Behavioral UI — CXL Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree Review — Part 7

This is part 7 out of 12 reviewing the digital psychology and persuasion minidegree at CXL Institute. For 12 weeks, I will deep-dive into areas such as psychology foundations, neuromarketing, persuasion models and behavioral psychology. Each week I will post one article reviewing the course content and discuss my learnings as well as my personal thoughts on it.

Last week I was writing about my learnings from the course ”Digital psychology and behavioral design” instructed by Ph.D. Brian Cugelman who is a specialist in online behavior change and data science. This week I will continue on the same topic and dive in a bit more into behavioral UI elements.

Pressure tactics

There are different kinds of stress in life and a certain amount of stress is needed to motivate us to do things. This positive kind of stress is referred to as eustress. On the other hand, if we are experiencing too much stress we will be overstimulated, unfocused and that will lead to decreased motivation. Since our users will experience more stress every time they face a problem or an error on the website it is important to reduce this stress as much as possible to be able to use pressure tactics that increase both stress and motivation.

Time limit

This pressure tactic is about urgency. By informing the customer they have a limited amount of time to take action that will increase their motivation.

One should not use fake time limits though because if people find out they will become resentful.

Quantity limit

By showing the customer how many items are left will put pressure on them to take action, because if they don’t they can miss out. This is also sometimes called scarcity technique.

Competitors

This pressure tactic is widely used on travel websites and what it does is that it tells the customer that if they don’t act, someone else will. So this tactic is like urgency and scarcity combined.

Brian emphasizes the importance of being careful when using these techniques and not overdo them. And as mentioned earlier, to make these tactics work first other forms of stress need to be reduced.

Social influence

To make social influence present people have to watch what other people are doing, or feel that other people are watching them. There are many different social influence techniques that can be used online and these have persuasive effects.

Some of the most common social influence techniques are testimonials, star ratings and reviews.

Deciding

There are different UI tools to help people make up their minds. Pricing tables are one of the most important ones and these show comparisons of pricing and features. The thing is that the pricing and features are often presented persuasively with the intent to make the customer make a specific choice.

The options can be presented as shown above. Options A and B are probably products with lower value and ROI. The features presented will of course be good because nobody wants to sell or buy a bad product, but in comparison with C, A and B will be perceived as less desirable. C might have a higher price but because of the features presented the value of that option is much higher than the other options.

By adding a fourth option, D, it can be used as a decoy. A decoy is an option that is not created to sell and its purpose is to make the other products to appear more attractive. Every time you see an option that makes you question why you would ever choose that one over the other options, that is probably a decoy.

Trust

The target audience’s level of trust is based on the perceived honesty and competence of the company/website. One of the most common UI elements that can be used to increase trust is trust badges. These can be accepted payment badges or third-party endorsements such as McAfee secured for instance. Instead of increasing trust, another strategy to increase sales is to reduce risk or increase motivation. Risk can be reduced by reassuring people that they will get their money back if they want to, one way of doing this is to add a money-back guarantee badge. Another way to reduce risk is to use expectations managers so people know what comes next.

Reinforcer

Reinforcers are things that increase the chance of our customers taking action again. If we reward someone after they have taken action, that will reinforce their behavior and the likelihood of them doing it again. By showing gratitude and appreciation through simple words and images behavior can be reinforced.

Psychology inspired design

The last lesson I went through this week was about how to create psychology inspired design. The steps below describe the process.

Step 1: The first step of the process is to define the target audience, what their attitudes are like, what their beliefs are, what they like and don’t like and what behaviors you want to influence.

Step 2: The next step is to list psychological principles that will help you achieve your behavior change goals. These principles could be; loss-aversion, value proposition, credibility-competence, endorsement, trust bling, reinforcer etc.

Step 3: After the first two steps have been complete it is time to design a theoretical wireframe and filling in the psychological principles that we want to use. Based on those principles you start brainstorming creative ideas on how to turn the psychological concepts into design. Here it’s important to have your target audience in mind and what you think will work for them.

The same technique can also be applied for processes such as below.

Summary of the seventh week

Just as in earlier weeks, this week has also given me many new learnings and tools. I feel like my toolbox is expanding for every lesson and I can’t wait to put my learnings into practice. This week I especially liked the lesson about psychology inspired design since I think that seems to be a very handy way of applying psychological principles to the website. Just being aware of the principles available for use doesn’t give any value if you don’t know how to transform them into a persuasive design. Next week I will write about the psychology of products and pricing. Hope you enjoyed reading this post, see you in a week!