5 Simple UX Principles to Guide your Product Design

Photo credit: Orin Zebest

Few things in life are constant: death, taxes, and strangers asking “So what do you do?” within a minute of a handshake.

As a UX designer, I’ve had a lot of practice over the years trying to nail down my answer.

Report Advertisement

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

It’s my job to be inside a user’s brain. I need to look at design from the mindspace of a user (actually, lots of users) and squash potential problems or confusion.

This never-ending process requires keeping UX present before, during, and after the build is complete. It’s always a challenge to act with the user in mind—influences like due dates and bottom lines sometimes cloud the way.

To help keep your product on the right path, I’ve assembled a list of 5 UX principles I use to guide my design process. Understanding how and why to make UX decisions goes a long way in explaining things to others on the team, which goes an even longer way in getting said UX decisions into the final product.

1. Digestibility

Good design is easy to digest—the brain shouldn’t have to expend a ton of energy to figure out what the heck it’s looking at. With any luck, people will just “get it” without needing a 6-section explanation.

This goes beyond clear, easy-to-read copy. People sometimes need guidance to make decisions, so a menu with a list of 12 inline items may seem daunting. Organizing with some hierarchy (size, color, icons) can help highlight the more common choices, which allows someone to find what they’re looking for faster.

Another good example of digestible design is the new user guide, often presented as staggered tips that a person can process one at a time. But imagine the opposite, hitting a brand-new user with a whole stack of instructions, removed from the context of the product. No one likes a confusing surprise.

Consider all the decisions you’re asking someone to make with your product to get to the bottom of the funnel. The brain has a limited amount of cognitive resources during the day—using them up needlessly is rude.

2. Clarity

Good design is honest. Aside from understanding the words in your value prop, you need the user to understand the actual value. Being coy or unclear about your product isn’t going to win any fans.

Related to value, pricing is an area where clarity is everything. Users aren’t going to click “Buy now” if they can’t figure out what you’re asking them to pay. While shady “free trials” that switch to auto-billing might be the norm, I doubt they’re winning any popularity contests.

This may sound cheesy, but a good plan is to simply follow the Golden Rule. Explain things like you’d want them explained to you. Make things as clear as you can. You know what you’d expect out of the products you choose to use, so don’t you dare build something less.

3. Trust

Good design is easy to trust. Before asking someone to complete an action, make every effort to help them understand why the task is needed. Being honest and clear in explanations builds trust at each step, leading to increasingly easier conversions down the funnel.

Consider Uber (and Lyft, depending on which way you swing). They’ve made catching a ride so easy that a 100-year-old industry is now in chaos. The app saves your payment info, which you might not feel comfortable exchanging with a stranger, and facilitates a trustworthy, painless transaction.

Removing doubt will create a growingly invisible experience. As decisions require less and less resources, using the product becomes easier and more enjoyable.

4. Familiarity

Ground-breaking design is awesome, but design that converts is better. New frameworks and flashy plugins might look nice on Dribbble, but if no one is clicking the “buy” buttons, you’ve got a problem.

Platform guidelines exist for a reason. While it might seem that making your product look exactly the same from platform to platform is the main goal, be careful to pay respect to the sticky details of each OS. Using familiar patterns, icons, and presentational styles is a great way to look native, even if you’re not.

Testing your solutions on actual devices goes a long way to ensuring things feel at home in each environment, which is where a tool like InVision shines. Pretending to be a user is easier when you’re not also having to pretend to use a device.

5. Delight

It’s been said that an idea isn’t enough anymore, that execution is what wins the war. Ironically, the more the team executes, the less the user has to. The more simplicity you can bring to a complex problem, the more delighted the user will be with your solution.

The ultimate delight is when someone forgets your product is a “product”—where it’s so useful that it doesn’t even read as a product anymore, just simply as some useful thing in a person’s life.

