Susan M. Weinschenk's Blog, page 8

100 More Things #123: PEOPLE MAKE DECISIONS BASED ON SPECIFIC MEMORIES

Let’s return to Jim, who was looking into buying a new car. He’s debating whether to get a small budget sedan or a larger sport utility vehicle with lots of bells and whistles. Psychologists have had two competing theories—the prototype theory and the exemplar theory—about how people think about decisions like these.

The prototype theory states that people have memories of different experiences, and that they create a general overview of those memories for a specific category. For example, if Jim thinks about deciding to buy the small sedan, he’ll make that decision based on a general category overview of “small sedan.”

The exemplar theory starts with the same idea—people have memories of different experiences—but it states that decisions are based not on a conglomerate overview category of memories, but on one or two specific memories. For example, if Jim thinks about deciding to buy the small sedan, he’ll make that decision based on his memory of the road trip he took with his friend Linda in her small sedan and his mom’s small sedan from when he was in high school.

The competing prototype and exemplar theories have been around for over 30 years. It was very difficult to devise an experiment to figure out which model was true until fMRI brain scanning became available. Michael Mack (2013) used fMRI brain scanning to test the two theories.

If the prototype theory is true, then the fMRI imaging would show activity patterns in some parts of the brain. If the exemplar theory is true, then the activity should show in different areas.

And The Answer Is…

A majority of the participants in the study showed brain patterns during decision tasks that matched the pattern you would expect if people were making decisions based on the exemplar model. (For any of you who get into the details of brain science, Mack found that the posterior parietal cortex was the critical brain area for these memory/decision tasks.

His theory is that the parietal cortex plays a critical role in encoding and retrieving exemplar memories for decisions.)

What does this mean for design? When people are making a decision, they’re using specific memories to think about their decision. They’re basing their decision not on generalities, but on specifics. If you know about their specific memories, you’ll be better able to predict and even influence their decision.

For example, if you know that the only sedan your potential customer owned in the past was a gray Honda Accord, then you can assume that when he thinks about a sedan he’s thinking about that gray Honda Accord. If he liked the gray Honda Accord, then you can talk to him about the new Honda Accords, or show him cars that are like them. You could show him photos of the new gray Honda Accord. If you know that he didn’t like the gray Honda Accord, and that he went on a fishing trip he really enjoyed with his friend in his friend’s blue sport utility vehicle, then you can show him photos of a blue sport utility vehicle. His decision will be influenced by these specific memories.

You might be thinking: “Wait, I’m designing a website. I don’t know what every visitor’s memories of cars are. How can I possibly build that into the website”?

I admit that this takes a different way of thinking about design, and it requires some interesting changes. But imagine for a moment you’ve designed an interactive experience where a person comes to your car-buying website and is prompted to create a “past car parade.” You ask him to talk about his first car. (Or if you don’t want to go as futuristic as talking about his first car, then you can ask him questions that he answers just by choosing fields on the screen). Based on his answers, you bring up a picture of that car. You can also find out if he liked the car, and if he has good or bad memories of it. Then you go to the next car he owned or drove or spent time in. You keep going until there is a picture on his screen of all the cars he has had “relationships” with and liked.

If your customer is young and hasn’t previously owned a car, then the car parade could include cars in which he had adventures, perhaps a parent’s car or a friend’s car.

Next, you could take him through a series of choices about the next car adventure he wants. You can start with photos from the car parade and, based on these photos and questions, you can predict, show, and help him refine the car he wants.

By doing this you’re triggering specific memories and using those memories to guide him to a decision.

Takeaways

In your design flow, ask people about specific memories and experiences with products or services in the past that match the products or services they’re deciding on.Provide a summary of these experiences to trigger specific memories while they’re making a decision.

100 More Things #122: PEOPLE MAKE DECISIONS AT CERTAIN CALENDAR EVENTS

You may want to pay attention to the month, day, and year that you advertise, promote, or recommend certain services or products. There are certain times in the calendar year, as well as certain years in life, when people are more disposed to making decisions and life changes. If you time your messages, events, and promotions, it’s likely that they’ll resonate more and that people will be more likely to make a change or purchase based on them.

Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, and Jason Riis (2014) conducted a series of studies showing that people make commitments to personal improvement and change (dieting, gym memberships, eating healthier) on the first day or week of the new year, and on the first weekday after a federal holiday. (This research was conducted in the United States.) They call this the Fresh Start effect. Their theory is that these events give people a break from their usual routine and help them see a bigger picture of their lives, prompting a fresh start mindset.

In addition, Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield (2014) have a theory that big life decisions occur during milestone years, typically those ending in 9, such as 29, 39, 49, and 59.

