Seat Belts, Behaviour Change & Bindle

How an understanding of Covid Cosmologies puts people at the heart of Bindle

Buckle Up

The seatbelt was patented in 1885 yet it was only in 1966 that car manufacturers were required to fit them in vehicles. It took another 30 years for every US State (bar New Hampshire) to enforce their use. In the decades between arrival and their use becoming mandatory few people became accustomed to this seemingly bizarre social practice. Nowadays, buckling up is second nature.

Changing people’s behaviour at scale is hard. Making new practices feel natural even harder. But in the age of Covid that’s the imperative.

In recent months governments across the globe have spent millions to develop and deploy test and trace apps. Yet only a handful have been successful. To take only one example, one month after its launch, only 68 suspect cases had been identified through the official French government “Stop Covid” app.

Every public policy expert knows that humans are creatures of habit. Changing people’s behavior is more difficult than developing solutions that, were they to adopt them, could save their life.

This is the challenge faced by the Bindle Systems team. They have developed a technological solution that allows people to easily and safely display their Covid-19 health status whenever they go into a shared space. Widely adopted, it could save thousands of lives and help reopen the economy. The challenge is to drive mass adoption in months, not decades.

Covid Cosmologies

For the founders of Bindle Systems, the need for society to adopt their solution is a no brainer — it’s just “the right thing to do”.

Yet they also recognised that this understanding of what ‘makes sense’ might not be widely shared. The underlying technology of their system is complex but they acknowledged that people’s ideas and behaviors around Covid are more complicated than their engineering smarts. They knew that only if they built a product that met people “where they were at” could it achieve widespread adoption.

Understanding people — their beliefs, values and behaviours — is hard at the best of times. Confronted by a novel, harrowing pandemic, people’s lives and understandings of their world are thrown into disarray. Building a picture of American’s ‘covid cosmologies’ was what Stripe Partners set out to do.

What are people’s beliefs about the virus? How should they avoid becoming infected, or infecting others? What are their anxieties, their needs and their hopes?

To answer these, and other questions, we engaged with Americans across states which were experiencing the pandemic in different ways. Our objective was to build a picture of their “Covid Cosmologies” that could provide the foundations for a service that they would readily adopt and incorporate into their everyday lives.

Put differently, our goal was to uncover insights that could ensure Bindle:

1. Has a powerful value proposition that addresses fundamental needs (the drive for using Bindle must be high)
2. Delivers the right product experience to neatly fit into people’s existing routines (the barriers to using Bindle must be low)

Uncertainty reigns

Over the course of our conversations, we found that people are plagued by uncertainties. They are asking themselves:

• How can I make sense of the virus itself? (Where does it come from? How dangerous is it? Whose account of what it is and where it emerged from should I believe?)
• How do I best protect myself and my loved ones? (Where am I most at risk? Do masks work?)
• How should I interact with others? (What do they think about the virus? How should I behave around them?)

Making sense of Covid is quickly overwhelming.

These uncertainties compound each other. People are left feeling overwhelmed and powerless, and with these emotions come strong feelings either of resignation and even rejection of the biological and social realities of the pandemic.

Participants were asked to draw the evolution of their state of mind during the pandemic. We identified a recurring pattern: worry, followed by adjustment and eventually resignation.

A key insight was that almost everyone — whatever their political affiliation or attitudes towards Covid — faces cognitive overload. Their response? Find heuristics, or shortcuts, which simplify their lives.

In practice, this means not making decisions based on cold analysis of the infinite information available but rely on existing, often binary, value systems that point them towards what “feels” right. As Jonathan Haidt argues in The Righteous Mind, moral intuition precedes logical reasoning. In a pandemic, people use their moral compass to make decisions and then commandeer the ‘facts of the matter’ which support this action.

Example of 3 value systems we came across during our interviews (names changed)

Implications for Design

This confirmation that people don’t, indeed cannot, think of the pandemic in strictly rational terms had significant implications for Bindle’s product and go-to-market strategy.

Behavioral science studies (Carrey, 2020) show that trying to convince people with factual arguments is not only ineffective — it’s often counterproductive. Our research indicated that Bindle needed to appeal to people’s deeper, more visceral understandings of the pandemic and how to respond to it. It also identified how the product’s benefits should be framed.

Our research highlighted that the one thing most people are missing deeply was normal social interactions. Honing in on this key benefit allowed to focus Bindle’s core value proposition: a gateway to normalcy.

Beyond identifying this core strategic positioning, our research also surfaced people’s daily Covid routines: what are their pain points, what new behaviors have they adopted, where is there space for them to effortlessly start using Bindle.

Journey map of social occasions for one study participant (names changed)

It is this fine understanding of people’s concrete, mundane, routines and pain points that allowed us to design the right user experience for Bindle.

The pandemic is present daily in quantitative terms: reproduction rate, case numbers and test statistics. We’re made fearful by talk of its exponential growth. Yet those aggregates always start with individual decisions. Creating the conditions for new behaviors requires meeting people where they are at. Right now we can’t afford to wait, like we did with seat belts, for new behaviours to scale slowly. Rapid shifts are required. Bindle supports the return to normalcy by being a system that makes a complex reality easier to navigate.

// Cyril Maury

References

Carey, J. M., V. Chi, D. Flynn, B. Nyhan, and T. Zeitzoff (2020). The effects of corrective information about disease epidemics and outbreaks: Evidence from Zika and yellow fever in Brazil. Science advances 6 (5), eaaw7449.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion. Pantheon Books.