Easier Is Better Than Better

In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz comes to an interesting conclusion involving human choice.

“People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.”

Common sense would dictate that if you were given a list of choices, you would choose the one that is most important to you, when in reality humans usually choose the one that is easiest for them to understand and evaluate. Very often we do so because we don’t have the time to put in the research necessary to make an informed decision. Politicians are rarely elected based on the majority of people doing research on their background and the policies they support. They are elected for the fact that people can relate to the message they are spreading and because we have heard of them before.
When it comes to our own designs, we imagine people being able to make informed decisions on what the next step should be. However, they are already making 400+ decisions throughout the rest of the day that are likely more important than what they will deal with in our design.
Do you think most people realize there are benefits to driving a manual transmission car over an automatic? Do you think they care? Automatic is easier to pick up so why bother with any other choice? How often do we stay in relationships that we shouldn’t, simply because it’s easier to just deal with it than face the repercussions of having to confront the person?
Have you ever been to In ‘N Out Burger? I’ve heard great stories about this place and their mythical burgers and fries. The catch behind this place is that they have a very limited menu. You order a Double Double, cheeseburger or hamburger. You can add fries, milkshake and beverage to that if you wish. That’s all of your options (unless you know about the secret menu). Now, I’ve been there and tasted their food and it’s good, but it is not much different than Wendy’s. The appeal of the place is that your choices are limited. It’s easy to order there because you don’t have to decide which type of chicken sandwich you feel is the best option for you. In ‘N Out makes the fast food experience easy for you. Having it your way is not the way we want.

In ‘N Out is known for their very limited menu. Too many choices are distracting and require more time for making a final decision what to order. Image source
Woot.com is an online store with a twist. Instead of browsing through hundreds or thousands of items, you are offered only one item a day. If you like it, you buy it and if you don’t, you wait until tomorrow to see what is going to show up. The site is successful and yet the logic of it all seems backwards. However, if I’m running a store, does it really matter whether I’m selling 100 units of 1 item or 100 different items for 1 unit at a time? Woot makes the shopping experience easy by making our choice simply “yes” or “no”.
How much less fun would Angry Birds be if you had to select the birds you could use before each level? Taking away that choice and letting us focus on how to use the birds we are given makes the game much more enjoyable.

By not choosing which bird to play with in each level, one can focus more on how to use them. Image source
How many of your friends choose to buy a computer for their home simply because they use the same one at work? Since they have been using it at work, it has become easy for them to use. Doesn’t mean it is the better computer  —  it is simply the one that is easiest for them. Our selections don’t have to be the best choices  —  they just have to be ones that we are okay with.
How often do you come across a site that offers you better features than their competitors, but they aren’t as easy to use. There is no reason to switch over to a service that is harder to use even if they have more features. If the features aren’t there to make my life easier then what good does the service do me?
Back when image hosting was cool, the sites that won were the ones that allowed you to upload an image without having to register or login. You simply uploaded your image and you were done. Imgur is a great example of this and has now become one of the most popular image hosting sites in the world. That doesn’t mean sites like Flickr couldn’t thrive  —  they just had to work much harder to achieve more users and show that going through the hassle of registering was indeed worth it.

[Editor's note: Have you already got your copy of the Smashing Book #2? The book shares valuable practical insight into design, usability and coding. Have a look at the contents.]

User Settings And Choice

In a recent article, Jared Spool did a study that found that only 5% of users changed their default settings in MS Word. Being a computer nerd, this surprised me because I like to dive into the settings of all of my applications to see what I can tweak. The large majority of people don’t seem to want to tweak though  —  they just want to use the application:

“We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.
We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.
What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.”

It is great to provide the user with the ability to make changes, but settings aren’t a must-have feature. Building a great product that just works should be priority number one and once you begin to understand what settings might be tweaked, should you then start to think about adding a settings panel.
Users assume you are giving them the settings that are best for them right off the bat. If you aren’t, then they might view your product as a failure.

The Paradox Of Choice

The paradox of choice says that the more options available to an individual, the harder it becomes to make a selection. For example, if there are free samples of jam being given out at the store, you are more likely to get people to buy a jar of jam when only six selections are available as opposed to 24. More choices don’t make the selection process easier for people, but having no choices takes away some of the freedom they believe they have.

According to Barry Schwartz, it is much easier to find your pair of crocs if there are fewer color options available. Image source
When deciding on which of the new iPhones you should get, you can either get it in black or white and three different memory options. Add in multiple carriers though and the choice starts to become a little more complicated.
If a client tells you that you can do their design any way you choose, it is more difficult than having to do a design with constraints because your options are endless. We need constraints, limited choices, to be built into everything that we do. This makes decision making easier and the benefit of this is an easier design to use.
If somehow you can make the easiest product and the best product in the industry, you have yourself a winner. You have to consider how many choices we are given daily so it’s in your best interest to limit the ones your customers have to make because there is a good chance it isn’t the most important decision of the day for them.
What this means is that the design that is easiest to evaluate (less options to choose from) will win most of the time. Make your copy straight to the point. Don’t waste your time on graphics that don’t drive the point home. Funny t-shirts and bumper stickers are effective because they are easy to evaluate. I have a hard enough time picking my outfit in the morning  —  don’t make me try to decide which one of the 250 default avatars I should use.