Hershfield’s theory is that it is at these times that people ask themselves reflecting questions, like “What am I doing with my life?” and that causes them to take action on big life decisions.

Alter and Hershfield analyzed data from an extramarital affairs dating site (ashleymadison.com), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data on suicide, and a racing site (athlinks.com).

Of the 8 million men at the affair website looking for a date, more than 950,000 of the men were 29, 39, 49, or 59. That is 18 percent more than expected by chance. (Women showed the same trend, but it wasn’t as strong as men.)

Of 500 marathon runners at the athlinks.com site (aged 25 to 64), 74 percent were in a year ending in 9.

And the suicide data from the CDC from 2000 to 2011 show that the suicide rate for both men and women between the ages of 25 and 64, who were in a 9 year was statistically significantly higher than other years.

Takeaways

If you are launching and offering, schedule the launch to coincide with the first week of the New Year, or the first weekday after a national holiday.Capture customer birthdates and then time your products and promotions to the people whose ages end with a 9.

100 More Things #121: THE SURPRISING EFFECTS OF STRESS ON DECISION-MAKING

Josephine is the director of marketing at a genetics company. She loves her job, but it’s very stressful. She’s in charge of a new product launch, and the deadline is approaching. One of her best team members had to take a leave of absence for a medical emergency and she doesn’t know when he’ll be back. Things aren’t likely to get less stressful for several months.

Josephine’s husband, Alex, has a dilemma. His parents have been in poor health, and they’ve taken a turn for the worse. They live 500 miles away. Alex doesn’t think his parents can live on their own in their house anymore, and there isn’t a nursing home near where they live now. On the other hand, he doesn’t think they’ll want to move to the city where he and Josephine live, and neither he nor his parents can afford to pay for a nursing home in the city. He’s the only child, so there’s really no one else who can help out with his parents, or with these decisions about what to do.

Alex is an IT manager at a midsize financial investment firm. Sometimes his job is stressful, but right now the situation with his parents is even more stressful than his work.

What’s likely to happen, then, if Alex brings up the idea about either moving to the small, rural village where his parents live, or finding another place to move where they can all live together in a larger apartment or house? Any of these changes will likely affect both his and Josephine’s careers, as well as their living situation.

Alex feels that he can’t wait much longer to have this conversation with Josephine, but she is under so much stress at work right now, he can’t imagine asking her to make these decisions. He doesn’t think she’ll be able to come up with any good ideas given her current frame of mind and stress level, and he’s reluctant to add to her troubles.

What should Alex do? Should he wait until Josephine’s work stress goes down to have this conversation and make any big decisions? What effects will stress have on both Alex and Josephine’s decision-making?

The Complicated Relationship Between Stress And Decision-Making

Mara Mather and Nichole Lighthall (2012) reviewed the research on stress and decision making. They defined stress as:

“Experiences that are emotionally or physiologically challenging” that “elicit sympathetic nervous system responses and stimulate the release of stress hormones (e.g., cortisol in humans) that mobilize the body’s resources to respond to a challenge.”

Physical stress and psychological stress affect both the dopamine reward pathways in the brain and the feedback loops that affect the assessment of risk and reward.

When making a decision under stress, people remember and apply what they’ve learned and experienced in the past that ended with a positive outcome. And they tend to ignore what they’ve learned or experienced in the past that ended with a negative outcome.

This means that if either Josephine or Alex have faced similar family-related and work-related stresses before and there was a positive outcome (they made some life or career changes, but it ended up being a good thing), they will remember those experiences now, while under stress, and those past, positive-ending experiences will influence the decisions they make now.

If they had similar experiences in the past that had a negative outcome (the life or career changes they made didn’t advance them, but were negative), they will tend to forget about those experiences and those experiences will not influence the decisions they make now.

The Interesting Gender Twist

But there’s another consideration to take into account. It turns out that men and women react differently when a decision involves immediate risk-taking.

If people have to make an immediate decision while under stress, one that involves choosing between a safe option (less potential gain, but less risk of loss) or a riskier option (higher potential gain, but also higher potential loss), men tend to go for the riskier option and women tend to go for the safer option.

Figure 21.1 shows a flowchart of all these decisions.

So what does this mean for Josephine and Alex? If Alex brings it up now, and suggests that they move and look for new jobs right away, Josephine (being under a lot of stress) is likely to perceive this as an immediate risk and therefore go for whatever is the safer option for her. As mentioned earlier, they will both tend to remember similar decisions where things worked out well, but if Alex pushes for an immediate decision, Josephine will tend to go to safer options and Alex to riskier options.

