A decision is not made
in the moment.
It is the outcome of everything that came before it. What people do is the decision they really made; what they say is the one they meant to make. We read it by setting one against the other, and using behavioural science to explain the difference. That difference is where what they really think shows itself, and where the systems around them are doing their work, or not.
What people value and believe. It shapes everything that follows, and no survey reaches it directly. You find it by listening to what they say, and then watching what they do. Across 126 studies, what people said they felt and what their split-second reactions showed matched only weakly.1
What people tell you depends on who is asking, what they think you want to hear and what they want from you. Useful, and never the whole picture.2
What people actually start, skip, delay, abandon and repeat. Every number you report comes from here. Across eight published studies that asked people what they would do and then checked, typically fewer than half did.3
The processes, technology and incentives between intention and action decide whether what people think, what they say or what they do wins out. Change those, and people do what they already wanted to do, without being asked to change how they think. That is the path of least resistance, and it is where we work.4
Sources
- Nisbett and Wilson, “Telling more than we can know”, Psychological Review, 1977. Greenwald and Banaji, “Implicit social cognition”, Psychological Review, 1995. Charlesworth and Banaji, “Patterns of implicit and explicit attitudes II”, American Psychologist, 2021. Hofmann and colleagues, “A meta-analysis on the correlation between the Implicit Association Test and explicit self-report measures”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2005: 126 studies, mean correlation 0.24.
- Krumpal, “Determinants of social desirability bias in sensitive surveys”, Quality & Quantity, 2013. Larson, “Controlling social desirability bias”, International Journal of Market Research, 2019. Tourangeau and Yan, “Sensitive questions in surveys”, Psychological Bulletin, 2007. Murphy and colleagues, “A meta-analysis of hypothetical bias in stated preference valuation”, Environmental and Resource Economics, 2005: median ratio of stated to actual willingness to pay 1.35; List and Gallet, 2001 found factors up to three.
- Our compilation. Eight studies that asked people whether they would do something, then checked. The share of those who said they would who did: Sheeran, “Intention–behavior relations”, European Review of Social Psychology, 2002, 422 studies and 82,107 people, mostly health: a median 53 in a hundred; Rhodes and de Bruijn, “How big is the physical activity intention–behaviour gap?”, British Journal of Health Psychology, 2013, ten studies, 3,899 people: 54 in a hundred (42 per cent of the sample were intenders who acted, 36 per cent intenders who did not); DellaVigna and Malmendier, “Paying not to go to the gym”, American Economic Review, 2006, 7,752 members: forecast 9.5 visits a month, actual 4.17, so 44 in a hundred of the promised visits; Harris, Maurer and Lurie, “Do people who intend to get a flu shot actually get one?”, Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2009, 1,527 adults: just over half; Rogers and Aida, “Vote self-prediction hardly predicts who will vote”, American Politics Research, 2014, 29,403 people across three elections: fewer than half of those who said they would vote did; White, Hardisty and Habib, “The elusive green consumer”, Harvard Business Review, 2019: 65 per cent say they want to buy from sustainable brands, 26 per cent do, so 40 in a hundred; Ganczak and colleagues, “Does vaccinating against influenza in a given epidemic season have an impact on vaccination in the next season?”, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2022, a Polish follow-up study: of patients willing to have the next season’s flu vaccine, 31.9 per cent had it; Cowe and Williams, Who are the ethical consumers?, Co-operative Bank, 2000, the “30:3” gap, 30 per cent say and 3 per cent buy, so 10 in a hundred, as reported in Bray, Johns and Kilburn, Journal of Business Ethics, 2011. Range 10 to 54; counting the two “about half” results as 50, the median of the eight is 47. Background: Webb and Sheeran, “Does changing behavioral intentions engender behavior change?”, Psychological Bulletin, 2006: across 47 experiments, a medium-to-large change in intention (0.66) produced a small-to-medium change in behaviour (0.36). Sheeran and Webb, “The intention–behavior gap”, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2016. Conner and Norman, “Understanding the intention–behavior gap”, Frontiers in Psychology, 2022. Stirratt and colleagues, “Self-report measures of medication adherence behavior”, Translational Behavioral Medicine, 2015.
- Fogg, “A behavior model for persuasive design”, Persuasive ’09, 2009: behaviour happens when motivation, ability and a prompt meet. Michie, van Stralen and West, “The behaviour change wheel”, Implementation Science, 2011. DellaVigna and Linos, “RCTs to scale: comprehensive evidence from two nudge units”, Econometrica, 2022. Sheeran and Orbell, “Using implementation intentions to increase attendance for cervical cancer screening”, Health Psychology, 2000: attendance 69 per cent without a when-and-where plan, 92 per cent with one. Gollwitzer and Sheeran, “Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis”, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006: 94 tests, effect size 0.65.
We make visible
what is decided
invisibly.
