Read the following sentence:
“The aroma of warm bread spread tantalizingly out of the bakery.”
And now fill in the blanks to form a word:
B_ _ T_R
You probably did not come out with “barter,” “banter,” “beater,” “bitter,” or even “better.” In fact, chances are that your word was “butter.” The phrase “bread and butter” is fairly common in English, so the mention of “bread” is likely to have activated concepts that are associated to it and thus may have made you think of the word “butter” over the many other fitting alternatives.
Psychologists call this phenomenon priming. It refers to the fact that exposure to one stimulus (in this case, the initial sentence about the aroma of bread) influences a subsequent response to a different stimulus (in our example, the word template that you had to fill in). After you’ve watched a horror movie on TV late at night, you’re more likely to jump up at all the creaks and noises in your house than if you’d watched a comedy. And studies have shown that when people hear a word such as “kindness”, they tend to later judge others as more kind; if they feel the scent of a cleaner they recall more cleaning-related activities and are even less messy while eating a crumbly cracker.
Priming has been extensively studied in cognitive and social psychology, and such priming examples are pervasive in almost all aspects of everyday life; priming shapes our behaviors and reactions to the environment and is an often an effective shortcut that allows us to take quick decisions. It is also an efficient persuasion tool, employed extensively in marketing and advertisement. (If you’re curious about how sound and packaging prime the taste of our food, check this recent New Yorker article.)
Priming and Web Design
Elements in the interface can prime user behavior and expectations. For example, let’s assume users encounter a coupon field on the checkout page of an ecommerce website. Even though they may not have planned to use a coupon, the very presence of a coupon box primes users to leave the checkout flow and search for a promotion code — something we’ve seen again and again in our testing of ecommerce sites. FoMO (fear of missing out) is the cause of many a lost sale on sites with prominent coupon-code fields.
Images and page content prime people into forming expectations of the website. If those assumptions are further confirmed, the overall experience is smooth and pleasant. However, when the assumptions are proven wrong, people often perceive that the site has poor usability. In the example below, the homepage of a private-school site depicts several pictures of young kids, which may make you believe that the school in question is a preschool or at best, covers the first elementary grades. In fact, the school includes grades up to 8th.
The aesthetics and look-and-feel of a page also create first impressions about a website and a business. Below, you can see the websites for two different Chinese-restaurants. You can probably easily identify which of the two restaurants is a chain just by looking at the homepage. Although users don’t always consciously formulate such inferences, these implicitly do influence user behavior and interactions with the site, as well as attitudes toward the company.
Priming and Usability Testing
If you plan or facilitate usability studies, you probably know that a good test must not bias participants in any way. There are many opportunities for influencing people in a user study — ranging from the task wording to the facilitator’s behavior. When tasks use terms already present in the interface, participants are primed by the task formulation and tend to look for those exact terms. For example, in one of our tests, we asked people to search for an “iPad keypad.” Although the word “keypad” is not as frequent as “keyboard”, most users typed “keypad” instead of “keyboard” in the search box. In other words, we effectively primed users into using the rarer term. Had the website actually used that same term in the name of its products, we may have drawn the wrong conclusion that the product was easy to find.
Another example of priming in usability testing is when the moderator inadvertently makes users behave in a certain way. Sometimes simply being overly friendly can make participants feel that they must live up to that friendship and must reciprocate either by being too positive about the design or by trying too hard to complete the tasks. In other situations, the moderator may bias users by talking too much or by using too many words. For instance, a question such as “What do you think this button does?” can warn users that the indicated UI element is a button, although, in the absence of that prompt, they may not have realized that it was active. And (sometimes unavoidably) the facilitator can elicit a certain behavior by demonstrating it to the user. In a children study, we redirected a lost user back to the browser’s homepage by pressing the browser’s Back button several times. Although before that event the child had never used the Back button, afterwards she used it in almost every task.
Summary
Whether in user testing or web design, priming is a force that must be reckoned with. The trick is to use it to your and your users’ advantage, and bias people into behaviors and expectations that match your site’s goals and their needs. (More on how to use priming in UX design in our full-day course on The Human Mind and Usability.)
References
R.W. Holland, M. Hendricks, and H. Aarts. 2005. Smells like clean spirit: nonconscious effect of scent on cognition and behavior. Psychological Science, 16, 689-693.
T.K. Srull, R.S. Wyer Jr. 1979. The role of category accessibility in the interpretation of information about persons: Some determinants and implications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1660-1667.
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