What Do You Think?

This article is part of our Opinion Column section where we provide a platform for designers and developers to raise their voice and discuss their opinion with the community. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

5 Universal Principles For Successful eCommerce-Sites

When was the last time you called customer support because you were having problems checking out online? Probably never! Cart abandonment rate is at around 60%, and most of it happens before the user even begins the checkout process. Sometimes, convincing your customers to trust you is your biggest challenge.
There is no “Consumer Trust for Dummies,” but as eCommerce designers, we need to focus on some fundamentals. The following topics may seem as obvious as walking into a seven-foot Wookie, but rest assured you will find plenty of websites with a mouth full of fur.

1. Paint Your Pictures At Home

If your core demographic is women between the ages 35 and 65 who have an annual income of $60,000+, you would treat them different than the 18- to 25-year-old male demographic. First and foremost in e-tail: forcing your visitor to think is a bad idea. When creativity stops being subjective and can be measured by a dollar amount, making sure you’re designing for the customer is a no-brainer.
Years ago, I had an SVP of DotCom tell my team, “You can go home if you want to paint pictures.” And for the rest of the day, I couldn’t wait to get there so that I could make sure the next morning his inbox was full of expletive material illegal in most counties. After calming down, I realized he was right. All along, what he was telling us was simply to design for the customer and not ourselves. This was a challenge for designers working in an eCommerce corporate atmosphere but a very important lesson to learn.

2. Good UX Is Like A Perfect Movie Score

Build brand loyalty to gain patient, forgiving customers for a lifetime. For instance, Apple’s customer loyalty exceeds all other brands with an unusual cult following. Apple lovers forgive the company when it makes mistakes and zealously defend the company’s products and reputation.
How do you make your customers trust you this much? The answer is to give the user an “Experience.” It is not enough simply to make a website usable. The experience you create for the customer has to make them not realize that they are “using” it. It’s a tough concept to grasp, and the recipe changes from website to website, but the right combination of usability, creative design, writing, psychology and metrics and a strong brand will create an experience through which your customers learn to trust you.
Like the perfect score to a film, a good user experience is unobtrusive and transparent to the consumer because “it just works.” The Apple model will not work for everyone, but I often find myself challenged with a W.W.J.D. moment. Ask, “What would Jobs do?” and then look at other websites for inspiration.

3. eCommerce UX Pitfalls To Avoid

Just because a website is usable, does not mean customers will use it. Usability and user experience are in the same family, but more often than not user experience is the forgotten child. There are key areas in which the two must co-exist. Below are suggestions for some areas where websites should spend as much, if not more time, on the user experience.

Product Detail page

The product detail (PD) page is where some retail websites drop the ball. Too much focus is put on the design and usability of the home page, and that effort does not continue through to the rest of the website. More of the user’s time is spent on the product detail page than any other. Here, you need to offer customers all of the information they are looking for but present it in an intelligent way as well.

A few recent trends on eCommerce websites are “no-click” alternate images and swatches. A user simply has to roll over an image, without clicking, to get immediate feedback. The same approach can be used to zoom in to the image. Other UX options for the PD page are smart fields that let users know they still have to perform a required action before proceeding, without getting a typical error message.

The Checkout Process

Much like the PD page, the checkout process is a critical piece that engages the customer on a somewhat intimate level. However, unlike the PD page, where customers want to spend time to make sure they want what they are looking at, the checkout process should have as few steps as possible. Too many steps and the customer feels trapped.
But too quick and they feel like they have lost control. For instance, asking for credit card information too soon will seem out of order and no doubt scare even the most seasoned online shopper into abandoning their cart. Hidden taxes and shipping costs will make them feel like you are trying to take advantage of them.

Security

Always making sure your customer knows that your website is secure and that their privacy will never be compromised goes back to the issue of trust. It does not take much effort to display a message telling your customers that they are safe in your hands; a footer link to your privacy policy is not always enough.

Page Weight

A page’s weight is determined by its file size, by adding up every image, every line of code and anything that gets loaded when the user first hits the page. Libraries such as Scriptaculous, jQuery, MooTools and even Flash Shared Objects are often forgotten, but they all add to a page’s “weight.”
Some fascinating things are on the horizon for developers related to user experience and page weight. One notable development as of late was the release of Safari 4 Beta, which has support for HTML 5 media tags, CSS animation and CSS effects. As more and more of these features become standard in browsers across the board, we can look forward to offering users a better experience by using features directly in the browser.

4. The Value Of Content And Then SoMe

We cannot talk about user experience without touching on content and social media (SoMe). In order to be profitable, eCommerce retailers need to engage customers with their content and use social media outlets within and outside their own websites.
93% of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media, according to Cone, while an overwhelming 85% believe a company should not only have a presence in but also interact with its consumers via social media.

