Psychology Flashcards
🙈 Hick’s Law
More options leads to harder decisions.
Hick’s Law predicts that the time and the effort it takes to make a decision, increases with the number of options. The more choices, the more time users take to make their decisions.
Checklist:
- Find an area where you have a lot of options or a lot of repetitions.
- Try to either reduce the number of options or find ways to hide items. (Do they all need to be displayed at once? #progressive disclosure)
- If you can’t minimize the options, try to put them in an easily skimmable order and make sure the items are familiar; else, it won’t work
Examples:
1. In a travel booking app like Airbnb, having too many options can lead to a paradox of choice (and a churn!). Can be reduced via personalization.
- Trello’s 3rd signup step has a dropdown with 15 options. That makes it hard to pick one
- Duolingo’s list of lessons can sometimes be overwhelming
🙈 Confirmation Bias
People look for evidence that confirms what they think
People tend to search for, interpret, prefer, and recall information in a way that reinforces their personal beliefs or hypotheses.
Examples:
1. In times of crisis it’s hard not to look for what we want to believe in
2. Facebook optimizes for what users want to see and creates “filter bubbles”. Their feed shows you more of the information that confirms what you believe in (whether that’s true or not)
🙈 Priming
Previous stimuli influence users’ decision.
Subtle visual or verbal suggestions help users recall specific information, influencing how they respond. Priming works by activating an association or representation in users short-term memory just before another stimulus or task is introduced.
Example:
1. Brave primes you to focus on the importance of privacy during their onboarding, making you more likely to choose DuckDuckGo instead of Google search. Brave can hence subtly (but respectfully) reduce the brand awareness of their number one competitor: Google.
🙈 Cognitive Load
Total amount of mental effort that is required to complete a task.
Cognitive load is the total amount of mental effort that is required to complete a task. You can think of it as the processing power needed by the user to interact with a product. If the information that needs to be processed exceeds the user’s ability to handle it, the cognitive load is too high.
- Hopper’s results page has loads of information to parse, making the task of choosing a date harder
- Putting steps on different screens
🙈 Anchoring Bias
Users rely heavily on the first piece of information they see.
The initial information that users get affects subsequent judgments. Anchoring often works even when the nature of the anchor doesn’t have any relation with the decision at hand. It’s useful to increase perceived value.
- Tinder’s pricing table shows the most expensive subscription plan first (the anchor) so that the other plans look inexpensive in comparison
- Brick and mortar shops often display very expensive items in the front with visible price tags so that the item you end up seeking seems cheaper.
🙈 Nudge
Subtle hints can affect users’ decisions
People tend to make decisions unconsciously. Small cues or context changes can encourage users to make a certain decision without forcing them. This is typically done through priming, default option, salience and perceived variety.
(Consider nudging users in the right direction before forcing steps.)
🙈 Progressive Disclosure
Users are less overwhelmed if they’re exposed to complex features later
An interface is easier to use when complex features are gradually revealed later. During the onboarding, show only the core features of your product, and as users get familiar, unveil new options. It keeps the interface simple for new users and progressively brings power to advanced users.
- Tinder is One of the best examples of progressive disclosure
🙈 Fitts’s Law
Large and close elements are easier to interact with
Fitts’s law is a predictive model which states that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. This is mainly used to model the act of pointing, either physically (e.g., with a hand) or virtually (e.g., with a computer mouse).
- Amazon’s purchase screen dedicates one third of the screen to your subscription setup vs. a tiny radio button for the one-time purchase.
- Adobe uses a tiny subscription management link in their auto-renewal email to discourage people from cancelling their subscription. This is a common dark pattern unfortunately.
🙈 Banner Blindness
Users tune out the stuff they get repeatedly exposed to
Users have learned to ignore content that resembles ads, is close to ads, or appears in locations traditionally dedicated to ads.
- When your most important CTA for revenues is mistaken for an ad…
- When you mix real content with ads, people start blocking everything…
Decoy Effect
Create a new option that’s easy to discard
When we are choosing between two alternatives, the addition of a third, less attractive option (the decoy) can influence our perception of the original two choices. Decoys are “asymmetrically dominated”: they are completely inferior to one option (the target) but only partially inferior to the other (the competitor). For this reason, the decoy effect is sometimes called the “asymmetric dominance effect.”
- The decoy was the “Print only” plan at the same price as the “Print + Web” plan, and most people bought the latter!
🙈 Framing
The way information is presented affects how users make decisions
The framing effect happens when your decision is influenced more by how the information is presented (or worded) than by the information itself. It’s partly due to the fact that people evaluate their losses and acquire insight in an asymmetric fashion (see Loss Aversion and Prospect Theory, by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky).
- Blinkist could anchor the status quo (reading without Blinkist) as very time-consuming helps users see the value of their product and frame the main benefit of their app (saving time)
- Tesla’s charging interface highlights the costs, but not the benefits of being electric. Framing the charging experience around that benefit (while still displaying the costs for transparency) could have addressed this issue
🙈 Attentional Bias
Users’ thoughts filter what they pay attention to
🙈 Empathy Gap
People underestimate how much emotions influence user behaviors
🙈 Visual Anchors
Elements used to guide users’ eyes
🙈 Von Restorff Effect
People notice items that stand out more