Fundamental Principles of Great UX Design

Fundamental Principles of Great UX Design | How to Deliver Great UX Design

Send your questions to Ask UXmatters and get answers from some of the top professionals in UX.

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our expert panel looks at the importance of considering the fundamental principles of great design—not just UX design principles, but design principles in general. Our panel also discusses how great UX design takes place within organizations, looking at this topic on many different levels. How can you create great designs when working with a variety of designers with different backgrounds and while working within the constraints of project-defined goals? How can the presence of User Experience at the C-level and, in general, garnering support from the C-level affect our ability to implement great designs. How can we produce great designs in a repeatable manner? Keep reading for the answers to all of these important questions.

In my monthly column Ask UXmatters, our experts provide answers to our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: ask.uxmatters@uxmatters.com.

The following experts have contributed answers to this edition of Ask UXmatters:

• Leo Frishberg—Product Design Manager at Intel Corporation
• Pabini Gabriel-Petit—Principal Consultant at Strategic UX; Publisher and Editor in Chief, UXmatters; Founding Director of Interaction Design Association (IxDA); UXmatters columnist
• Peter Hornsby—Web Design and UX Manager at Royal London; UXmatters columnist
• Jordan Julien—Independent Experience Strategy Consultant
• Jim Nieters—Global Head, User Experience, of HP’s Consumer Travel Division; UXmatters columnist
• Eryk Pastwa—Vice President of Design at Creatix
• Daniel Szuc—Principal and Cofounder of Apogee Usability Asia Ltd.
• Jo Wong—Principal and Cofounder of Apogee Usability Asia Ltd

Q: What are the fundamental principles of great UX design?—from a UXmatters reader

For designers working in the ever-changing field of user experience, it’s always important to consider the fundamental principles of design.”—Pabini Gabriel-Petit

“For designers working in the ever-changing field of user experience, it’s always important to consider the fundamental principles of design,” responds Pabini. “At many levels, the nature of the work that we do constantly shifts and evolves—whether we’re  designing for new technologies or different contexts, ranging from apps for personal use to cross-channel experiences.

“When we’re called upon to solve design problems that we haven’t solved before, design principles provide a sound basis for devising innovative solutions. For example, in recent years, we’ve seen many new trends in technology products—such as cloud computing, the proliferation of mobile devices and tablets, big data, the Internet of things, and wearable computing. All of these trends have required us to look at design afresh and come up with new interaction models, design patterns, and standards—many of which are still evolving.

When we’re called upon to solve design problems that we haven’t solved before, design principles provide a sound basis for devising innovative solutions.”—Pabini Gabriel-Petit

“Visual design trends shift as well—sometimes for the better; sometimes not. For example, in the recent past, we saw the prevalent use of small, light-gray fonts that were both too small and too low contrast for good readability—for almost anybody, not just those with serious visual deficits. Now we’re seeing bigger fonts—solving that readability problem I just mentioned—and the flat look everywhere. The flat look is a pleasing aesthetic for the most part, but not when it’s hard to tell the difference between a text box and a button. Clickable and tappable affordances should invite interaction—and that usually means adding at least of bit of dimensionality to them. By paying attention to design principles, which have their basis in human factors, UX designers can avoid creating ill-considered design solutions.”

Fundamental Design Principles

Ensure that users are contextually aware of where they are within their journey.”—Jordan Julien

“This question is as broad as asking, ‘What are the fundamentals of medicine or engineering?’ remarks Jordan. While there are specializations within the field of user experience, here’s my attempt at identifying some key fundamental principles of UX design:

• Be contextual—It’s often easy to think of a user journey like a storybook. If you open most books to any given page and select a word, you’ll be met with an abundance of context on the page. You’ll usually see the title of the book, the chapter, the page number, and the word will appear contextually within a sentence, paragraph, and page. Ensure that users are contextually aware of where they are within their journey.
• Be human—Be approachable, trustworthy, and transparent. Provide human interactions over machine-like interactions.
• Be findable—Establish a strong information scent. Provide wayfinding signs.
• Be easy—Reduce the user’s cognitive workload whenever possible. Be consistent and clear, and establish a strong visual hierarchy.
• Be simple—Establish a strong signal-to-noise ratio. Avoid distractions, jargon, and long loading times.

