Essays & letters
Stop calling it user error
When a customer does the wrong thing, the interface usually asked them to. On the phrase that lets product teams off the hook.
By Daniel Côté
Returnonbehavior — A magazine of customer behavior
(This issue)
The retention issue
Why customers stay, why they drift and what the first week of a product decides — studies, teardowns and field tests from teams who measured it.
(Cover story)
Why habits outlast campaigns
A launch email can buy a spike. Only a habit buys week twelve. A subscription team’s year of chasing reactivation, and what changed when they stopped.
[ Read the story ]Latest posts
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We publish careful stories about why customers click, buy, stay and leave — written by the people who run the experiments.
(About Returnonbehavior)
Return on behavior is what you earn by understanding a customer before you change a screen. We treat every story the same way: the evidence first, then the change.
[ Our story ](Sections)
Conversion
Landing pages, sign-up flows, checkouts and paywalls: where intent turns into action, and where it quietly leaks away.
[ Browse Conversion ]UX
Usability research, onboarding and interface design, judged by what people actually do on the screen rather than what they say.
[ Browse UX ]Pricing
Anchors, decoys, plans and billing: the psychology of how customers read a price and decide what something is worth.
[ Browse Pricing ]Retention
Habits, lifecycle messaging and churn: why customers come back in week two, and what makes them stop.
[ Browse Retention ]Analytics
Cohorts, funnels and experiments: reading product data honestly, including the numbers that flatter you.
[ Browse Analytics ](A Returnonbehavior series)
Each field test follows one team through one change, from the hypothesis to the numbers, including the parts that did not work.
[ Follow the series ] Field test 01
The checkout that asked for less
An online homeware shop removed four fields, one page and a forced account from its checkout. The first result looked like a failure.
Field test 02Onboarding that teaches one thing
A project-management tool replaced its eight-step product tour with a single task. Fewer people finished onboarding. More of them were still there a month later.
Field test 03The paywall that waited
A language-learning app moved its upgrade prompt from the first session to the first streak. Free-to-paid conversion fell for two weeks, then overtook the old flow.
Analytics
The metrics that flatter you
Sign-ups, page views and total users all go up and to the right. That is exactly why they are so dangerous to run a product on.
- Words
- Daniel Côté
Screen notes
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