of online sessions (90 minutes on Monday and Thursday)
• + 1 to 2 hours outside of classes to explore readings and finish the assignments we start during class time.

Additionally, we offer 4 hours of coaching and office hours each week.
• office hours are an hour after class on Monday and Thursday
• + formal coaching sessions on Wednesday  

Like most things in life, you get what you put in. You will also be making a commitment to collaborate with classmates as you develop ideas together. To get the most out of the course, we encourage you to make room in your life and calendar for it. 

But the really neat thing to expect? You’ll start seeing the world a bit differently. During this course, you will start thinking like a behavioral scientist. So while there are the actual (and non-trivial) time commitments to be aware of, you should expect to become immersed in the content in a way that seeps into your daily life. You’ll ask more questions. You’ll be more curious.

Mondays and Thursdays (and our Wednesday kickoff) are jam-packed with content – and breaks to keep people fresh. We bring in a top behavioral scientist to teach an interactive lesson on the behavioral design process and the most important BE psychologies. We also plan time for rapid feedback and collaboration.

Wednesdays (optional) we get our hands dirty & learn by doing. Bring in the project you’re excited about and our behavioral scientists will help you apply the concepts you learned on Monday.  

Pro tip: You can ask your company to sponsor you. A lot of companies have a professional development budget for things exactly like this.

Want to bring a friend or teammate? We offer discounts to groups of 2 or more. Email [email protected] for more info.

We also offer nonprofit and government employee discounts, as well as a ‘COVID-19 front-line worker’ discount. Learn more

Once we enroll our entire cohort, you will get access to:

• a shared calendar for our interactive sessions with links to a Zoom url we’ll use for all sessions 

Right before the course begins (Mid-October 2022) you’ll receive access to:

• a learning platform called Podia that will guide you through each week with content, readings, and assignments
• a course overview map (similar to a syllabus) to make sure you have the big picture
• a private Slack channel where the class and instructors will regularly interact outside of our live sessions

In short, we will make sure you have access to all the digital tools you’ll need to have a great learning experience!

No previous experience in behavioral economics or design is necessary. If you have read a few behavioral economics books, you’ll still learn many new things. We focus on applying behavioral insights to your daily work!

We believe the power of behavioral design should only be used to make a positive impact in the world. For that reason, course access is only allowed to those whose work is focused on making people happier, healthier, or wealthier. We do not allow admission to certain industries that may not align with ‘behavior change for good.’

You have access to the course for 2 months — that’s 4 weeks of actively receiving new content, plus another full month to review and cement your learning.

We’ll evaluate your application within 24-48 hours. Once accepted, we’ll send you a payment link to complete your enrollment. It is first-come, first-serve; to secure your spot, you must pay. After payment is received we will send you calendar invites for all the class sessions.

Yes, and if 5 people from your company join the cohort, you’ll get private breakout groups with your team. Contact us to learn more. Additionally, if you want to send a large group we do offer group rates.