Taking all of this into account, it would be best if Alex did one of two things:
Wait till Josephine is under less stress.
orTalk about it now, but not with the idea of having to make an immediate decision.

FIGURE 21.1 Decision-making under stress.

Implications Of Stress For Design

So that was the summary of what Alex should do about talking to Josephine, but what are the implications of these stress effects for design?

Let’s take an example:

You have a career website and app that help people take short and long-term steps to a better career. You provide a comprehensive set of services, including advice, job searching, and help with preparing resumes and work portfolios.

People can use just a few of your services, or they can purchase a package of many services.

Some people who sign up for your services are men, and some are women. Some are under stress ( just lost my job!) and others are not (wondering if this might be a good time to look around for a new position). If you knew their gender and their overall stress level, you’d be better able to advise them.

If people are under stress when they purchase your services, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If they’ve had any kind of similar positive experience, then the current stress might even help them make a decision to move forward.

In this situation, it would be useful for you to add in a customization part of your package. If you can get people to fill out a survey about stress level, and provide some data about their gender and past experiences with career moves, you could then create some algorithms that would help you help them.

For example, if you have a man using your app and he’s currently under a fair amount of stress, but has had some positive experiences with career changes, then he’ll be open to ideas for change. If, on the other hand, he hasn’t had positive career change experiences, and he’s under stress, then he’ll be less likely to be open to big changes right now.

Takeaways

When people are under stress as they make a decision, remind them of previous similar experiences they’ve had. When they recall similar experiences, they’ll tend to remember only the positive experiences, and those positive experiences will make them more willing to make a decision.When your target audience is primarily women who are under stress, provide them with options that pose low risk. They’re unlikely to choose an option that has high risk.When your target audience is primarily men who are under stress, provide them with options that have a high potential gain, even if those options include a high potential risk.When you’re designing for a target audience of both men and women, provide options that are both safe and risky.When possible, try to determine the gender, past experience, and level of stress of your target audience, so you can customize your design accordingly.

100 More Things #120: CHUNKING AND MOTOR MOVEMENT CAN SPEED UP THE CONFIDENCE DECISION LOOP

Since the research shows that if it takes a long time to make a decision then people might not make the decision at all, is it possible to change the perception of certainty or the elapsed time to get people out of this loop and encourage a decision? The answer is yes, and here’s how to do it.

Since the decision network is looking at two things, elapsed time and amount of evidence, to decide about certainty, you can speed things up if you encourage the impression that a lot of evidence has accumulated.

Let’s say Jim is trying to decide what car to buy. Jim is coming to the car website and looking at some information about particular car models. What could you do to make him feel that he has accumulated a lot of evidence? You could show him a lot of information— you could force him to view a series of pages about the cars. Then he could see that he has accumulated a lot of evidence. But that might take a lot of time, and if too much time elapses, then the decision network will lose certainty.

Little Chunks And Lots Of Feedback

Instead of providing a lot of information, the better tactic is to break the information into small chunks. Show the gas mileage as one independent chunk. Show the safety rating as one independent chunk. A lot of small chunks of information will give the decision network the impression that it has accumulated substantial evidence. Next, you can show the actual accumulation of those facts. Give feedback on the screen of all the information that has been accessed. You could display a running list of all the attributes and/or topics Jim has looked at, or all the categories of information he has investigated.

Jim would now be looking at a screen that shows that he has already looked at car mileage, safety features, options, and the loan calculator. You don’t have to show the data itself, just a checklist of the types of information he has accumulated.
The decision network will see the summary of all the information and perceive that a lot of evidence has been accumulated in a short amount of time. Remember, the amount of time that has elapsed is critical. If all that evidence has accumulated quickly, then the network in the brain will think that: a) the decision must not be that difficult, and b) plenty of evidence is there for certainty. This in turn will cause a feeling of certainty, and it’s that feeling of certainty that will trigger the actual decision to act.

Get People To Take A Physical Action

It’s not just one part of the brain that decides. There are portions of the brain that process information (for example, visual information or auditory information) and any of these areas can trigger the “I’m certain” idea, which in turn will trigger the decision to act. That decision to act will depend on what the action is, for example, reaching for something or clicking the mouse.

The motor (movement) parts of the brain are more involved in decision-making than many people realize. You can increase the chance of a “go” trigger if you get people to take a physical action. They may not be ready yet for the actual “go” trigger, but if you can get them to take a series of smaller actions (click here to see the safety ratings, click here to choose the vehicle color), you increase the chance that they will more quickly take the final, larger “go” action.

