Influence and interactive design

Hi there,

I’m back with more reviews on courses from the CRO minidegree by CXL Institute.

This week we talk about Influence and interactive design.

Week #7

Course Name: Influence and interactive design

Instructor: Brian Cugelman

Total Time: 35 minutes

In this course, Dr. Brian Cugelman presents an original framework, using research on behavioral patterns from a neurochemical and evolutionary psychology background.

He merges about 10 major scientific frameworks into tactical design strategies to keep customers repeatedly engaging with your product or service. You’ll learn to identify desired outcomes and achieve each one with a unique design strategy.

Let’s begin.

Desired outcomes overview:

Our objective here is to look at our target audience and the key outcomes that people try and achieve in the behavioral sciences. Things that we want people to do and the impacts we want them to achieve.

We concentrate on trying to get into a person’s head and make them aware of what we are proposing.

For example, we want them to go to our landing page and get them to buy.

We want them to know what we are offering them. They should understand what our website says and not be like “God, I can’t figure out what they’re saying here”.

Next, is motivation which is the most important from a neurochemical and psychology point of view.

After which, they might have the intention of buying. This s the intention phase. It is on their radar but they haven’t taken action yet. They want to find out more.

Here’s where we deal with trust. Trust stops action when people don’t have it.

Next, we get people to take short-term action. Like opting in or making a small purchase.

We don’t only want short-term behavior. We want things to be long-term. We want loyalty. When people are in a relationship with us, they act time and time again.

Abandoning - At a certain point, people stop taking action. They check out your competitors and do multiple different things. Instead of fearing abandonment, hardwire it into your marketing and engagement processes.

Design principles overview:

We have to be able to direct the attention of people to ourselves. Hence, we focus on the key principles we want to get into their head.

We need to:

Advocate ideas and principles that appeal to our target audience.

Evoke emotions that will motivate our target audience. Positive and negative messaging techniques.

Then we support decision-making to help make it easier for them.

Once they’re evaluating their decision to trust us, we assure them that we’re the right people to be able to help them, our product is a safe bet and our technology is easy to use. We assure them that they will achieve their outcomes.

But we can also screw all this up by having horrible user interfaces, unintuitive processes, and complex navigation paths.

Next, we talk about how we facilitate action. How do we get people to take action?

We do that by creating a path.

People will drop out along the way so we have to worry about how we re-engage them

Directing attention:

We use design principles to get people to focus on what we are offering them.

Pre-attentive processing:

When things break patterns, they instantly stand out to us. Apply these principles to get people to focus on where you want to make them focus.

Guess which pattern stands out in each of the blocks below.

 Let’s see how LinkedIn does it...

LinkedIn wants to get more people to sign up for their premium services. They make use of pre-attentive design principles by coloring and highlighting their “Upgrade” button. They bury their downgrade button so it's not immediately visible in the bulleted list.

Educating customers:

We want them to know exactly what it is we are offering. Let them test it. Look around. Get to know what it’s like.

Some people go for the features while some go for the benefits. We have to do both, to make sure that the target audience has a basic cognitive understanding of what we’re offering.

People have been exposed to a lot of marketing so we need to make sure we give them the facts.

Evoking emotion:

We do it through a value proposition, a promise. If you do X, you get Y.

There are so many models that motivate people. Dr. Cugelman has the most faith in the area of Evolutionary Psychology and research on the neurochemistry of motivation.

Take a look at this model.  It is the concept of our hierarchical needs from an Evolutionary psychology (and research on the neurochemistry) point of view.

We can motivate people through loss aversion – they want to avoid certain things that threaten their survival.

And also, through incentives – people want to move towards things they see as a survival advantage.

Let’s start at the bottom.

Immediate Psychological Needs: At this level, people are primarily concerned about avoiding bodily harm and worried for their safety. People are more concerned about avoiding threats than they are about health and safety. Products that target these feelings could be healthcare or insurance.

Self-Protection: At this level, people want to feel safe and secure. They are not worried about being killed or physically harmed.

Products that can serve this category of people are IT security, antivirus software, some of the types of insurance; not the ones that cover life-threatening illnesses but the ones that cover the danger of you being out of work, perhaps.

Affiliation: Here it’s all about raising people’s oxytocin levels by targeting their desire to interact with other people socially. People want to feel connected, feel like they belong to a community.

Social media is a perfect example of making people want to feel connected and liked by others.

Status: People want to feel a sense of power and this is reflected in their desire to show off their status. Serotonin is the brain chemical that activates this motivation in human beings. It is also responsible for mental health issues and is associated with people feeling like they lack power or lack control over their lives.

Brands play upon this desire by targeting people with messages that make them feel like they will belong if they were to purchase their products.

Mate Acquisition:

This reflects our desire for sex.

Mate Retention and Parenting:

This is all about our desire for love and for parenting from an evolutionary psychology point of view.

Decision making:

When people understand your offering they might move towards making a decision to buy. We then need to make sure that we support them completely in getting to the point of purchase and completing it.

