Week 7 - Solution Insight

This week we focused on thinking about the solution to the problem we defined. After reviewing studies on the psychological motivations that cause consumers to order products impulsively, we also began to investigate the existing solutions to deal with these biases.

We found that a main way to deal with it is to get the consumer to switch to a more calculated way of thinking - from system 1 (fast, impulsive, automatic) to system 2 (calculated, slow, analytical).

We found that a possible way to do this is to make people stop and reflect on their actions. We started to define our application as an algorithm that studies the user's purchasing pattern and displays an alert for him in real time with a recommendation: whether he is going to make a rational purchase or not. The very fact that the customer receives an alert that makes him stop and reflect before adding the product to the cart, may make him reconsider the purchase and hopefully prevent impulsive and irrational purchases.

The algorithm will include several parameters such as: rating of the user's past purchases, price, type of product, time of purchase, the way the user arrived at the site and common manipulations. Following the accuracy of the solution, we rewrote our scenario and made it more accurate. In addition, we divided the actions of the user into 4 stages and this helped us define more precisely what the user's action is and what our system will do as a result. It was a very significant week for us because we were able to start working on the solution, which was very difficult at first. In the meeting with Hadas, we talked about the practice of the application and we were asked to investigate how the notifications would actually work in a way that would not be annoying to the user. Next week we meet with mentors and are very excited to hear what they have to say.