Takeaways

You can encourage the decision trigger to fire by organizing information into small chunks.Provide visual feedback of evidence as it accumulates—for example, if someone is researching at a website, you can list all the pages, screens, or datapoints that have been considered during a session. This creates a feeling that evidence has accumulated quickly.Design the flow of tasks and screens so that your audience takes a series of small physical actions. The faster you get people to physically respond, the faster they reach the “go” trigger moment for the final decision.

100 More Things #119: CONFIDENCE TRIGGERS DECISIONS

Why do people seem to make some decisions slowly and but other decisions are made quickly? You might speculate that if the decision is something small and insignificant, like what to order at a restaurant, they will make the decision quickly, but if they’re deciding something large and important, like whether or not to move to a new apartment or a new city it will take a long time to decide. It seems natural to assume that important decisions would take more time.

But in reality, the importance of the decision isn’t what causes people to make up their minds quickly or slowly.

How about individual personality? Some people are spontaneous and others take a long time to decide everything. Although there are differences in personality (and brain chemistry) that cause some people to be more impulsive than others, even impulsive people sometimes take a long time to make decisions, and cautious people occasionally decide on things quickly. So it’s not individual personality that predicts the time required to make a decision.

The best predictor of when people are going to make a decision is how confident they are that they are making the best decision. And what’s interesting is what affects that confidence.

The Effects Of Evidence And Elapsed Time

People make decisions when they’re confident that they’re making the “right decision.” If they’re not confident about their incoming information, then they won’t make that “go” decision.

If people make decisions when they reach a certain level of certainty, the next question is what brings them to that moment of certainty? If your design is supposed to encourage people to make a decision (click on the Register button, download a file, press the Buy button), is there anything you can do to help people feel more certain and therefore speed up the decision-making process?

Research by Roozbeh Kiani (2014) investigated the relationship between certainty, elapsed time, and the amount of evidence.

When people are considering a decision, their brain networks (largely unconsciously) are not only analyzing all the factors and assessing the pros and cons of the decision, but also assessing how certain they are of making a decision at that point and how certain they are that the decision they’re making is the best one. How do these decision-making brain networks decide if a person is certain? They use the person’s past accuracy on decisions like this, and add to that information all the evidence, both pro and con, that the person has been accumulating for this particular decision.

Kiani specifically studied the effect that elapsed time has on the feeling of certainty. As time drags on and a person hasn’t made a decision, the parts of the brain that are involved in decision-making start to wonder if the person is taking a long time because the decision is difficult. The more time it takes, the more the network decides this must be a difficult decision. And if the decision is difficult, then the decision network becomes less certain that the person will make a good decision and that the person is ready to decide. Which of course puts the person into a loop (the longer it takes, the more difficult it must be and the less certain the person is, and therefore it takes more time).

Takeaways

People will not make a decision until and unless they feel confident of the decision.This confidence factor is true for any type of decision, large or small.

100 More Things #118: WHEN FACED WITH A COMPLEX DECISION, PEOPLE FOLLOW THEIR FEELINGS

You’ve probably had the experience of having to make a complex decision and getting advice like, “Don’t let your feelings get in the way of making a good decision.” Many people think the best way to make a complex decision is to rule out feelings.

As a designer, this idea that feelings get in the way of good decision-making, and that people should base their decisions on solid, factual evidence, is likely to influence how, when, and how much information you build into your designs.

Let’s say you work for a car company and your team is designing part of the website where potential customers can decide which vehicle they’re interested in purchasing.

Or maybe you work for a company that sells software apps for email marketing, and you’re designing the web page where people decide if they need the free package, the pro package, or the enterprise package.

Or maybe you work for an online university and you’re designing an app that lets students sign up for courses for next semester.
All of these examples require people to make fairly complex decisions. Conventional wisdom holds that they’ll probably base them on deliberation, rather than feelings.

If you follow that logic, then you, as the designer, would give your audience plenty of information about each choice, and make sure they have lots of time so they can make the best, and most deliberate, decision.

But that might be the opposite of what you should do if you want to help them make the best decision.

Logic Or Feelings?

Joseph Mikels (2011) conducted a series of studies to find out whether people make better complex decisions if they a) use logic, have comprehensive information, and carefully deliberate, or b) base the decisions on their feelings, with less information and less deliberation.

In his first study, he presented participants with attributes (things like gas mileage, safety features, and so on) for four hypothetical car options. Their task was to decide which was the best car. Before showing the car attributes and car options, Mikels told some of the participants to pay attention to, and base their decision on, which car was best, by focusing on the attributes they were about to see. He told other participants to pay attention to and base their decision on their feelings.

