A Smidge of Behavioral Science at the End of the Year

Dear readers & friends,

So, yeah, this year hasn’t exactly been newsletter-heavy from my side, and I’m sorry for that. I would’ve loved to write more here, but first, there was that writer’s block thing (I wrote about it in the last edition) and after I had that sorted out, I didn’t really get to publishing a lot of articles. Because I’m kinda trying to write a book (making a public commitment here to force myself to actually follow through with it).

That’s gonna be my big goal for 2025 and obviously take away some time and energy from writing and publishing smaller things. The working title is “Essential Lessons on UX” (subject to change).

But I still want to end this year with another edition of ToDUX for all of you because I did manage to at least publish one more thing since August.

Smart Green Nudging

I already mentioned it in the last newsletter: together with my partner Johanna and friends from Goethe University Frankfurt, I got a paper published in the Marketing Science academic journal.

We’ve now taken the insights from that paper and made them into a Medium article for a more general audience that was published in Better Marketing: “What if You Could Reduce Returned Products With Just Some Lines of Text?”*

This article explains how combining behavioral science with AI can address the costly issue of product returns in e-commerce. By applying the concept of “Green Nudging”—subtle messages encouraging customers to make more mindful choices—we could reduce returns by 2.6% in a seven-week experiment, saving an estimated $340,000 annually while cutting emissions.

Personalizing these nudges with causal machine learning doubled their effectiveness, showing how sustainability and profitability can align through innovative, customer-centric approaches.

Reading Recommendations

Since it’s the end of the year and we all have better things to do, I’ll keep my recommendations to one each this time around.

📖 Ethics in times of growth design by Mary Borysova, in relation to applied behavioral science, asks the uncomfortable but necessary question, “Can growth design be truly ethical?”

Tool Recommendations

🛠️ Coglode distills behavioral science into actionable “nuggets,” offering easy-to-digest “bite-size” principles that help improve decision-making, design, and communication strategies. It's a practical toolkit for applying behavioral research to real-world challenges.

Enjoy reading and until next time. I really appreciate your being interested in my content. As always, I welcome your feedback and comments on my articles and this newsletter. Simply reply to this email to share your thoughts. But more importantly: I wish you all a very, very Happy New Year! 🎆

Cheers,
Max

* My articles are usually behind the Medium paywall. You can get the friend links by subscribing to my newsletter.