Love your forms: Psychological investment
When I taught psychology at Copenhagen Business School, one of my favorite psychological principles was the gradual escalation of commitments/investments. The thinking behind the principle (from Prospect Theory) is that “…people seek to justify and rationalize any suffering or effort they have made.” This is the reason why investing time in something makes you more likely to continue. If you do something small, you are more likely to do something bigger (effort-wise).
So when one of our clever engineers suggested we switch around two of the fields in a form, I loved it because it was right down the alley of the principle of psychological investment.
Changing the form to do the easiest task first
Trustpilot is an online review community, where all users can go to read about companies they are unfamiliar with before they buy. This is only possible because other people write reviews about all sorts of companies. To verify these reviews, we ask people to put in their reference number. Finding the reference number is quite a big task. You have to move away from Trustpilot’s website, search your email for your reference number, and bring it back. It’s easier just to type something.
In the current setup, the reference number is on top of our form. So why not put it below if it is the most difficult task. Will that work?
It works!
After running approx. 20,000 users through the variations, we saw a 7% increase in conversion. Just by moving fields around! A change that takes one engineer less than 10 minutes to do, will have a value of thousands of dollars; making this experiment an excellent example of the psychological investment principle in action when designing forms.