He reinforced the feelings versus information split by asking the participants in both groups different questions in the middle of the task. After showing an attribute about a car, the people with the feelings instructions were asked to rate how they felt about the particular car (they rated their feelings on a scale from 1 to 7, with 1 being very negative and 7 being very positive). The people in the information group were not asked about their feelings. Instead, they were asked how well they remembered the particular car (they too used a scale from 1 to 7, with 1 being “I don’t remember anything about the car” and 7 being “I remember the car very well”).

Half of the people went through this experiment for four cars and four attributes (simple condition) and half went through for four cars and 12 attributes (complex condition).

After they had viewed all the attributes and cars, Mikels asked each participant to choose which car was best, based on the attributes.

Lastly, he had each participant rate the importance of each attribute on a 7-point scale, with 1 being that the attribute—gas mileage, for example—was not important and 7 being that it was very important.

What were the results?

For this experiment, there was an actual best car: of the four cars, one had 75 percent positive attributes, two had 50 percent positive attributes, and one had 25 percent positive attributes—which means there was a “right” answer (that is, the car with 75 percent positive attributes).

For the simple condition (four cars, four attributes), there was no significant difference between the people who were given instructions to focus on feelings and the people who were told to focus on information. Both the feelings people and the information people performed similarly when picking the best car.

But there were significant differences for the complex condition (four cars, 12 attributes). Sixty-eight percent of the people in the feelings group picked the best car option, while only 26 percent of the information group chose the best car option. Figure 18.1 shows the data.

FIGURE 18.1 Feelings group versus information group results for simple and complex conditions.

Satisfaction And Confidence

Mikels ran the experiment again, but this time he had participants make only the complex decisions, and there was no objective “right” answer. Each of the four cars had half positive and half negative attributes. Instead of an objective right answer, he used importance ratings from each participant to determine the best choice for them.
In addition, he asked participants to rate how satisfied they were with their car choice (on a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 was not at all satisfied and 7 was extremely satisfied). He also asked how confident they were that they had made the best choice (on a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 was not confident and 7 was highly confident).

Again, the people in the feelings group made better car option decisions (based on their own importance ratings of attributes) than the people in the information group.

Look at Figure 18.2. The feelings group not only made better decisions, but also were more satisfied with their choice and more confident that they’d made the right choice.

FIGURE 18.2 Satisfaction and confidence for the feelings and information groups.

What About Giving Time For Deliberation?

We’re not quite done with Mikels. In his third experiment in this series, he wanted to see if giving people time to deliberate made a difference. So he redid the experiment with the complex task only, but this time he assigned half of the participants to a “conscious deliberation” group and half to a “distraction” group. He told the conscious deliberation participants to think about the decision for 3 minutes before choosing a car. He gave the distraction participants a non-related working memory task for 3 minutes. (Look at random numbers that are shown for 2 seconds and respond if the number is the same number that appeared two trials before.) At the end of 3 minutes, both groups were told to choose one of the four cars as the best for them.

So what happened? Figure 18.3 shows the results.

FIGURE 18.3 The results of distraction and deliberation.

The people in the information group who were given 3 minutes to deliberate did as well as the people in the feelings group who did not deliberate. Taking time to think about a decision helped people when they were making a complex decision and had evaluated the information.The people in the information group who were distracted by an unrelated task did worse than those who just quietly deliberated.Doing an unrelated task didn’t make a difference to the feelings group. They did as well as the information group. But when the feelings group was asked to deliberate on the decision, their accuracy plummeted.

Decisions For Designers About Information Vs. Feelings

At this point you might be saying, “Wait, I can’t do anything about this. I can’t get inside someone’s head when they’re making a decision.” True, but if you make design decisions about what and/or when information is provided, then your design can either help or hinder people’s ability to make better decisions.

Here’s what I draw from Mikels’s research: If people have to make a complex decision, then you have two choices as a designer:

Give them just the critical information up front, tell them to focus on the information, and don’t ask them to decide right away. Tell them to take a few minutes before they decide.

or

Give them just the critical information up front, tell them to focus on how they feel rather than analyze the data, and then ask them to decide right away.

If you think that people will be using feelings to decide, then you definitely want to minimize the amount of time between when they have all the feeling information and when they decide.

The Big Mistake That Most People Make

Jim goes to a car website. He’s trying to decide whether he should buy a new car now and, if so, whether it should be the XYZ brand, which model is the right one for him and his family, and whether he can afford it—a set of complex decisions.

When he gets to the website there’s a picture of the car and it looks great (feeling). He watches the video of the family going on an adventurous vacation in the new car (feeling). He looks at the ratings for fuel efficiency and safety (information). He compares the different models through photos and data (information). Now he’s ready to make a decision based on just the minimum amount of information he needed, and lots of feelings about which model is right for him and whether this car is right for him at this time.