World-class UX design rests on and is synonymous with world-class system design—as long the system spans both the foundation technology and the people who benefit from it.”—Leo Frishberg

“I’ll admit that these are broad principles with far-reaching implications. Some may be more important to interaction designers or information architects, while others may be more important to usability specialists or user researchers.”

“For me,” replies Leo, “the fundamentals of all great design go back to Vitruvius, the Roman engineer who introduced three principles to guide architectural design:

• Venustas—Beauty, or Delight
• Firmitas—Firmness, or Soundness
• Utilitas—Utility, or Commodity

“We can easily map these three principles to the BTU model—Business (Commodity), Technology (Soundness), and User (Delight)—which is in common use. Once you have addressed each of these areas, you can attain the level of elegance, in which you apply the fewest resources for the maximum gain. World-class UX design rests on and is synonymous with world-class system design—as long the system spans both the foundation technology and the people who benefit from it.”

Focus on user needs and make them the focal point of your design process.”—Eryk Pastwa

“Focus on user needs and make them the focal point of your design process,” says Eryk. “It’s a cliché, but that’s all UX design is about. From a practical viewpoint, designers should understand that each user’s point of view is unique, so we must be empathetic and step outside our box to understand others’ points of view as much as possible.”

For more design principles, Pabini recommends that you read the following articles on UXmatters:

• “Accessibility First—for a Better User Experience for All”—by Whitney Quesenbery
• “Achieving and Balancing Consistency in User Interface Design”—by Michael Zuschlag
• “First, Do No Harm”—by Pabini Gabriel-Petit
• “Principles Over Standards”—by Peter Hornsby
• “So the Necessary May Speak”—by Luke Wroblewski
• “The Complexity of Simplicity”—by Luke Wroblewski

Delivering Great Design

Being able to deliver great design depends not only on your design ability, but on managing the design process and other participants in that process effectively.”—Peter Hornsby

“This is a very difficult question to answer in a way that is actionable,” answers Peter. “I could say something like ‘Listen to your users,’ but really, what would that tell you that a million other articles don’t? Although I wrote about some of the principles that I use when designing in my UXmatters column ‘Principles Over Standards,’ I think what you may be driving at is really more about how you can produce great design. But I don’t believe there is a set of principles that are applicable in all situations.

“Great design is the result of so many factors—and only a few are within your control, particularly when you first start out as a designer. Being able to deliver great design depends not only on your design ability, but on managing the design process and other participants in that process effectively. For example, you need to understand your client’s goals and drivers, as well as the strengths and limitations of the underlying technology. You need to understand when and how to delegate tasks and how to share ideas effectively with other designers and product team members.

You can learn as much from failures as successes, but only if you take the time to reflect on why something worked or didn’t work.”—Peter Hornsby

“Probably the most difficult thing of all is accepting that sometimes you cannot deliver the best design you’re capable of—just the best design that you can deliver within the context in which you’re working.

“When I first started driving, my great-uncle advised me to narrate what I was doing as I drove—to force me to reflect on what I was doing and why I was doing it. Design is a very personal thing, so this may not work for you, but what I’ve found works well for me is taking time to reflect on what I’m doing, what other designers have done to solve similar problems, and what my stakeholders—not just users—want to achieve. You can learn as much from failures as successes, but only if you take the time to reflect on why something worked or didn’t work.”