• 60% of all online adults use social media.
• 85% believe a company should not only have a presence in but also interact with its consumers via social media.
• 56% of users feel a stronger connection with, and feel better served by, companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

When a website such as Facebook, which just turned 5 years old in February, has an active user base of over 175 million people, it is easy to see the unlimited potential to increase your wallet share simply by giving your customers what they want. Some options are:

• Give your customer the ability to add your website or product detail pages to websites such as Delicious, StumpleUpon, Digg, Twitter and Facebook.
• Give them the ability to customize their experience on your website. These experiences can range from customizing the home page as they see fit to uploading their image to go beside their product reviews.
• Create an RSS feed for your website. If your website has a blog or some other content area that changes regularly, give your customers the option to add it to their favorite RSS reader.

They say, “Content is king,” but if you cannot account for your king’s whereabouts, he needs to be beheaded. Your website’s content is only as relevant as its success. So, test as much as you can. Some tests you can perform to get hard data include:

• Website and email A/B testing
  Split your promotion views between your customers. 50% see version A, and 50% see version B. You can perform these tests for just about any purpose, but make sure your goals are clear before beginning. Figure out what you are trying to solve, and then move forward with the testing. From changing your website’s navigation to simply testing the style of your promotion’s copy, doing an A/B test will give you the relevant data you need to decide whether to update or remain the same.
• Polls
  Polls are quick and simple but, depending on your pool of users, can give you mountains of data. To get more people to take your poll, consider giving some kind of incentive to participate. Some polls are fun to take, but if you’re asking, “Which brand of television is better?” and not, “Who’s hotter, Jessica Simpson or Britney Spears?” then you may want to think more carefully about how much the feedback is worth.

5. Using Type And Color To Influence

Using color and typography is nothing new to designers. Using them in eCommerce is not much different. When designing for a retail website, your client is the customer. You are trying to convince thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of potential customers to click on your promotion and buy whatever you are selling. Consider the following.

Can It Be Read?

Most designers love to play with typography: twisting, shaping and contorting letters and word to obey your every whim, forming a beautiful masterpiece of skill and beauty. However, if your customer is not an artist, chances are they won’t get what you’re doing, and you’ve just lost a sale. Up front and to the point messaging is not always the answer either.
Consider using fun copy as an alternative. For example, if you sell banjos, instead of saying, “Shop New Banjo Supplies,” you could say, “Add More Twang to Your Thang.” As stated earlier with regard to designing for the customer, this depends a lot on what your target demographic is.

Can It Be Red?

No big surprise, red is the color of choice for error messages. But consider this when thinking about the user experience. What color does Target.com use for its error messages? Makes you think, right? Good! By the way, it uses red, too. The point is to consider alternatives. If your company has red in its brand, and the website has a lot of red as well, consider another color. You’re trying to get the user’s attention, so blue text with an alert icon could work just as well.

Consistency in Type: Stylistically and Creatively.

Making sure your headers, sub-headings and body copy are consistent across your website is easy. Making sure your website has a well-defined style guide is not. A style guide requires a lot of patience and care and is never complete. A website’s style guide should be a living, breathing document that continues to grow as your company and brand grows.
There is nothing wrong with this. As you find certain styles that perform better than others, find a way to add them to the guide. This document, depending on the complexity of your brand and the size of your website, could potentially be split into two separate documents: a creative style guide and a copy style guide. Each guide serves a different purpose but live together harmoniously.

Inspiration and Sources

Designing for the user experience in eCommerce is a multi-faceted puzzle. Some solutions work across the board, and some are specific to your website alone. The good news is that finding the solutions that best fit your particular needs is the most challenging and rewarding work a designer can do. It takes a rare breed to fully appreciate the value of the user experience, and if you are part of it, I hope this article and these resources give you as much pleasure as they have given me.

• Jakob Nielsen’s Alert Box – Current Issues in Web Usability
• Human Factors International
• User Interface Engineering
• UX Booth
• Pattern Tap
• Usability Post
• 960 Grid System
• I Love Typography
• Web Designer Depot
• A List Apart
• Function
• Endless.com
• Free People
• Facebook Statistics

Optimizing Emotional Engagement In Web Design Through Metrics

Think about what keeps you coming back to your favorite store, your favorite person or even your favorite website. It’s not just a mindless buy-go, hug-go or click-go relationship. It is a complicated, emotional connection. It is what makes relationships with people and brands intoxicating. User engagement must have an equally complex emotional connection. It must affect the user in mind, body and spirit. Anything less is a 1990s brochure website.
You can create strong storytelling strategies based on user personalities and segmentation. However, it seems almost impossible to measure those efforts, let alone know how to optimize them, without access to a neuroscience laboratory. In fact, emotional engagement can be optimized, and quite effectively, using something already at your disposal: performance metrics.

Emotional-Behavioral Response Relationship

Let’s start with the basics: an emotion is a psychophysiological response in your body to a stimulus. It’s an internal process that in turn triggers an external behavioral response. Behavioral responses help you decipher the emotional responses of others. Things like facial expressions and body language give you clues to whether the chef wielding the knife is angry and going to attack you or happy and going to make you dinner.

For example:

But you don’t have to be face to face in order to read a person’s behavioral clues. In digital environments, users’ behavioral interactions with the platform can give you insight into their emotional states. Instead of reading facial cues to analyze how your UX efforts affect users, you can measure their responses via metric data. Metric data is a user’s behavioral response quantified. With a little reverse engineering, you can identify strong emotional triggers, optimize weak elements and create stronger user experience strategies, using psychology as your secret weapon.

