UX, dopamine, and motivation
Visitors have a million and one reasons to leave our website once they arrive. Literally, everything is working against us to keep visitors engaged with experiences we’ve painstakingly designed.
From the first nanosecond on the website, the brain and its biases are actively making snap judgment calls. In fact, cognitive psychology researchers at Carleton University reported in the Behaviour and Information Technology journal that people make a “like” or “no-like” decision about a web page design in as fast as 50 milliseconds.
That’s astonishingly fast, but the finding that’s more arresting is that people will subsequently work hard to “confirm” their initial assessment — ignoring evidence to the contrary. The researchers call this confirmation-bias phenomenon the “halo effect.”
So, if we don’t strike the right halo effect right away, our users are very quick to bail. Unfortunately, the real story is much more involved and grim. In addition to perception (the designs folks see and quickly interpret), cognitive psychologists also study memory, attention, motivation, and emotion. And these forces are also actively working to hijack our users.
But despite all the gloom and doom, there is hope for us designers.
