Hello. This is Devan Rome. Welcome to Part 7 of my 12-part series reviewing the concepts I’ve learned in CXL’s Digital Psychology and Persuasion Program. Here is a link to the course. In this series, I review the principles discussed and taught in the course. I also write about some of my opinions of the course. With that said and out of the way, I will now get on to this week (week 7’s) review of the course. I am now about half way through this 12-part series, and I am certainly learning a lot.
I will start with Brian Cugelman’s course on Influence and Interactive Design. He gives stages. The stages are attention (getting into their awareness), learning, desiring (motivation), deciding (intent), trusting (confidence), intention, trusting, acting (short term), and maintaining (long term). The first few are basically non-negotiable. You should also plan for abandoning. Now for the design principles overview video. The first thing we want to do is to be able to direct attention. We also want to advocate ideas and solutions. We then want to facilitate action.
In facilitation, you want to provide a path, trigger responses, and support progress.
Now for the directing attention. We will use design principles to direct attention. The principle you should know is pre-attentive processing. There are a few principles. Number, enclosure, size, orientation, additional elements, contrast, curvature, subtracted elements, and shape.
Most CTA buttons should follow this principle. Breaking patterns control where people look.
Now for educating customers. They don’t need to know all of the details, they just need to know how to understand the page. Our goal with education is to give the audience a great simulation of what the product is live. Features tell, but the benefits sell. You have to do both.
Now for evoking emotion. Brian Cugelman says to do this to a value proposition. There are a lot of models on how to do this best. Cugelman prefers a neurochemical model. People care about, in roughly this order:
- Immediate physiological needs
- Self-protection
- Affiliation
- Mate acquiring
- Mate retention
- Breeding
Now for the decision-making video. I like this guy. He’s succinct. If someone cares what we are doing. You want to avoid giving people analysis paralysis. You also don’t want to structure your offering so that people don’t get what you’re selling. What is now popular is the irrational model of decision making. You must make both rational and irrational appeals. You have to spell things out for people, often.
Now for trust and credibility. Sometimes, people might want to make a purchase, but they don’t trust you. Something you want going for you is a halo effect. Good designs help you make a good first impression. In a trusting situation, the truster is almost always the one taking the risk. He talks about Elements of credibility.
Now for creating a path. This is where you worry about the ability for people to go forward. Your forms, checkout process, the engineering on your system must be simple and easy for your users. You want to minimize friction. Using good design principles will help.
Now for re-engaging customers. Many companies struggle to hold onto data. You should be honest about this within your organization. There are many reasons why a customer may abandon. The two main things for you to look at are motivation and ability. You should think about how what you’re doing connects to the other things that motivate your audience or audiences. Do what it takes to try and re-engage your audience people. One reason to do this is to remind people why they selected you in the first place. This is a good tactic, probably. It reminds me of what Tom B did to Daisy in The Great Gatsby. He made an emotional appeal and asks her to remember all the good times, and he asks her if wants to lose all the benefits he got. Interesting idea, Thomas. Or should I say F. Scott Fitzgerald?
Dr. Cugelman also gives good flash test as a bonus for testing your website’s efficacy. I will have to be sure to download that.
Now back to Mr. Roger Dooley’s course on cognitive biases. People don’t want to be disagreed with. They quite dislike it. People are usually biased towards what they already believe. I’ve heard about this bias basically ad nauseum.
Now for the Barnum / Forer effect. This is something that “psychics” and palm readers use, and people often believe this type of stuff. Same thing with horoscopes. Now for design tweaks and brainy hacks. Higher effort (in font) may sometimes justify higher price. Sales can increase as much as 27% with adjectives. The ones that work are vivid, sensory, emotional / nostalgic, specific, and branded. Textural metaphors often help. For example, saying “having a rough day?” rather than “having a bad day?”. Doing this can help you activate sensory areas of your brain. With that said, you may want to consider words like this, that have a “sensory” meaning, in your copywriting.
Now four words that double persuasion. These are the four words “BYAF”. This stands for but you are free. By giving people the freedom to do something, you are helping remind them they have a choice.
Now for priming. Showing someone a picture of money can make them more selfish or greedy. Basically, it’s about using language or visual cues. that prime your audience for your offer. Mr. Dooley talks about Ross Perot. His point is to use your credibility first before talking about your influence. People who heard Ross Perot speak before getting his bio and testimonials preferred him a little less than people who learned his bio and testimonials for. If you’re selling to guys. People primed with a picture of a woman are shown to become impatient and start becoming focused on short term gains. Well, that kind of explains a lot. Hmmmm. People who saw a fancier font actually thought soup tasted better compared to people who saw a more basic font. This is another good example, and it further shows me why I should be sure to focus on good font in my web design work.
Okay. That’s good for this week. I will be back next week with info on week 8.
