The You Experience — #9: The Halo Effect & Your Personal CTA
This is a series of tips and career-changing advice I’ve uncovered in my pursuit to help others design the way they are experienced. Ignited by the words of Mariah Hay, Head of Practices at Pluralsight, my mission is to help you, “Apply your UX skills to the way people experience you.”
Every day, our powerful brains are hard at work analyzing an insurmountable number of decisions and choices. Thankfully, people much smarter than me devote their entire careers to understanding what goes on in our heads.
Their vital research reveals intriguing psychological findings that have a direct correlation to how others experience you.
The current buzz in the design community has an intense focus on soft skills, and for good reason. How we’re experienced by others is highly dependent on the attention we give our soft skills. We’re encouraged to:
- Be empathetic
- Be a good communicator
- Be a team player
- Be curious
- and more…
While valuable, I worry we’re focusing too broadly on these topics. If the real reason you’re not getting hired actually distills down to specific behaviors and characteristics of your personality, when do we surface those discussions?
If you didn’t hire someone because they were “awkward” or “weird”, how do you go about telling them they are awkward or weird? What critique are you giving them to make improvements? I highly doubt telling them to “be a better communicator” will do them any good.
If you felt they wouldn’t be a “culture fit” on your team, I would want to know why.
To truly design how we’re experienced by others, a deeper dive into the minutiae of human interaction is required. It demands we look at specific behaviors that surface during conversations and craft helpful dialogue around those behaviors to help the person improve.
At the very least, we can raise awareness of psychological traits and tendencies we all possess. Knowing about these traits & tendencies lends itself naturally to more actionable feedback, resulting in better human experiences.
The Halo Effect 😇
One of the most fascinating (to me) psychological human tendencies is, “The Halo Effect”. The Halo Effect is a cognitive psychological effect that pits fact against bias, where we establish an overall assessment of a person’s character, based simply on initial impressions of that person.
The Nielsen Norman Group wrote an article linking The Halo Effect to UX and offering this definition:
The “halo effect” is when one trait of a person or thing is used to make an overall judgment of that person or thing. It supports rapid decisions, even if biased ones.
Continuing that thinking, the folks over at Verywell have this to say about it:
The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about his or her character. Essentially, your overall impression of a person (“He is nice!”) impacts your evaluations of that person’s specific traits (“He is also smart!”).
Whether your customers are trying your newly launched product or you’re sitting down for a stressful interview, The Halo Effect is guiding that experience. On websites, apps, and in person, bits of judgment and assumption are being tossed around by way of this psychological phenomenon.
The Halo Effect in Action
Let me illustrate how frequently The Halo Effect permeates our day-to-day by telling you about my morning.
The credit union
For years, possibly a decade or more, I have been banking with the same credit union. In every email, they refer to me as, “HSA-MIKE”. All of their emails refer to me that way.
All of them.
Are their UX designers that oblivious to this? Is their product team even remotely concerned about the experience their customers are having? It’s apparent to me that their entire organization is clueless.
The doctor visit
Over the past 30 days, I visited my doctor’s office multiple times (not to worry, I’m okay.) I walked in this morning and greeted the same receptionist and asked them how their day was going. Politely, but seemingly perplexed, the receptionist looked me in the eye, tilted their head, and again asked, “What’s your name?”
Ugh.
Is it too much to ask that we try a little harder to remember people’s names? Could experiences be improved by simply remembering a name? I think so, but this person clearly didn’t get that.
The big box store
Aside from human interaction, The Halo Effect comes out in full display with businesses. Simply say the name of a company and we become immediately aware of how we feel about them. Here’s a short list of some… take note of how you feel about each:
- United Airlines
- Walmart
- Xfinity/Comcast
- McDonald's
Any thoughts? Good ones? Bad ones?
Here’s how my experience with a “big box store” went down this morning.
I walked in and used their app to quickly find the item I needed on the shelf. I was happy to see the item was on sale for $10 cheaper than advertised on the app, according to the label on the shelf. As the cashier rang me up for my purchase, the price didn’t come up at the sale price. Not to worry, I showed the associate the picture I took, which clearly showed the sale price.
But no… the associate wouldn’t budge. The manager wouldn’t either. I was not getting the sale today. I stood there confused, angry, conscious of the build-up of people in line waiting for me to hurry up and get on with my life. I was embarrassed and resolved to never shop there again.
Ever.
Recognizing The Halo Effect
In each situation, I assumed a lot. I made negative, snap judgments about the credit union, health clinic, and big box store based on trivial, brief interactions with a small portion of their overall experience.
- Is the entire credit union aloof and a bad place to bank because they can’t fix the way they address customers in emails? Probably not.
- Is the employee at the doctor’s office a ditzy 20-something, completely lacking in their social skills? I highly doubt it.
- Is it sufficient to say I can make an overall negative judgment of the big box store based solely on one cashier and one manager? No. And I’ve had plenty of good experiences there in the past.
You see, we humans do this all the time. The Halo Effect causes us to make quick, bias-driven assumptions with little information regarding the whole picture.
- We establish someone’s intelligence simply based on the way they dress.
- We toss out a great website because of one bad interaction.
- We approach a good-looking stranger and engage in conversation based solely on their attractive appearance.
- We decide someone isn’t a good fit for a role because of one thing they said in an interview.
- We buy a product simply because our favorite celebrity endorsed it on Instagram.
The Halo Effect & Your Personal CTA
So what’s the point?
Think of The Halo Effect as your personal call to action, floating above you for the world to see.
A great call to action button on a website drives engagement, encourages the visitor to go further into the website, and ultimately serves the purpose of conversion on the website.
A high converting CTA is successful because of good copy, thoughtful placement on the page, a compelling offer, an attractive design, an uncluttered interface, and many more factors.
In short, a customer chooses to explore a site further based on a good CTA.
Look up — look up and picture a sign over your head. What does it say? What’s your personal CTA? What is someone’s first impression going to be of you?
What will lead them to explore your character further, or be deterred?
A halo sits above you every day and in every social situation. When you meet new people, they see your CTA. Your CTA could be how you’re dressed that day, the tone of your voice, how your hair is done, the car you drive, the meal you choose, or the response you give to a question.
The YouX Takeaway
As we go about designing the way others experience us, it’s critical to keep in mind that it comes down to more than just basic soft skills. A more tactful approach to design the UX of you is to become more aware of psychological tendencies, like The Halo Effect and be able to talk about it openly.
As individuals, let’s learn to recognize how, when and where The Halo Effect shows up in our lives.
You’ll be surprised just how often it does.
As professionals, look at the bigger picture and engage those in your network in more constructive dialog about their character. I get it, soft skills are important. But don’t beat around the bush. Help the person on the other end understand your point of view of them as an individual.
This article is part of the YouX Series, written to help design the way others experience you. Keep reading if this article resonated with you:
- Part 1: Energy Matching
- Part 2: Having 20/20 Social Vision
- Part 3: What’s in a Name?
- Part 4: The Art of Listening
- Part 5: Self SWOT Analysis
- Part 6: Shine
- Part 7: Gratitude
- Part 8: Share Your Journey
- Part 9: The Halo Effect & Your Personal CTA