By The Numbers: Behavioral Response

Behavioral psychologists have classified emotions in numerous different theories. A large majority of these theories agree that emotions manifest in various intensities and can even combine with others to build new emotional states. One example of such a theory is Robert Plutchik’s emotion wheel.

Plutchik’s emotion wheel.
When it comes to user experience, emotional engagement builds on itself as the user continues to interact not only with your platform, but with all aspects of your brand online, including SEM, press coverage and social networks. Emotional engagement with a digital product can be divided into four categories based on how much information and engagement the user has with your website: awareness, attraction, investment and adoption.

Awareness

User experience doesn’t start when they hit your landing page or start your app, but prior to it. Visitors have to make their way to your website in the first place. They’re navigating through websites full of frustration-inducing elements, trust-busting perils and anticipation-inducing amusements. The focus at this point is on building trust, anticipation and whatever other emotional responses you’ll target in your copy, imagery and overall storytelling.

• Track awareness-level engagement using metrics like page views, page hits, video views, impressions and click-through rates.
• Identify emotional image and copy triggers during the development phase by A/B testing on micro-sites, as well as using ad content and email campaigns.
• Create dynamic content that spotlights your SEM, SEO and advertising goals, giving users exactly what they want as soon as they hit your page.
• Leverage strong referral sources and advertising platforms to build trust and credibility. The coffee vendors featured in the screenshot above use Google, and the companies featured to the right of this column you’re reading use Smashing Magazine to reach customers. By aligning their messages with these brands, they are able to build more trust in the user than an ad on a less relevant platform (like Craigslist) might have.
• Use emotionally rich imagery in your advertising messages, and carry that messaging through to the website itself. “Fresh-roasted coffee” begins to paint an emotional picture for the user of that perfectly roasted cup of steaming delight first thing in the morning. If your click-through rate is low, then your ad may not be compelling enough.
• Develop intuitive and relevant architecture to decrease frustration and increase trust. First impressions count. If the bounce rate is high or the time on site is low, then the story you are telling in the awareness phase might not be carrying though to the user’s interaction on the platform.

Attraction

Attraction-level engagement keeps users interested in your platform. Cohesion of the UX elements and usability is the name of the game. Building emotional engagement at this level is critical because behavioral engagement consists mainly of superficial interaction such as navigation and content absorption.

• Track attraction-level engagement by looking at bounce rates, session lengths, pages per visit, abandonment rates, email opening rates and click-through rates.
• Stay up to date on current trends in usability to create systems that are user-centric.
• Identify high-focus areas in your user interface through eye-tracking, heat maps and software that records mouse movement. Optimize your framework, and place emotion-building content in strategic areas.
• Continue building and reinforcing motivational and emotional triggers through engaging imagery, emotionally charged words for headings and main copy, and persuasive triggers. @Mailchimp publicizes a lot of “free”, “big” offers and uses bright imagery to boost joy and anticipation levels. Negative emotions, like sadness, can also build strong emotional engagement in users. Examples are the powerful images of animal cruelty often seen in PETA and ASPCA campaigns.
• Highlight brand relationships, security measures, press and endorsements. Aligning your product with other respected brands builds trust. The list of brands that Mailchimp uses to show its press features builds an impressive amount of credibility. This is immediately followed by the call to subscribe by email. Putting the call to action after the trust-building credentials is more effective than the other way around.
• Develop proper system-generated feedback and error handling. This could include loading notices and 404 pages with content referrals, which reduce abandonment due to user frustration.

Investment

Investment-level engagement involves a commitment from the user. It moves beyond a simple navigational interaction; the user is no longer behaving based on curiosity and anticipation alone. The user is interested in what you are offering, they trust your credibility, and they anticipate further interaction; thus, they act appropriately. They are now engaged enough to invest time, or do something risky like download a file or submit credit card information, or assume an identity (real or fictitious), stepping out of the role of anonymous Web surfer.

• Track investment-level engagement by tracking your social network followers, RSS feed or podcast subscribers, email newsletter subscriptions, file downloads, e-commerce conversion rates, purchase line items (both items and amount), community sign-ups, and warm leads.
• Leverage your existing community to motivate others to action. @Mormon.org leverages its community to build trust, and its strong messaging of love and belonging and its interesting interface build joy in users.
• Minimize frustration by requiring the fewest steps possible to achieve the objective. For example, allow users to order without logging in. The more information you require (such as Social Security or credit card numbers), the more trust you will have to build.
• Reiterate trust, security and credibility elements during the check-out or registration process.
• Monitor your online reputation.

Adoption

Adoption entails users accepting the website structure as a common platform for interaction or knowledge on a subject. Emotional engagement is extremely high, and interaction is consistent. If investment-level engagement gets users involved, then adoption-level engagement makes them your cheerleaders.

• Adoption-level engagement can be seen in return customers, unique versus returning visitor ratios, geo-location check-ins, and participation in “karma” systems (badges, etc.), to name a few.
• Use strong social interfaces to spotlight followers, supporters and die-hard addicts.
• Put community-building messaging in your copy. “Colbert Nation,” “Psychos,” “Gleeks” and “Chipotle for Life” are elements that brands use to add excitement and enthusiasm to their products and reinforce the emotional engagement of their communities.
• Make it easy for users to integrate the product into their daily lives, as Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter do via apps and open APIs.
• Invite fans to help shape your future, and make it easy for them to share information, spread your brand and recruit their network.
• Let users play. It’s just a burrito wrapped in foil, but @Chipotle builds an addictive community element into its website by combining joy, trust and anticipation with quick, simple interactive elements.

