Lessons learned from social psychology: — The Halo effect in interaction and interface design
The Halo effect is a well known cognitive bias. It describes the phenomenon that knowledge about a certain attribute of a person dominates the overall impression. Other attributes are neglected or ignored. At the same time, the knowledge about this particular attribute leads to conclusions about other attributes or characteristics. One characteristic “overrides” the others.
For example, an attractive person might be perceived as intelligent and trustworthy, even though there is no logical reason to believe that their attractiveness correlates with intelligence and credibility.
The „Halo“ of attractiveness is causing us to make leaps of logic, automatically attributing further characteristics we might not know if they are true.
The Halo effect is also important for digital products: Just think of digital assistants, bots and smart toys. But it is also relevant for the good old website.
In addition, the Halo effect is by no means bound to only positive characteristics as it can also occur with negative characteristics.
An example we’ve been seeing a lot of lately is when a website uses bad automatic translations. People notice if something is translated automatically. We then make leaps of logic and make inferences concerning the quality of the brand behind this website: „oh — they do not care about their copy“ might lead to: „they might not care about their users” and thus: “they might not care about me“.
All these attributions might even lead to doubt if one can trust them, you might find yourself asking „Can I trust them with my credit card details?“
This might especially be highly critical when „serious“ businesses — for example, banks, airlines or medical products — make such errors; because we trust them with our data or our lives. This can severely damage the credibility and trust in such a brand.
So, in conclusion, it might be very important to keep this kind of effect in mind when designing (no matter which kind of) interfaces to avoid bad or poor impressions via design and thus risking to lose trust of your users or customers.