The Layers of Great UX Design

Establish metrics to ensure that your designs are great. … I like to measure five factors that define whether a site or product meets users’ needs, because these are factors that UX design can and should impact.”—Jim Nieters

“To highlight the fundamentals of great UX design, we need to look at several layers,” states Jim, “sort of like peeling an onion. I’m assuming that I should start at the beginning, but please note that what I’m writing here is in no way comprehensive. That said, Pabini Gabriel-Petit and I are writing a column for UXmatters that talks about how leaders can create a UX practice that consistently and repeatably delivers great user experiences. Please take a look at the first installment and let us know what you think. In the meantime, here’s my answer to the reader’s question.

“At the first level, all great user experiences are easy to use and delightful to their users. They enable users to perform their tasks with ease and engage them in the right ways. But, not only is great design delightful, it also monetizes well. You can establish metrics to ensure that your designs are great. For consumer sites, you can measure users’ success in getting through different parts of a process funnel—from recognition, to engagement and interaction with the site, to successful accomplishment of whatever the site’s goal is—for example, sales or signups. In addition, I like to measure five factors that define whether a site or product meets users’ needs, because these are factors that UX design can and should impact:

• discoverability—Can users discover how to accomplish their tasks the first time they look at a product?
• learnability—Can users easily learn a product’s interaction models and predict how to move from one part of the product to another? On repeat visits, can they remember how to engage with the product to accomplish their goals?
• efficiency—Once users have become repeat users, can they accomplish repetitive tasks quickly and easily?
• system performance—How nimbly does the user interface respond when users click a button or interact with the product? If it’s slow, designers have a part to play in improving the total experience, including system response times when user are performing tasks.
• delight—Does the product delight users? If you can instill an emotional connection to a product in users, they will champion your product and share its virtues.

The bigger question is not how we know a product has a great design. It’s how you get there—in other words, what it takes to produce great user experiences repeatably.”—Jim Nieters

“To me, though, the bigger question is not how we know a product has a great design. It’s how you get there—in other words, what it takes to produce great user experiences repeatably.

“The large majority of well-designed products have been designed following a user-centered design (UCD) approach. In this process, user researchers first identify user task flows, challenges, and emotional triggers, providing insights that will inform the proposed design solution. Then UX designers leverage this research in their designs, ensuring that they are both easy to use and satisfy the emotional needs of the user. And finally, usability specialists validate the designs through usability testing, or evaluative research. This basic approach pretty consistently results in useful, usable products.

However, while usability is absolutely necessary, it’s not always sufficient. If you want to produce a truly great design, you’ll need a few additional ingredients. First, you need great researchers and designers. Where do these artisans come from? They can come from anywhere—from any background or any institution. The reality, though, is that most great designers have an education in Human Computer Interaction, whether through formal education or independent study. They are steeped in the general mindset that they’re not just building a user interface. Rather, they understand their users’ needs and optimize their designs for those users—and have years of practice doing just that.

Just because the user interface is the easiest part of any application to build … many leaders believe that it’s easy to design a user interface well. This is far from the truth.”—Jim Nieters

“In my experience,” continues Jim, “the biggest obstacle to great design is that most companies have typical Web developers create a user interface and assume that it will be fine. Just because the user interface is the easiest part of any application to build—it generally takes only 10–20% of the effort that coding the back-end system requires—many leaders believe that it’s easy to design a user interface well. This is far from the truth. It’s amazing to me that—even after experiencing examples of great design over several decades and seeing the growth of User Experience into a more mature discipline—so many still believe this. While you may be able to build a user interface quickly, it may not serve its users’ needs well. Great UX design requires skilled UX teams, and companies must give these teams the resources and the deference that they deserve if they want to have user interfaces that differentiate their products. If they don’t, they’ll probably get a user interface that sucks, and they’ll have to redesign it.

“It’s still far too common for companies to say that they want to invest in User Experience and differentiate their products through design, when they really want to produce user interfaces on a shoestring budget. They think that they can hire one designer or one UX leader and get great user experiences. It’s just not that easy! Or, companies may say that they want to be the new Apple or Amazon of their marketplace, but their level of investment does not reflect their stated goals.