Summary

So, what keeps people coming back? Or more to the point, what keeps them from coming back? Using metric data, we are able to trace behavioral and emotional responses to identify the weak spots in our storytelling strategies. By identifying and optimizing these areas, we’re able to make our products better, faster, stronger.
These are just some of the ways to quantify emotional engagement strategies. How do you measure your engagement successes? Share in the comments below.

Resources

Looking for more information?

• UX Booth
  A great resource on all things user experience. It goes into detail on many of the subjects touched on here.
• Occam’s Razor, Avinash Kaushik
  A blog dealing with Web analytics and its practical applications.
• Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets
  A very good introduction to all things analytics, via Occam’s Razor.
• Affective Computing Group, MIT Media Lab
  Always has interesting projects on the affective-cognitive experience of human and technology. Many studies are publicly available in PDF.

Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed

A lot of designers seem to be talking about user experience (UX) these days. We’re supposed to delight our users, even provide them with magic, so that they love our websites, apps and start-ups. User experience is a very blurry concept. Consequently, many people use the term incorrectly. Furthermore, many designers seem to have a firm (and often unrealistic) belief in how they can craft the user experience of their product. However, UX depends not only on how something is designed, but also other aspects. In this article, I will try to clarify why UX cannot be designed.

Heterogeneous Interpretations of UX

I recently visited the elegant website of a design agency. The website looked great, and the agency has been showcased several times. I am sure it delivers high-quality products. But when it presents its UX work, the agency talks about UX as if it were equal to information architecture (IA): site maps, wireframes and all that. This may not be fundamentally wrong, but it narrows UX to something less than what it really is.
The perception might not be representative of our industry, but it illustrates that UX is perceived in different ways and that it is sometimes used as a buzzword for usability (for more, see Hans-Christian Jetter and Jens Gerken’s article “A simplified model of user experience for practical application”). But UX is not only about human-computer interaction (HCI), usability or IA, albeit usability probably is the most important factor that shapes UX.
Some research indicates that perceptions of UX are different. Still, everyone tends to agree that UX takes a broader approach to communication between computer and human than traditional HCI (see Effie Lai-Chong Law et al’s article “Understanding, scoping and defining user experience: a survey approach”). Whereas HCI is concerned with task solution, final goals and achievements, UX goes beyond these. UX takes other aspects into consideration as well, such as emotional, hedonic, aesthetic, affective and experiential variables. Usability in general can be measured, but many of the other variables integral to UX are not as easy to measure.

Hassenzahl’s Model Of UX

Hassenzahl’s “Model of User Experience”.
Several models of UX have been suggested, some of which are based on Hassenzahl’s model. This model assumes that each user assigns some attributes to a product or service when using it. As we will see, these attributes are different for each individual user. UX is the consequences of these attributes plus the situation in which the product is used.
The attributes can all be grouped into four main categories: manipulation, identification, stimulation and evocation. These categories can, on a higher level, be grouped into pragmatic and hedonic attributes. Whereas the pragmatic attributes relate to the practical usage and functions of the product, the hedonic attributes relate to the user’s psychological well-being. Understanding the divide can help us to understand how to design products with respect to UX, and the split also clarifies why UX itself cannot be designed.

Manipulation

Hassenzahl explains the hedonic and pragmatic qualities with a hammer metaphor. The pragmatic qualities are the function and a way for us to use that function. However, a hammer can also have hedonic qualities; for instance, if it is used to communicate professionalism or to elicit memories. (Image: Velo Steve)
In this model, the pragmatic attributes relate to manipulation of the software. Essentially, manipulation is about the core functionalities of a product and the ways to use those functions. Typically, we relate these attributes to usability. A consequence of pragmatic qualities is satisfaction. Satisfaction emerges if a user uses a product or service to achieve certain goals and the product or service fulfills those goals.
Examples of attributes that are typically assigned to websites (and software in general) are “supporting,” “useful,” “clear” and “controllable.” The purpose of a product should be clear, and the user should understand how to use it. To this end, manipulation is often considered the most important attribute that contributes to the UX.

Identification

Although manipulation is important, a product can have other functions as well. The first of these is called identification. Think about it: many of the items connected to you right now could probably be used to get an idea of who you are and what you care about, even though some of them would be more important or descriptive than others. The secondary function of an object is to communicate your identity to others. Therefore, to fulfill this function, objects need to enable users to express themselves.
The growth of social media can be explained by this identification function. Previously, we used personal websites to tell the world about our hobbies and pets. Now, we use social media.
Facebook, blogs and many other online services help us to communicate who we are and what we do; the products are designed to support this identification need. MySpace, for example, takes advantage of this identification function; it allows users to customize their profiles in order to express themselves. WordPress and other platforms let bloggers select themes and express themselves through content, just as users do through status updates on Facebook, Twitter and all the other social platforms out there.

