UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interaction) research can often lead you into the vague and ultra-positive SEO world of ‘solutions’, ‘tricks’, off-the-cuff-acronyms and ‘Laws’ that bloggers name after themselves.
Even when ideas are properly anchored in academic research, you have to remind yourself that often the conclusions drawn from the accurate data are hypotheses themselves.
The best way to develop UX is to set up your own user-testing along accepted guidelines: takethis example as a starting point, with more in depth information in the Nielson Norman Group’s reports section.
That said, there are many fascinating, well-proven and widely accepted concepts on the go today, of which we’ll pick out a few to get you started.
1. Faces
While general object recognition occurs in the visual cortex, faces are special in that they are processed faster in the Fusiform Face Area (along with perhaps other very familiar patterns). This has bolstered the well-established idea that people notice faces first as they enter a room or visit a website.
Furthermore, as this impulse has be linked to assessment of friend or foe: as observed here (in point 6) angry or aggressive faces stand out in a crowd.
Connected to this is the impact of an eye looking directly at you, as combined with an aggressive mood in the Guinness advert discussed here. Following the direction of a gaze, in this case back at yourself is often referred to as Gaze cueing, and is used to direct attention to products. In the example here, a set of happy eyes drawing attention to a mortgage quote widget increased quote requests by almost 10%.
2. Social proof
The response to faces, it could be argued, is a form of ‘Social Proof’. That is: we are interested in what other people are interested in. There are different types of social proof, from linking to expert sources to confirm the credibility of a wikipedia entry, to the peer reviews on amazon, to friend likes on Facebook, queues outside clubs and restaurant tables being booked up. As is obvious from these examples, different contexts suit different types.
An extension of this affects language intended to persuade:
if this advert said one fifth of Texans smoke, rather than 8 out of 10 Texans don’t smoke, it would hand smokers easy social proof that they could smoke. Similar cases are made in thisgood overview of social proof.
3. Decoys
The term ‘Decoy’ is perhaps a cynical one for what is elsewhere described as explicitly stating the difference between options. However it is often used to highlight the downside of the alternative, as in the famous ‘nudge’ of labelling a trashcan or bin ‘Landfill’ when next to a ‘recycle’ option (in the picture). The pictures of what should go in each further facilitate an better choice.
It has widespread use on sales options pages, where the lack of features of free versions are compared to the paid versions. A side-effect of creating several choices of versions is that people tend to chose one of them rather than none, as illustrated by this discussion of fast food restaurants bunching together.
Also falling within the realm of decoys is this interesting idea about using the wrong hand to open car doors.
4. Choices
The most well-known experiment on choices is the ‘Jam’ study. In it a booth was set up in a upscale shop with jam to taste and buy; half of the time it had 24 flavors of jam on it, the other half it had 6 flavors. When it had 24 more people stopped (60% compared to 40%); they did the same amount of tasting for both (around 3 or 4); but importantly tens times more purchases were made when there were only 6 jars on it (31% compared to 3%).
This has lead to the dominant idea that simplifying choices is a better sales idea. And resulting discussion of when that is not the case (ie when dealing with well informed customers). And also some reinforcement of the idea that this does not mean simplifying everything, but merely the manner of interaction (in the jam case, this is the booth).
5. Storytelling
Despite the verifiable, applicable and analytical advantages of figures and data, figures (ironically) such as those in the experiments by Green & Brock (2000, 2005) show that stories are a far more effective means of delivering a message. It is, as often, quoted why politicians so often relay stories of one or another person, even when advocating a wide scale change.
This storytelling can be in many forms — spoken, photography, videos — but when it is written there are a few other considerations from a UX point of view. This article quantifies different choices very well.
This experiment done by Song and Schwartz documents how people assess an exercise regimen written in a hard-to-read font would take them twice as long to do as one written in a very legible font (despite the fact the regimen would not include any reading, of course).