To produce great user experiences repeatably, you need a UX leader whose voice is equal to that of the leaders in Product Management and Engineering.”—Jim Nieters

“Finally, to produce great user experiences repeatably, you need a UX leader whose voice is equal to that of the leaders in Product Management and Engineering. You need a leader who knows how to structure an organization in the right way. One of a UX leader’s goals is to identify and put the right processes in place, ensuring that User Experience is a key part of the process. Unfortunately, if User Experience reports into Product Management, for example, Product Managers may force the UX team to compromise on design—meaning you’ll get almost good, but not great user interfaces.

“So, as I said at the outset, great design produces great user experiences, and User Experience is multilayered. I’ll leave off with this note: User Experience, as a discipline, hurts itself deeply when UX professionals provide contradictory answers about how to produce great user experiences. As Matthew Holloway said in his keynote address at UX STRAT 2014, other disciplines don’t do this. Marketing has a clear message and value proposition. So do Engineering, Product Management, and Quality Assurance Testing. What’s ours? Let’s make sure we can articulate our message clearly, simply, and consistently. Then maybe more organizations will recognize what it takes to repeatably produce great user experiences!”

The Nature of Great UX Design

Great UX design meets user needs that a business fully understands and nurtures.”—Daniel Szuc & Jo Wong

Dan and Jo suggest, “Great UX design

• meets user needs that a business fully understands and nurtures
• maps to business needs, whose improvement we can track over time
• connects to data points that speak to the product or service story
• uses a well-defined and well-understood design framework that scales well and promotes consistent and usable interactions
• leverages design patterns that promote useful, usable, and delightful interactions
• maps to well-defined design principles that connect to brand principles and business goals and directions
• undergoes continuous improvement through customer and business feedback
• tries out new ideas and conducts experiments that do not disrupt the core value
• is led and owned by people who are well educated and grounded in deep knowledge of design foundations
• is visible and improves through structured and balanced critique”

To learn more about these principles, Dan and Jo recommend that you read their recent UXmatters article, “Designing Projects for Success: A More Humane UX Practice.” 

The principles of design

The elements of design

• LINE – The linear marks made with a pen or brush or the edge created when two shapes meet.
• SHAPE – A shape is a self contained defined area of geometric (squares and circles), or organic (free formed shapes or natural shapes). A positive shape automatically creates a negative shape.
• DIRECTION – All lines have direction – Horizontal, Vertical or Oblique. Horizontal suggests calmness, stability and tranquillity. Vertical gives a feeling of balance, formality and alertness. Oblique suggests movement and action
• SIZE – Size is simply the relationship of the area occupied by one shape to that of another.
• TEXTURE – Texture is the surface quality of a shape – rough, smooth, soft hard glossy etc.
• COLOUR – Colour is light reflected off objects. Color has three main characteristics: hue or its name (red, green, blue, etc.), value (how light or dark it is), and intensity (how bright or dull it is).

The principles of design

1. BALANCE – Balance in design is similar to balance in physics. A large shape close to the center can be balanced by a small shape close to the edge. Balance provides stability and structure to a design. It’s the weight distributed in the design by the placement of your elements.
2. PROXIMITY – Proximity creates relationship between elements. It provides a focal point. Proximity doesn’t mean that elements have to be placed together, it means they should be visually connected in someway.
3. ALIGNMENT – Allows us to create order and organisation. Aligning elements allows them to create a visual connection with each other.
4. REPETITION – Repetition strengthens a design by tying together individual elements. It helps to create association and consistency. Repetition can create rhythm (a feeling of organized movement).
5. CONTRAST – Contrast is the juxtaposition of opposing elements (opposite colours on the colour wheel, or value light / dark, or direction – horizontal / vertical). Contrast allows us to emphasize or highlight key elements in your design.
6. SPACE – Space in art refers to the distance or area between, around, above, below, or within elements. Both positive and negative space are important factors to be considered in every design.

