The 10 Most-Watched Teardowns of 2024
Looking for inspiration? Here are my most popular teardowns of the year
🙋♀️ Kristen here. This is a collection of the most-watched teardowns from 2024. In each teardown, I unravel what makes popular products successful (or not). My goal: to help you understand user psychology and get a playbook for powerful design patterns to get great results, too.
I hope you enjoy this collection (spoiler: it's been an amazing year for product insights!). If you'd like to chat about behavior change, product design, or pricing, please reach out! Our team of behavioral designers at Irrational Labs is always on the hunt for fun partners and problems:
kristen@irrationallabs.com 📧
P.S Smash that subscribe button to keep getting these.
10 most-watched teardowns of 2024
Ready for the best behavioral insights of 2024? Each teardown below comes with its core takeaways. Think: features that actually drive engagement, UX decisions that kill conversion, and the occasional "what were they thinking?" moment. No sugarcoating—just real product psychology you can use:
Google Gemini: How not to do your pricing page 👉 The road to conversion may be paved with good intentions—but this one still leads to hell
What you'll learn:
How to frame discounts to be optimally effective
Small ways to improve your pricing page
How to design an upsell/cross-sell message to help increase conversion
Product lessons from 6 top consumer apps 👉 A deep dive into what makes today's most successful apps stick
What you'll learn:
Headspace and Duolingo’s notification strategy
How Slack and MyFitnessPal drive to user action/engagement
Best practices and psychology for streaks from top apps
Pro tips to improve your onboarding from proven patterns
Figma's price hike: How to (and how not to) raise your prices 👉 The hits and misses from tech's latest pricing shakeup
What you'll learn:
How to write an email communication to tell users you’re increasing price
What to emphasize (and not emphasize) in communicating the change
What to do to increase user trust, even during the price hike
How to do research on yourself 👉 Want better self-insight? Here's an easy way to start.
What you'll learn:
How to set up effective self-tracking systems
What questions to ask yourself for meaningful insights
Ways to maintain consistent monitoring without burnout
Breaking down BNPL: Insights from Klarna's checkout strategy 👉 How can products offer more choice without sacrificing simplicity?
What you'll learn:
How BNPL works and why it’s the killer app
A few key words that separate each app (and how to apply this insight)
How to balance friction with immediate benefits to increase conversion
ClickUp: The everything app for work? 👉 Products that try to be everything to everyone, risk being nothing to no one
What you'll learn:
When to hold your user's hand during onboarding (and when not to)
How to balance features for power users vs. the broader audience
A classic mistake junior marketers make when writing a positioning tagline
Barron Ernst breaks down (HBO) Max's pricing page 👉 Insights on pricing, conversion, choice architecture, and retention from a streaming giant
What you'll learn:
When to offer product bundles and when not to
The importance of multiple CTAs strategically placed
Design hacks for when you have to give the user a lot of choices
Advance directives: When design is literally life or death 👉 Death is certain, but planning isn't
What you'll learn:
Multiple examples of defaults that change user behavior
Deep dive on incentives (great lesson in ethics!)
How your design choices can make a life-or-death difference
Indeed: How small UX decisions contribute to hiring misses 👉 When it comes to decision-making, simplicity wins
What you'll learn:
Deep dive on the psychology of choice, with real examples
Actionable tips on how to reduce cognitive load in your users' decision-making
When to make something harder and deep dive on self selection
Radish Oakland: How does a behavioral scientist choose to live? 👉 Happiness is a question of design
What you'll learn:
What the research tells us is the number one factor in happiness
What you can do today to improve your happiness
What it's like to co-live with "19 Adults and 4 Babies" (spoiler: way better than you think)
That's it for this best-of edition! You can browse the entire archive here. Looking forward to bringing you more deep dives into product psychology in 2025.
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Questions about your product? Email kristen@irrationallabs.com.
Want to increase conversion, retention, engagement? Reach out to Irrational Labs.
We design products that change behavior, using behavioral science. Check out our case studies to see it in action.