Stimulation

Gmail notifies users when they forget to attach a file to an email.
The Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, states that 80% of the available resources are typically used by 20% of the operations. It has been suggested, therefore, that in traditional usability engineering, features should have to fight to be included, because the vast majority of them are rarely used anyway.
This is necessarily not the case with UX, because rarely used functions can fill a hedonic function called stimulation. Rarely used functions can stimulate the user and satisfy the human urge for personal development and more skills. Certain objects could help us in doing so by providing insights and surprises.
From this perspective, unused functions should not be dropped from software merely because they are used once in a blue moon. If they are kept, they could one day be discovered by a user and give them a surprise and positive user experience. As a result, the user might think “What a brilliant application this is!” and love it even more.
In fact, this is exactly what I thought (and found myself tweeting) when Gmail notified me that I had forgotten to attach the file I’d mentioned in an email. If you do a Twitter search for “gmail attachment,” you’ll probably find many others who feel the same.
Furthermore, I think “Pretty cool!” when YouTube enhances its presence by modifying its logo on Super Bowl Sunday (or Valentine’s Day). I also discovered something new when MailChimp’s monkey whispered, “Psst, Helge, I heard a rumor…” and linked me to a Bananarama song on YouTube. There are many examples, but the best “stimulating” functions are probably those that are unexpected but still welcome (like the Gmail notification).

Evocation

Souvenirs tend to have weak manipulative qualities, but they can be evocative when they elicit memories. (Image: meddygarnet)
The fourth function that a product can have, according to Hassenzahl’s model, is evocation, which is about recalling the past through memory. We enjoy talking and thinking about the good old days (even yesterday), and we want objects to help us with this. Even weird, dusty and practically useless souvenirs (with weak manipulative qualities) have evocative function because they help us to recall the past.
In design, we can certainly give a website a vintage look and feel to remind us of our childhood, high school or the ’60s… or the ’30s. But even websites with a modern and minimalist design can have evocative attributes. For instance, don’t Facebook and Flickr (by way of their users and your friends) provide you with a huge number of pictures from the past, some of which are highly evocative?

Thus, UX Cannot Be Designed

The MailChimp monkey’s words will probably appeal to some users more than others.
Having said all this, why is it argued that UX cannot be designed? It’s because UX depends not only on the product itself, but on the user and the situation in which they use the product.

You Cannot Design the User

Users are different. Some are able to easily use a website to perform their task. Other simply are not. The stimulation that a product provides depends on the individual user’s experience with similar products. Users compare websites and have different expectations. Furthermore, they have different goals, and so they use what you have made in different modes.
Think about it: when judging the food and service at a restaurant, you will always compare what you experience to other restaurants you have been to. They have shaped your experience. Your companions compare it to their previous experiences, which are certainly different from yours. The same goes for software, websites and apps. Evocative qualities vary even more, simply because all users have a unique history and unique memories.

You Cannot Design the Situation

UX also depends on the context in which the product is used. A situation goes beyond what can be designed. It can determine why a product is being used, and it can shape a user’s expectations.
On some occasions, you may want to explore and take advantage of the wealth of features in WordPress. In other situations, the same functions may make things too complex for you. On some occasions, you may find it totally cool that the MailChimp monkey tells you randomly that, “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” but in other cases it would feel entirely weird and annoying, because you are using the application in a different mode.
Furthermore, UX evolves over time. The first time a user tries an application, they may be confused by it and have a slightly negative experience. Later, when they get used to it and discover its wealth of features and potential and learn how to handle it, they might get emotionally attached to it, and the UX would become more positive.

We Can Design For UX

Are roller coasters fun, thrilling and exciting or just breathtakingly scary? It’s hard to tell. (Image: foilman)
Many designers label themselves “UX designers.” This implies great confidence in the capabilities of the designer; it suggests that the user experience can be designed. But as explained, we cannot do this. Instead, we can design for UX. We can design the product or service, and we can have a certain kind of user experience in mind when we design it. However, there is no guarantee that our product will be appreciated the way we want it to be (again, see Hassenzahl). We can shape neither our users’ expectations nor the situation in which they use what we have designed.
It is certainly possible to have a fairly good idea of the potential ways a user will judge what we make, as Oliver Reichenstein points out. Movies, rhetoric and branding demonstrate as much: they predict certain experiences, and they often achieve their goals, too.
However, a thrilling movie is probably more thrilling in the theater than at home, because the physical environment (i.e. the situation that shapes the UX) is different. In the same way, the effectiveness of an advertisement will always depend on the context in which it is consumed and the critical sense and knowledge of the consumer (i.e. the user’s prior experience). The commercials are designed to elicit certain experiences, but their level of success does not depend solely on the commercials themselves.
The difference between designing UX and designing for UX is subtle but important. It can help us understand and remind us of our limitations. It can help us think of how we want the UX to be.
It has been suggested, for instance, that UX is the sum of certain factors, such as fun, emotion, usability, motivation, co-experience, user involvement and user engagement (for more, see Marianna Obrist et al’s article “Evaluating user-generated content creation across contexts and cultures”). In turn, we must address some of these factors when we design for UX, depending on how we want our product to be perceived. If we want an application to be fun, then we need to add some features that will entertain; a joke, a challenging quiz, a funny video, a competitive aspect or something else. We should keep in mind, however, that, as designers, we can never really predict that the application will be perceived as fun by the user. Users have different standards, and sometimes they aren’t even willing to be entertained.