So this is the golden moment. He’s made the decision to buy and has chosen the model. This complex decision has been based mainly on feelings, and he hasn’t had time to deliberate (which you now know through Mikels’s work will only result in him making a bad decision). If you’re the designer of this experience, then so far you’ve done a great job getting the person to make the best decision.

What you need to do next is get him to commit to the decision immediately. You should present a short form and get him to mark his decision.
You could show a series of statements and have him choose the one that fits his decision:

“Yes, I’ve decided. The X model is the best car for me.”“I like the X model, but this isn’t the right time for me to buy a car. I might buy at some point in the future.”“Thanks, but this is not the right car for me.”

Get him to make a choice and then get him out of there. When he makes the choice, take him to a page that gives him the next step and tells him an email is on its way with a list of the closest dealers. The idea is to get him off the information-laden page before he starts looking at more information and deliberating.

If you’re like most designers, you don’t do this. Instead, you miss the golden moment. You don’t ask him to decide and you don’t get him off the page. Instead, you think, “We gave him all that engagement/emotion information and a few of the specs, now let’s give him all the data so he’ll see that this is the right decision.” You start giving him detailed specs to review (wheel base, turning radius, 5-year maintenance and repair costs, ownership cost ratings). You cause a “deliberation” phase, and by doing so you significantly decrease the chances that he’ll make the best decision.

Note
Here’s an important caveat. Mikels (2013) repeated his experiments a few years after the first series. He ran similar experiments with people whose average age was over 70. He found that older people are much more likely to use their intuition and feelings for decisions; in fact, they disregard the rational information too much. As a result, their feelings decisions about complex issues were often not the best choice.

Takeaways

When you’re presenting information to people under age 70 who have to make a complex decision, encourage them to use their feelings. In the middle of the process, ask them how they feel about the options.Even when you instruct people to use their feelings, you can’t guarantee that they’re using their feelings, so it’s best to design the flow of information this way: a) Provide the minimum amount of information necessary, b) ask for the decision, and c) once they decide, stop providing them with information.When you’re presenting information to people over age 70 who have to make a complex decision, don’t encourage them to use their feelings.When you’re presenting information to people who have to make a simple decision, give them the minimum amount of information necessary to make the decision and don’t worry about instructions to use feelings, or preventing deliberation.

100 More Things #117: PEOPLE CHOOSE WHAT’S BRIGHTEST

Let’s say you’re the designer for an online grocery store. You’re designing the product pages for a website or phone app. The people who will be using these product pages shop at the online store regularly. They’re familiar with the products, and they have preferences for particular products and particular brands.

There could be a lot of questions about how preferences might influence decisions, for example:

Are preferences more of an influence than the visual design of the page?Is there anything you could do to make them choose one product over another?If you show pictures of the packaging (for example, a picture of the box of crackers), could the manufacturer do anything to increase the likelihood that someone would pick their product over another brand?Which is strongest: the individual’s previous brand preference or something about the page or package design?Can you override an established preference based on visual design?We explore some of these questions below.

Exogenous Vs. Endogenous Influencers

Influences that are outside of people are called “exogenous (external) influencers”; influences from their preferences are called “endogenous (internal) influencers.”

The “How People See” chapter described research showing that people use visual complexity and color when they are evaluating visual appeal, and that they make those judgments in less than one-half of a second (500 ms). But what happens when they’re choosing from several products?

Milica Milosavljevic (2011 and 2012) searched for the answers to these questions in a series of studies. She had people rate their preferences for different snack food products, and then showed the products to them quickly on a screen. The participants had to decide which product they wanted to purchase.

Here’s what Milosavljevic discovered:

The visual brightness of the product packaging (called visual saliency in the research) was more important in the choice than the participants’ preferences.If Milosavljevic slowed down the responses, either by asking participants to be confident before choosing, or having them choose with their hands rather than their eye gaze, then the visual saliency effect—choosing based on the brightness of the product package—was even greater.

So the endogenous factor of product preference can actually be overridden by an exogenous factor of making one product appear brighter than others on the screen.

The manufacturer could create a brighter package that would then translate into the image at the website. Or the designer could influence choice by making the product image brighter, or using additional visual attributes (boxes, borders, highlighting) to increase the visual saliency of a particular product.

Note
The minimal time to make a product decision is around 313 ms. That’s one-third of a second—even faster than the time to decide if a website is visually appealing.