Dr. Cugelman gives us an example of how Survey Monkey’s pricing table actually prevented him from purchasing it.

He wanted a survey tool for a maximum of two months. Survey Monkey’s price was $26/month but without randomization. With randomization, it was $300/year.

Dr. Cugelman couldn’t do without randomization but definitely didn’t want to pay $300 for only 2 months and so he didn’t purchase.

The point he’s trying to make is that we don’t want to prevent our prospects from purchasing but sometimes some of the options we present them with might lead them to not buying. As long as we have data to justify that we’ve made the right decision, we’re good. We don’t want to present people with way too many options and paralyze them into inaction.

On the other hand, we might offer them too few options which might not be enough for them to decide.

We might offer them different packages but what they want might be spread across different packages and we might end up blocking them from getting what they want.

We need to understand how people make decisions and structure our offerings so that we enable them to decide quickly.

There are two perspectives on this:

Rational decision making: where we assume that people will take the rational approach, weigh the pros and cons of our product and then make a decision

Irrational decision-making: This perspective has gained in popularity in recent years. People are influenced by cognitive biases and are ruled more by their hearts and minds than by pure rationale alone.

Your value proposition or core offering is what’s important and presents a good opportunity for you to trigger the irrational decision-making impulses of people. Especially if your competitors are not using these strategies.

Take the example of Amazon.

They offer a list price of $79.98 with an actual price of $69.66.

They also explicitly state that you save $10.32 or 13% by taking advantage of this deal.

Now there was no need for them to have done that because people could have done the math. But research on price framing says that stating such things clearly helps move people along to the point of purchase. Clearly, this is something that would help clinch the sale more often than not.

Trust and Credibility:

When a person has made up their mind to take action, the only thing that can stop them from completing the purchase is distrust. We need to make sure we do all we can to gain their trust and never break it.

Sometimes we have the halo effect where people like us and trust us instantly and even if we mess up a little after that, they tend to disregard it.

But if we are hit by the ‘devil’ effect, people are not going to trust us and it’s going to be a lot harder for us to win back their trust.

In an online scenario, it can take a fraction of a second to gain or lose our prospect’s trust. In some cases, superficial things like the design of your page can matter quite a bit.

We have to be able to gain our customer’s trust to the point where they feel comfortable putting in their credit card details and making a purchase.

Credibility is the key to getting trust. There are two dimensions to credibility.

Expertise: When you’re the domain expert, people trust you because they know you can deliver what they need. They’re sure they’ll get the outcomes they are looking for.

Honesty: When you have high integrity and ethics, people automatically begin to trust you and are more willing to do business with you.

Trick psychology doesn’t work and even if it does, it will only be a matter of time before people find out and blacklist you.

Creating a path:

Just because our customers are motivated and they trust us, doesn’t mean we’ve got the deal sealed.

What we now need to do is to provide an easy path for them to take action and complete the checkout process. If the oath we present them with is convoluted, they’re not going to buy. If we ask them for too much information or for information they might not have, they’ll abandon the process.

This is called Friction. Friction happens when the energy required to do something is greater than the motivation for the actual outcome.

Let’s take a look at an on-page path.

Like a landing page. We want to use design principles to take people from step 1 to step 2 and finally step 3.

Much of the behavioral impact we can make here has little to do with marketing and is more centered around simple buying mechanisms and excellent user experience.

Re-engaging customers:

Most companies don’t like acknowledging that their customers drop out in huge numbers. But it happens all the time.

People can drop out for many reasons.

Instead of getting defensive about it, companies should design strategies to re-engage their customers.

There are two main areas you have to look at when it comes to re-engagement.

Motivation:

If people aren’t motivated, you can try to motivate them again. Remind them of the outcomes they are looking for or why they signed up in the first place. Motivation levels can fluctuate over time but it’s our job to fire people up as much as can.

There, however, might come a time when we might need to give up on our customers. In the case where they’re really not interested anymore and have just stopped caring.

Ability:

It could also be that people lack the skills or the ability to do what we’re asking them to do. Or we’re creating so much friction that it’s making it impossible for our customers to complete the task at hand.

We need to analyze why people are dropping out.

Is it a problem of motivation or ability?

If someone lacks motivation and we try selling them on how easy it is to do things, our message isn’t going to resonate with them.

If people lack the skills to complete what they’re doing and need a helping hand, but instead you try to fire them up with motivation, it’s not going to work.

The important thing is to identify why people have dropped out and re-engage them accordingly.

What I liked about the course:

So much information packed into 35 minutes. CXL institute delivers another mind-blowing blast of knowledge.

I loved the model on hierarchical needs. It shows you exactly what people think of and want, at various stages in their lives. It just makes sense then that all of the messaging we do, needs to focus on the pain points our target audience is dealing with, at that moment in time.

I also liked the way Dr. Cugelman presented this information. It was clear, concise and to the point.

What I didn’t like about the course:

There was nothing I didn’t like. I loved the course content.

That’s all I have for this week. I’ll see you again next week with another review.

Till then, stay safe!

Sincerely,

Ryan