Extra Credit: How To Design For UX

Peter Morville’s “Facets of User Experience.” (Image: Semantic Studios)

Understand UX

If we want to design for UX, then we need to understand what UX is all about. For example, knowing which variables make users judge a product might be advantageous, and Hassenzahl’s UX model is one such model for this.
Other models have been suggested as well, such as Peter Morville’s “seven facets of user experience.” Here, UX is split into useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible and valuable. As you may have noticed, these facets fit Hassenzahl’s model pretty well: useful, usable, findable, credible  and accessible could all be considered as pragmatic (i.e. utilitarian and usability-related) qualities, while desirable and valuable would qualify as hedonic (well-being-related) qualities.
As mentioned, UX has also been viewed as the sum of particular factors. Other models have been suggested as well, some of which are linked to at the bottom of this article.

Understand Users

Following this, we need to understand our users. Traditional methods are certainly applicable, such as user research with surveys, interviews and observation. Also, personas have been suggested as a means of designing for UX, as have UX patterns. Smashing Magazine has already presented a round-up of methods.

Exceed Expectations

Finally, give users what they want — and a little more. In addition to enabling users to use your service effectively and efficiently, make them also think, “Wow, this application is genius.” Exceed their expectations desirably. If you do so, they will use your website or app not because they have to but because they want to.

Other Resources

To learn more about UX, you may want to read the following:

• 8 Must-See UX Diagrams
  An excellent collection of visualizations of the concepts and fragments of UX.
• Retro and Vintage in Modern Web Design
  An extensive showcase of inspiring websites that are graphically designed to elicit memories.
• UX Myths
  A website dedicated to debunking misconceptions about UX.
• The Thing and I: Understanding the Relationship Between a User and a Product
  Freely available extracts from Marc Hassenzahl’s article on the UX model referred to in this article.

Persuasion Triggers in Web Design

How do you make decisions? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably answer that you pride yourself on weighing the pros and cons of a situation carefully and then make a decision based on logic. You know that other people have weak personalities and are easily swayed by their emotions, but this rarely happens to you.
You’ve just experienced the fundamental attribution error — the tendency to believe that other people’s behaviour is due to their personality (“Josh is late because he’s a disorganised person”) whereas our behaviour is due to external circumstances (“I’m late because the directions were useless”).
Cognitive biases like these play a significant role in the way we make decisions so it’s not surprising that people are now examining these biases to see how to exploit them in the design of web sites. I’m going to use the term ‘persuasion architects’ to describe designers who knowingly use these techniques to influence the behaviour of users. (Many skilled designers already use some of these psychological techniques intuitively — but they wouldn’t be able to articulate why they have made a particular design choice. The difference between these designers and persuasion architects is that persuasion architects use these techniques intentionally).
There are 7 main weapons of influence in the persuasion architect’s arsenal:

Reciprocation

“I like to return favours.”

This principle tells us that if we feel we have been done a favour, we will want to return it. If somebody gives you a gift, invites you to a party or does you a good turn, you feel obliged to do the same at some future date.
Persuasion architects exploit this principle by giving users small gifts — a sample chapter from a book, a regular newsletter or just useful information — in the knowledge that users will feel a commitment to offer something in return.

Fig. 1: Book publishers offer free sample chapters in the hope that you’ll reciprocate the favour and buy the book.
That ‘something in return’ need not be a purchase (not yet, anyway). Persuasion architects know that they need to contact prospective customers on several occasions before they become an actual customer — this is why regular newsletters are a staple offering in the persuasion architect’s toolkit. So in return they may simply ask for a referral, or a link to a web site, or a comment on a blog. And note the emphasis on ‘ask’. Persuasion architects are not shy of asking for the favour that you ‘owe’ them. (By the way, if you’ve enjoyed this article, please share it on Twitter!).

Fig. 2: Seth Godin knows how to leverage the principle of reciprocation. This comes from one of Seth’s free PDFs and you’ll notice he’s not shy of asking you to return the favour.

Commitment

“I like to do what I say.”

This principle tells us that we like to believe that our behaviour is consistent with our beliefs. Once you take a stand on something that is visible to other people, you suddenly feel a drive to maintain that point of view to appear reliable and constant.
A familiar example of this in action is when comments on a blog degrade into a flame war. Commentators are driven to justify their earlier comments and often become even more polarised in their positions.

Fig. 3: Flamewars.net contains many examples of people justifying their commitment to comments they have made on a blog posting.
Persuasion architects apply this principle by asking for a relatively minor, but visible, commitment from you. They know that if they can get you to act in a particular way, you’ll soon start believing it. For example, an organisation may ask you to ‘Like’ one of their products on Facebook to watch a video or get access to particular content. Once this appears in your NewsFeed, you have made a public commitment to the product and feel more inclined to support it.

Fig. 4: Oxfam uses the principle of commitment in the knowledge that a small change in behaviour will lead to larger changes later on.

Social Proof

“I go with the flow.”