Takeaways

When you want people to choose among different products or alternatives, make the product you want them to choose more “visually salient” than the others.Use the visual salience/brightness technique when you want to overcome the target audience’s previous preference.Use the visual salience/brightness technique when you want your target audience to choose a product that is unfamiliar to them.

100 More Things #116: PEOPLE MAKE DECISIONS WITH SYSTEM 1 (TRUTHINESS) THINKING

Stephen Colbert, an American political satirist, coined the term “truthiness” during the pilot of his program The Colbert Report.

Colbert described truthiness as knowing in your gut that something is true as opposed to knowing through facts, logic, or evidence. The word “truthiness” caught on— you can now find entries for it in online reference sites, like this one at Dictionary.com:

The quality of seeming to be true according to one’s intuition, opinion, or perception without regard to logic, factual evidence, or the like.

Research shows that people do believe information that they feel is correct “from their gut,” and that truthiness is the way many people remember events and make decisions.

If I asked you “Is China a country in Asia?,” you would probably be able to quickly and correctly answer this question by relying on your knowledge and your memory. But there are other similar questions I could ask you that you wouldn’t be as sure about. For example, if I asked you “Is there a Gutenberg printing press museum in Mainz, Germany?,” you might only be able to answer correctly if you’d read books about Gutenberg, or traveled to Mainz. (The answer, by the way, is yes.)

Most of the time people are in System 1 thinking mode. System 1 is intuitive and quick. System 1 relies on Colbert’s “truthiness.” This means that you may try to answer the question about the Gutenberg museum based on gut alone.

Sometimes, and maybe even a lot of the time, these intuitive truthiness decisions can be correct. But sometimes they’re not. And these gut decisions are easily influenced.

Repetition Makes People Trust Their Gut

What influences people when they’re deciding whether or not something is true? Research on this question goes back at least as far as the late 1970s. In 1977, Lynn Hasher’s research showed that if people hear false information enough times, then they come to believe that it’s true. The theory is that repetition makes the information seem easier to recall. This feeling of easy cognitive processing combines with the feeling of familiarity. System 1 senses when something is familiar and easy to understand and then decides that it’s trustworthy and true.

Photo + Information = Truthiness

You probably already know that combining a photo with text—for example, showing a picture with a recipe—provides context and makes textual information easy to understand. But you may not realize that a photo can also increase people’s tendency to believe information, even when it’s not true.

Steven Frenda (2013) showed photos with news clips for political events that had occurred over the previous ten years. Some of the photos and news clips were real, and some had been altered so that they looked real, but described events that had not happened.

For example, one fake story included a photo of President Obama shaking hands with former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with this text:

“April 20, 2009: President Obama, greeting heads of state at a United Nations conference, shakes the hand of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. White House aides say the encounter was unplanned and the handshake was a formality.”

Another fake story included a picture of President George W. Bush at the wheel of a pickup truck with Roger Clemens, a well known baseball player, with this text:

“September 1, 2005: As parts of New Orleans lie underwater in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush entertains Houston Astros pitcher Roger Clemens at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.”

After participants viewed each photo and news clip they chose from these four options:

I remember seeing this.I don’t remember seeing it, but I remember it happening.I don’t remember it.I have a different memory of how it happened.

They could also respond to the following free-form questions:

How did you feel about [this event] at the time?Looking back, how do you feel about it today?

Frenda tested 2,650 participants. At the beginning of the study, participants saw three true events. This was to see how much people remembered these types of events at all. Most of the participants (82 percent) chose either “I remember seeing it” or “I remember it happening” for each of the true events. And almost everyone (98 percent) remembered seeing at least two of the three events.

Then the participants viewed one of five fake events and photos. Half of the 2,650 participants reported that they remembered the false event, and of those that reported remembering the event, half of those (or 27 percent of the total participants) said that they not only remembered the event, but also remembered seeing it on the news at the time. Only 6 percent of the participants said that they remembered it differently. The rest (44 percent) said that they didn’t remember the event.

Some participants even commented about their reaction to the event when it occurred. For example, for one of the fake photos about an event during Hillary Clinton’s campaigning for the Democratic nomination in 2008, one participant wrote in the freeform question area:

“I thought it was a desparate [sic] move and it solidified my disgust with Mrs. Clinton as a candidate.”

Note
In a second study, the researchers found that political affiliation affected false memories. Liberals tended to think that false reports that made conservatives look bad were true, and conservatives tended to think that false reports that made liberals look bad were true.

I’m not advocating that you use doctored photos and fake information to falsely affect people’s memories. In fact, knowing about this research means that you have to make sure that false photos and information aren’t intentionally or accidentally communicated. It’s all too easy for false information to end up online and then be repeated everywhere, combining the photo/information effect with the repetition effect! You may want to fact check websites and other information products to make sure you’re not adding to this problem.

