Identify, test & hack emotional response to your site

You’ve probably put a lot of time and money into the design of your website, but have you tested if it’s doing what you actually want it to do? Do you know what emotional response it elicits from first-time visitors?

If you don’t, here’s probably a good place to start. Emotional response to your site is essential business knowledge, and considering your website might be the first impression a potential customer has of your company, it’s vital that it is a positive one. Additionally, this response tends to differ largely based on lots of factors (age/gender/cultural background) — so how you perceive your site is unlikely to be how your customers perceive it. And potentially most importantly — if you don’t test it, you have no way of knowing if there’s a problem.

Luckily, there are tools which can help. A process we use internally is Product Reaction Cards — part of Microsoft’s Desirability Toolkit. It allows you test how users talk about your website to others; obtaining these results allows you to edit aspects of your site to ‘hack’ that reaction, in an attempt to change it to be more inline with brand. (*Note: I’ve used specific language here, more on that below.)

Using Product Reaction Cards is simple. In a nutshell, potential site users are asked to look over 118 ‘emotive’ words (e.g. interesting, boring, professional) & choose 10 of these words to describe your website. Collating this information from a spread of people will allow you to see patterns in the words chosen. You can set these results alongside your brand strategy (if you have one), identify potential discrepancies, then take steps to bring them in line.

Using Product Reaction Cards (PRC’s) to test emotional response

The process is brilliantly simple:

1. Open & download ProductReactionCards spreadsheet (ensuring page breaks horizontally allowing you to print all works on 3x pages). Print & cut out each card.
2. Lay out all cards on a table in co-working space or cafe, and ask random people to participate in a short study where you’re measuring how they perceive a website (ideally you’d get a representative sample- but we’re being practical here). Don’t mention it’s your website — this will influence their response.
3. Show them the site; ask them to choose ten words from the PRC’s explaining how they perceive the site. Record them.
4. Request they narrow these down to 6 words and ask them to explain why they’ve chosen them.
5. Repeat this process with at least 5 people — 10 if you can! It may seem a little laborious, but the process will invariably throw up other useful thoughts about your site.

It really helps to stick to timings for each step: two minutes to review the words, six minutes for initial selection; a further two minutes to narrow down to six words.

When you’ve collected this information, the easiest way to figure out your next step is by visualising it. We really like word clouds; found Wordle to be a pretty simple tool. A couple of pointers to help you on your way:

• Change word layout to ‘just horizontal’ for practical visualisation
• Mouse-click on individual colour schemes more than once to change the highlight colours. Creating your own really isn’t worth the hassle — they’ve spent time testing them so you don’t have to
• Use Safari for Wordle rather than Chrome — it uses Java so can be a pain at times but be patient.. Suggestions for alternatives welcome!

Finito? Excellent. Are the results as you expected? If not, get off the rafters, no need to panic. There are tonnes of simple changes you can do to alter these perceptions — changing individual elements like photography and colour can make a huge difference so we’d highly recommend changing one element at a time, and a bit of further testing.

One step further: split-testing

Simply put, split-testing (also known as ‘A/B’ testing) measures which of two groups (designs) is more effective — design ‘A’ or design ‘B’. The two samples can have small alternatives; differences in the colour of button (see bottom of the post to see how big an affect this can have) or much larger, ie a full homepage redesign. ‘Effectiveness’ could be the time on your site, or a user purchasing from your site — in this instance it’s a desired change in the way users’ perceive your site.

Split-testing is best done using a large sample size (e.g. 100 visitors), in a real-world situation (e.g. live on your site), with software such as Google Analytics- however you can start to get an indication of how perception may be altered by changing copy on your website, using the following method:

1. Take a screenshot of your current website using www.snapito.com
2. Change some key copy (i.e. the strap line) in a way you suspect will change perception using inspect element
3. Repeat the PRC methodology above on both options & compare results.

If you get favourable results using this method, then you can consider requesting your developer to implement a live split-test on your website.

Mighty Sharp

If you’ve implemented any of the above suggestions, or just read it through, you’re likely to have a taste of what we think to be best practise for website development.

Our philosophy is really simple:

1. Identify potential problems using data, rather than assumptions
2. Implement potential solutions
3. Test the outcome using data, rather than assumptions
4. Repeat & re-test!

If you need any further persuasion, I’ve included a couple of well-documented split-test results below. In the meantime, sign-up to the newsletter to receive similar posts- and drop me a line if you’ve got questions; it’d be great to see your results too. Or just to say aloha! jessica@mightysharp.co.uk

> Productivity software company Basecamp (previously 37signals) tested the leading title on its pricing page, & found that “30-Day Free Trial on All Accounts” generated 30% more sign-ups than the original “Start a Highrise Account”. Here, the word “free” alongside specific benefits “30-day free trial”; “All Accounts” enticed the user to become a customer.

> Dustin Curtis (designer, founder of Svbtle) found that “You should follow me on Twitter here” on his website had 173% more click-through’s than the original “I’m on Twitter.” For Dustin, being persuasive rather than passive led the user to think they should follow him on Twitter, so they did.

The important bit to remember that what worked for Basecamp or Curtis might not work for you- so test it out.

Jessica Rodgers, Producer + UX Designer, Mighty Sharp

* Specific language used here to portray differences between a perceived emotional response and an actual emotional response. Many interesting articles on this topic are available for pondering online.