Feeling that there is only one chance can convince people to take action sooner, sometimes without careful consideration of consequences or alternative options.
Demanding that users register or log in before they can use an app or see website information has high interaction cost and defies the reciprocity principle.
Humans tend to return good deeds: use this social psychology law in user interface design to gain users’ trust and motivate engagement with your site or app.
The "halo effect" is when one trait of a person or thing is used to make an overall judgment of that person or thing. It supports rapid decisions, even if biased ones.
Giving money on charity websites is 7% more difficult than spending money on ecommerce sites. Donating physical items is even harder. For non-profit websites, social media is secondary; the top priority is to write clearer content.
Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews.
Review of B.J. Fogg's new Persuasive Technology book, which provides useful principles on how to think about creating persuasive design, but rarely gives detailed design guidelines. The exception is a section on enhancing website credibility.
Epinions and Google join
eBay in maintaining independent ratings of the quality of products,
websites, and auction sellers, leading to better customer service
and helping users make informed buying decisions.
The Web is turning into a low-trust society, hurting the honest sites. Site design can communicate
trustworthiness in several ways, though ultimately the customer's actual experience is what matters.
Reputation management is an alternative to branding: people can find useful content on the Web by relying on computationally processed quality ratings from other users.
Because computers are no longer used exclusively for utilitarian tasks, we should use systematic methods to design products that are not just efficient but also attractive to users.
The reciprocity principle states that people, when given something upfront, tend to feel a sense of obligation to repay what has been provided. Login walls reverse this sequence and require users to disclose personal info before allowing access to content. People often resent this, and may not be as forthcoming or cooperative as a result.
When people think that something is rare or only available for a limited time, they will tend to act fast to secure that scarce item. This behavioral principle can be used in user experience design, but beware of overuse.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple satisfaction metric that's collected in a single question. While easy to understand, it's insufficiently nuanced to help with detailed UX design decisions.
Users are constantly evaluating whether they believe what you're saying and whether to leave a website. You can do 4 things to make users trust you more and stay on your site.
An engaging gameplay experience is good design. But there's a fine line between engagement and addiction, which would be bad UX, especially in the long term.
Storytelling is a powerful technique for UX teams and for working with stakeholders, but only if you use the proper words for your audience's domain. Here are tips for building vocabulary for your stories.
The Halo Effect says that any one element in a user's experience with a company will rub off on their interpretation of other elements and their feelings about the company as a whole. Good design in one part of a website will make people like other parts better (and like the company better), but the opposite is also true.
Negative experiences have stronger emotional impact on humans than positive experiences do. Thus, in designing the user experience, we need extra emphasis on avoiding those lows.
The user experience of shopping online can be enhanced by employing proven selling strategies from physical stores in the design of ecommerce websites.
Priming is a basic principle of psychology with big impact on user interface design: exposure to something makes a user more likely to think and react in related ways at later steps in the interaction.
In the real world, you can get away with causing customers a small amount of difficulty, but on a website, visitors will leave at the smallest obstacle.
People make decisions based on the information that is most readily available to them. Understanding how the availability heuristic works will help you design for the way people think.
Coercive tactics like Manipulinks and Please-Don’t-Go try to shame customers into doing what the company wants. Sacrificing long-term customer loyalty for short-term gains is shortsighted.
Sites must meet users' basic trust needs before they demand that visitors enter information or engage with them. The trust pyramid has 5 distinct levels of user commitment, each with separate design requirements before users will give a website what it wants from them.
Stories build empathy and make the user needs and pain points memorable to your team. Effective stories speak the language of the audience, are rooted in data, and take advantage of compelling artifacts.
The language used in interfaces influences the decisions that our users will make. Manipulative copy nudges users towards making choices that are against their best interests.
A perceived high-authority status of the person making a request can make people more compliant with that request. Applying this principle in UX can ease users' decision-making process.
In China, websites must work harder than in other markets to gain users’ trust. Displaying the company’s local presence, past client work, and being available to answer questions via online chat are critical.
Modal ads, ads that reorganize content, and autoplaying video ads were among the most disliked. Ads that are annoying on desktop become intolerable on mobile.
When choosing among several alternatives, people avoid losses and optimize for sure wins because the pain of losing is greater than the satisfaction of an equivalent gain. UX designs should frame decisions accordingly.
The perceived value of a site represents the benefit that users expect to derive from using it. High expectations make users more likely to engage with the site.
Sites must meet users' basic trust needs before they demand that visitors enter information or engage with them. The trust pyramid has 5 distinct levels of user commitment, each with separate design requirements before users will give a website what it wants.
The words in a link label make a strong suggestion about the page that is being linked to. The destination page should fulfill what the anchor text promises.
