CXL Scholarship- Digital psychology & Persuasion MiniDegree — Week 3 of 12
Hello, I am back with my third week of learning Digital Psychology and Persuasion minidegree at CXL institute and that is my third post about what I learned here, I will have 8 more weeks, so there is still a lot to learn!
4 Factors that Influence Decision Making
Every day we choose between a lot of decisions, what to wear, what to eat, where to go… But how much of this decision-making process is rational and how fueled by emotions? Psychologist says that there are four mental processes that have the influence on our decision:
Cognitive Biases
A systematic error in thinking that affect the decision and judgments people make
Memories
Past experiences can impact future decision making.
Reason
Abductive reasoning is based on creating and testing hypotheses using the best information available.
Emotions
Sometimes making decisions is really emotional. decisions are based on emotion.
First Impressions
Research suggests that first impressions are more powerful than actual facts and are formed within a matter of .05 seconds.
In the e-commerce world, first impressions are formed when a visitor sees your website for the first time. Every page on your site should be designed with this fact in mind.
Visual Design
As I wrote above, the website is mostly the first impression for our customers. One of the British researches they test what is the most important thing for customers in the website, Of all the feedback the test participants gave, 94% was about design, only 6% was about actual website content. The biggest influence on people’s first impressions of the site is visual appeal When participants did not like some aspect of the design, the whole website was often not explored further than the homepage and was not considered suitable.
Your Value Proposition
A value proposition tells the customer who you are, what you do, and why you’re better than the rest in a sentence or two
How to structure a solid value prop:
• Headline: State the end-benefit of your offering in 1 short sentence. You can mention the product and/or the customer.
• Sub-headline or a 2–3 sentence paragraph: A specific explanation of what you do/offer, for whom, and why is it useful.
• 3 bullet points: List the key benefits or features.
• Visual: Images communicate much faster than words.
Compelling Imagery and Graphics
There are some tips, which are good to follow when deciding which images use on your site:
• All images and graphics should complement the nature of your product. If you’re selling to an older audience, photos of teenagers on your site will be downright confusing.
• When using images of people, they should be smiling.
• Don’t go overboard. The goal is for visitors to see what’s essential and nothing more. Anything other than those essentials is a distraction.
• Go for professional pictures. Whether product photos, background images, or some other type of graphic, don’t settle for a low-quality image.
4. A personal “touch” that exudes trustworthiness.
People like to buy from those people, who are similar to themselves
Internal vs External Factors
External factors are considered objective, while the internal factors are subjective. External factors like highly contrasting colors are not more or less effective at grabbing attention. Internal factors, like habits, for example, are subject to change.
Cognitive Load
Cognitive load is the amount of mental energy that is required to process something, in this case, your website. Cognitive load theory was first introduced in 1988 by John Sweller, an educational psychologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia
Different Forms of Cognitive Load
Intrinsic Cognitive Load
The Intrinsic Cognitive load is related to the complexity of the information at hand. The load applied on the learner on the basis of two factors:
How hard the task or information at hand is.
How easily a user process that information.
This means that the complexity of task/concept and the users’ understanding of the task/concept are both responsible for factoring Cognitive load.
Extraneous Cognitive Load
If a learning experience is unnecessarily difficult to follow, it can lead to an Extraneous Cognitive load.
That basically means that all the cognitive energy that should be available for understanding or processing the task at hand are eaten up by this sort of learning experience.
This takes place due to poor design of learning experience or unsuccessful instructional strategies, which have a significant detrimental influence on the learning process by making a job more difficult than it should be.
Germane Cognitive Load
This type of cognitive load is formed by the construction of schemas and is considered to be desirable, as it assists in learning new skills and other information.
Schema helps to coordinate large volumes of knowledge that we process in an easy structure to reference and connect every day. It clubs different elements or pieces of data that are in some way connected to each other in the form of a map that can be easily checked at any time.
Eye Gaze Patterns
Eye gazing simply means looking at something with interest, usually for extended times.
Scientists and researchers conducted various studies on eye gazing in the past that explained how user read in an online environment.
Online Reading Patterns
-F Pattern: Users online love consuming text content in F shaped patterns. They usually read first few lines or headings on the top, and then they keep scrolling and looking for useful or interesting content by just gazing through the first few words on every line or paragraph.
-Layer cake pattern: Users fall in this pattern when they give more importance to headings and subheadings, and relatively give less consideration to the body of the text content. They might look at the body of the content when they find interesting work in the headings. People show this tendency to quickly find what they are looking for, to save their time and to avoid distraction.
-Spotted pattern: Users who show layer case scan pattern, quickly move to the spotted pattern when they find something interesting in the content. Here, they give attention to some area of content that looks like they are reading only spots of a para, hence the name.
According to Nielsen Norman Group’s 2008 study on online reading patterns, internet users read just 28% of an article’s copy during the average site visit. However, the fact that most readers don’t read an entire article is not to say they don’t understand that article
That was all about my third week of learning! Stay safe and we will meet next week!