This principle tells us that we like to observe other people’s behaviour to judge what’s normal, and then we copy it.
Persuasion architects apply this principle by showing us what other people are doing on their web sites. For example, researchers at Columbia University set up a web site that asked people to listen to, rate and download songs by unsigned bands. Some people just saw the names of the songs and bands, while others — the “social influence” group — also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by other people.
In this second group, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition, showing that people’s behaviour was influenced by the crowd. Even more surprisingly, when they ran the experiment again, the particular songs that became “hits” were different, showing that social influence didn’t just make the hits bigger but also made them more unpredictable.

Fig. 5: 1 million people can’t be wrong (from thenextweb.com).
Some familiar examples of social proof on the web are, “People who shopped for this product also looked at…” feature and Amazon’s, “What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?”.
Persuasion architects also exploit this principle in the power of defaults. They know that the default setting of a user interface control has a powerful influence over people’s behaviour. We tend to see the default setting as a ‘recommended’ option — the option that most other people would choose in our situation. There are many examples of this being used as a black hat usability technique, where additional items (like insurance) are sneaked into the user’s basket.

Fig. 6: When you book a flight, RyanAir sneak travel insurance into your basket too.

Authority

“I’m more likely to act on information if it’s communicated by an expert.”

This principle is about influencing behaviour through credibility. People are more likely to take action if the message comes from a credible and authoritative source. That’s why you’ll hear people name dropping and it’s also what drives retweets on Twitter.

For design guidance, we can turn to the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab (founded by B.J. Fogg) as they have developed a number of guidelines for the credibility of web sites. These guidelines are based on research with over 4,500 people and are based on peer-reviewed, scientific research. Thanks to their research, we know that you should highlight the expertise in your organisation and in the content and services you provide; show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site; and avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.
Persuasion architects exploit this principle by providing glowing testimonials on their web site. If it’s an e-commerce site they will have highly visible icons showing the site is secure and can be trusted. If the site includes a forum, they’ll give people the opportunity to rate their peers: for example, some web forums (like Yahoo! Answers) let users vote up (or down) answers to posted questions. The top ranked answer is then perceived to be the most authoritative.

Fig. 8: UXExchange allows users to vote up and vote down answers to questions, ensuring that the most authoritative answer rises to the top.

Scarcity

“If it’s running out, I want it.”

This principle tells us that people are more likely to want something if they think it is available only for a limited time or if it is in short supply. Intriguingly, this isn’t just about the fear of missing out (a kind of reverse social proof). Scarcity actually makes stuff appear more valuable. For example, psychologists have shown that if you give people a chocolate biscuit from a jar, they rate the biscuit as more enjoyable if it comes from a jar with just 2 biscuits than from a jar with 10.
Persuasion architects exploit this by revealing scarcity in the design of the interface. This could be an item of clothing that is running short in your size, theatre tickets that are running out, or invitations to a beta launch. They know that perceived scarcity will generate demand.
Related to this is the ‘closing down’ sale. One of the artists at my friend’s art co-op recently decided to quit the co-op and announced this with a sign in-store. She had a big rush on sales of her art. Then she decided not to quit after all. So pretending to go out of business might be a ploy!

Fig. 9: Phrases like ‘only 4 left in stock’ seem to stimulate a primal urge not to miss out.

Framing

“I’m strongly influenced by the way prices are framed.”

This principle acknowledges that people aren’t very good at estimating the absolute value of what they are buying. People make comparisons, either against the alternatives you show them or some external benchmark.
One example is the way a restaurant uses an “anchor” dish on its menu: this is an overpriced dish whose sole aim is to make everything else near it look like a relative bargain. Another example is the Goldilocks effect where you provide users with three alternative choices. However, two of the choices are decoys: one is an overpriced, gold plated version of your product; another is a barely functional base version. The third choice — the one you want people to choose — sits midway between the other two and so feels “just right.”

Fig. 10: BT’s ‘Unlimited broadband and calls’ options seem deliberately overpriced compared to the ‘TV, Broadband and Calls’ option presumably since it wants to to boost its share of TV customers.

Salience

“My attention is drawn to what’s relevant to me right now.”

This principle tells us that people are more likely to pay attention to elements in your user interface that are novel (such as a coloured ‘submit’ button) and that are relevant to where there are in their task. For example, there are specific times during a purchase when shoppers are more likely to investigate a promotion or a special offer. By identifying these seducible moments you’ll learn when to offer a customer an accessory for a product they have bought.

Fig. 11: After placing an order for a TV at the Comet web site, the designers encourage you to add other relevant items to your basket. This is exactly the right time to make the offer: once you’ve ordered the TV they remind you that you’ll need to install it.

Where to go next

Here are some great resources to find out more about persuasion architecture.

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini: This is the book that started it all. Although it was first published in 1984, it still serves as a wonderful introduction to the research carried out in the area.
• MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy: A series of reports and guides from a UK Government think tank on how to apply these principles to improving public policy.
• Design with intent: A blog by Dan Lockton, providing many examples of how designers use these kinds of technique to influence behaviour.
• The behaviour wizard: A wizard-style interface that helps you work out how to create behaviour change, based on a model created by BJ Fogg.
• The Nudge blog: A blog by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein that describes many examples of behaviour change based on what they call ‘change architecture’.