Every outcome a brand cares about is settled somewhere it cannot see. Outside, in what people believe before they speak and in the systems that steer them. Inside, in the decisions your own organisation keeps putting off. We work in both places, as an experience consultancy that does the work, not just the report.
Every decision has a history. Sometimes it belongs to one person, shaped by what they have seen, what they can afford, what they believe and what they were taught. Sometimes it belongs to a team, or to the adviser, clinician or buyer across the desk. By the time a brand steps in to persuade, the die is mostly cast. We map those histories, what people think, say and do and the systems that steer them, to show where the outcome was really shaped, and where acting earlier, or supporting later, changes the next one. XMap® is how we do it at scale.
We help your team make the decisions that matter today: the right questions, answered with evidence people can stand behind, each one owned by the person who will act on it. Then we stay and work alongside you, sleeves up: bringing the stakeholders with us, testing ideas before the money is spent, and working with your teams and agencies until the change holds. You own the change. We make sure it lands.
Where XMap fits. XMap® is one of the tools we built, alongside our workshops, user studies, design and technology. Its job is to bring an experience to life, so that better decisions get made by your own teams and by the customers you serve. Both usually know what they want to do. What gets in the way is their environment. So the change is made there: preparing the system, clearing the friction and timing the right prompt, until the action becomes the easy one. XMap shows where. We help make it happen, alongside you and the agencies you already work with.
Wherever people
decide.
Human behaviour does not change at the border of an industry, so neither do we. Our clients are the experts in their domain; we are the experts in people and the systems around them, and we have brought that to global brands from the United Kingdom since 2011. We work alongside the teams and agencies you already have, and our job is to make their work land. Some of the teams we have worked with are below. The sectors, and what we do in them, follow.
Worked with teams at
Applications abandoned halfway. Advisers working around the system. A policy nobody reads before they sign. Compliance did not cause any of it and cannot fix it; behaviour did. We find the point where the journey loses people, show why with evidence your risk team will accept, and hand your product teams and agencies a fix they can build. You get completion and retention that move, without another platform.
Talk to usPeople start and do not stay, and another feature will not change that. We read what players actually do, find the moments that decide whether they come back, and give your studio or your team the mechanics that earn it. Play works far beyond games: a safety check completed, a course finished, a habit kept. You get retention your board understands, and a roadmap built on behaviour rather than opinion.
Talk to usMost members join and go quiet. Points and tiers do not earn loyalty; the behaviours around them do, and those show in what members do, not in what they tell a survey. We find which moments build the habit and which break it, then work with your team and your partners to rebuild the experience around them. You get active members rather than a bigger database, and a programme partners want to be part of.
Talk to usEvery stage of a medicine's life turns on decisions made out of sight: which trials recruit, which patients reach a diagnosis, who prescribes, and what happens when exclusivity ends. We map the journeys behind them with evidence clinical, medical, access and marketing teams all accept, so the plan is agreed once and the agencies you already have build against it. You get plans that act where it counts, budget that stops going where nothing changes, and better outcomes for the patients behind it.
Talk to usA busy store with an empty basket, or a checkout people leave at the last step, is a journey problem, not a people problem. We find where shoppers and buyers decide, and why, in the store, the app and the procurement portal alike, then give your teams and agencies the fixes in priority order. You get conversion you can point to, and a journey that works for the people on both sides of the counter.
Talk to usTechnology fails for many reasons, and one of the most common is that people never take it up. Sometimes the answer is in the product. Often the product is fixed, and the answer is in how it is introduced, sold, set up and supported. A mobile network touches lives at the shop counter, on the help line, in the connected home and on the bill, not only in the app. We find what stops people, then change what can be changed: the product, the rollout or the support around it. You get adoption, including from technology you cannot change.
Talk to usHuman first.
AI forward.
Uservox means the user's voice: the human, heard inside your business. Nobody decides alone. Every person sits inside systems of other people, places and technology, and those systems shape what they do as surely as any belief. The brain is complex. Artificial intelligence is complex. We understand both, we know how to use both, and we use them to make the complex simple, so people get the one thing every human wants: their needs met.
heard
We give the people you serve a voice inside your business: what they need, what they decide, what happens to them next. Everything else is shaped around that, never the other way round.
understood
Technology runs through how a business operates and how its customers connect with it. We know it well enough to design with it rather than around it, and to keep it a tool in service of people.
used with intent
Companies are unsure about AI. We are not. It learned everything it knows from people, so we read it the way we read people, by what it does rather than what it says. We know what it is worth and where it falls short, and we put it to work at a scale people alone cannot reach, with a person deciding what is true, what matters and what to do.
made simple
Simple means something you can use on Monday: one picture your whole team agrees on, a short list of what to change first, and evidence anyone can open. You should never need us in the room to read it.
Talk to us.
Tell us what you need from your customers. We will show you what they need first, and how giving them that gets you there.
hello@uservox.com
UK +44 (0)1935 676980
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