The influence of photos on the decision of truthiness holds even when evaluating factual information. Erin Newman (2015) paired photos with the statement “Macadamia nuts are in the same evolutionary family as peaches.” Sometimes the photo would be related to the text, for example, a photo of a bowl containing macadamia nuts. Sometimes the photo would have nothing to do with the topic, and sometimes there was no photo at all.

If there was a related photo, then people were more likely to rate the statement as true.

Note
Newman found that the truthiness effect could last a long time, with people believing the information for days, months, or longer if there was a related photo.

Newman’s hypothesis was that a photo speeds up processing and decision-making and adds to the feeling of easy cognitive processing and familiarity.

Here’s the set of equations:

Photo = easy to understand

and

Easy to understand = familiar

so

Familiar = true

People aren’t aware of this decision-making. It happens unconsciously.

Takeaways

When you want people to believe information, repeat it often.Using a related photo next to text increases the believability of information.When you use photos to augment information, make sure the photos are accurate.

100 More Things #115: PEOPLE ACT BASED ON OBJECTS

In the 1970s and 1980s Xerox Parc was a center for research on human behavior that impacts technology design. One of the research questions was how do people behave in physical environments, and how should that impact the design of computer technology? Xerox Parc researchers brought children into a room with toys and observed their play and interaction with the toys. One thing they noted was that the children would focus on a toy, then go over to it and take an action with it (move it, play with it, give it to another child, throw it around…). The researchers noticed that people (children and adults) tend to focus on an object and then take the action. The sequence is: object first, then action.

Up to that point in time a lot of computer interactions involved choosing an action first (I want to edit a word processing document) and then choosing the object (this is the file I want to work on). Part of the outcome of the Xerox Parc research was to change that order of events and have people choose the object first (a particular document) and then take an action on it (copy, open, edit, print).

NOTE:
When the researchers observed children they noticed that if the object was very large and couldn’t be picked up (a very large block for example), the children would push and drag it to a different location, rather than picking it up. They called this “drag and drop” and it was the conceptual idea behind what later became mouse interactions on computers.

Some of the most important decisions that you make as a designer have to do with what is called the “conceptual model” of the design. These include decisions you make about what the objects are that people will be interacting with, what to call those objects, what actions can be taken on the objects, and how you convey the information and task architecture to the user. Keep in mind, people will focus on objects first.

Takeaways

To make sure that what you are designing is intuitive to use, decide carefully (and hopefully based on research with your target audience) what the major objects are that people will be interacting with when they use your design.Design the product so that it is easy for people to first choose an object, and then to take action on that object.

100 More Things #114: MUSIC EVOKES MEMORIES AND MOODS

We’ve all had the experience of hearing a song and being transported in memory to some time in the past.

Research on music and memory shows that certain songs (or even words to a song) stimulate neuron firings of certain memory traces. Music activates more areas in the brain than any other sensory stimulus.

The effect is so strong that it’s now a therapy for people with dementia. When music from their past is played to them, they not only enjoy it, but it also stimulates lucidity and memories.

Note
For more information on music, memories, and dementia, watch this clip from the documentary Alive Inside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=376&v=fyZQf0p73QM

Note
Elizabeth Margulis (2013), director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, showed that the emotional parts of the brain are more active when people listen to familiar music, even if they don’t like it.

Music And Mood

Listening to music can change people’s mood, sometimes in a matter of seconds. Adding music to a video, ad, movie, or TV program can change the emotional impact of the piece, and change people’s behavior.

If you want to move people to action, consider adding music to your message.

Note
Mona Lisa Chanda (2013) reviewed 400 studies and concluded that music stimulates the immune system and, in some situations, is more effective than anti-anxiety medication.

People Respond In A Similar Way

Daniel Abrams (2013) found that brain activity was synced among people who were listening to the same music. He also saw brain activity in areas that control movement, attention, planning, and memory, even when people were sitting still listening to music.

Note
Björn Vickhoff (2013) studied the heart rates of people singing together in a choir. Everyone’s heart rate started synchronizing when they sang together. A slow, structured beat had the biggest effect, and also slowed down everyone’s heartbeat.

Takeaways

Whether you’re designing a video, ad, public space, or website, you can use music to grab attention and to set a mood.When you want to stimulate memory, you may need to choose music that’s specific to a given person (or let the person choose her own music). But when you just want to grab attention or improve mood, you don’t have to use familiar or individualized music.Test your music with your target audience. If they like the music, you can assume that most people in that target audience will react in a similar way.