Fonts and Font manager resources.

https://www.dafont.com/

https://fonts.google.com/?category=Serif

https://nexusfont.en.softonic.com/

What are examples of Professional Development Opportunities

What are examples of professional development opportunities?


Examples of activities that contribute to professional growth and development:

• Continuing Education.
• Participation in professional organizations.
• Research.
• Improve job performance.
• Increased duties and responsibilities.
• Approaches to professional development:
• Skill Based Training.
• Job Assignments.

Professional development planning

Training needs analysis

A key part of your development as a researcher is to identify the development you require to enhance your skills. The first stage of this process is to audit your current skills and strengths and identify areas for development. This is often called ‘training needs analysis’ by employers, graduate schools etc. but the approach is useful for considering all development opportunities, not only formal training courses. Your university or employer may support this with a formal process, using forms and meetings with your supervisor or principal investigator. If not, it is something you can decide to do for yourself. Once you have completed this thinking you will be able to create a professional development plan detailing the training and development opportunities you need.

A Training Needs Analysis is an examination of the skills you need in order to complete a particular task against your current aptitudes. For example if you are giving a poster presentation at a conference you might break down the skills required in the following way:

Skills associated with giving a poster presentation

• Discipline specific skills: completing the research and checking data
• Communication, design and writing skills: organising the data in a clear and visually engaging way
• Inter-personal and presentation skills: presenting the poster confidently to conference delegates
• Networking skills: making the most of the opportunities presented at the conference

You would then compare these against the skills you have and the confidence you have in them. As a result of this you might decide that you need some training or further preparation to help you present effectively; after the presentation you might find it useful to record the skills that you have had an opportunity to demonstrate.

Planning

Many successful people follow a plan for their career; this can vary from a detailed plan to a broad direction. However, any plan should include clear and achievable targets with deadlines for completing different activities. It should also detail how you are going to access particular training and development. You could consider the training opportunities that exist in your lab, office or department, and that are available to you via your supervisor. Some opportunities will be formal courses, others might be hands-on sessions provided by other researchers or gaining experience through involvement in new areas of work. Your university or employer is likely to offer a number of organisation-wide training events that you can find out about. It is important to consider development opportunities available beyond academia through professional and disciplinary organisations, work and voluntary experience and independent training providers.

Remember: not all training has to be provided by practical courses or workshops. You might set yourself other tasks such as working through a short online course, undertaking some desk-based research, talking to qualified colleagues and setting your own targets and timetable.

The Vitae RDF Planner has been designed to make it easy for you to identify strengths and areas for development, and to plan and record your training and development.

New to professional development planning? Try our online course: PDP ROC.

Reviewing

You should see your development plan as a dynamic document that you continue to return to and amend throughout your career and as part of your wider personal and professional development. You can review your career, where you are and where you want to be, at many different points, for example to:

• develop in your current role
• prepare for promotion
• find a new direction/job.

The key to managing your development is to review your training plan regularly (perhaps once every three months). You can then discuss your needs and progress when you meet with your main supervisor or research manager. You may want to talk about:

• whether you have completed the training you identified
• whether you have learnt what you hoped from your training
• what development needs you still feel you have
• the setting of priorities and deadlines for future development.

As you undertake your research you may also identify further training needs. Talk these issues over with your main supervisor, peers or other contacts. Get their advice on what opportunities will help you to respond to the challenges presented by your research and by your wider career aims.

Career planning

Have you ever thought about where your job is taking you?

Developing a career plan will ensure you take active control of your career rather than making passive decisions about your development with no clear career direction. Enjoying your work and the environment you work in is essential if you are to have a fulfilling career ahead.

Many people are daunted by the thought of putting together a career plan, but breaking down the process into the following four steps will help you get started.

• Self assessment 
  Put together a personal inventory of who you are and what makes you tick as a person. Analyse your interests, personality characteristics, values, skills and drivers (what motivates you).
  Look at your current job role – does it compromise or fit with your qualities? Can you adapt it to make it fit better with what is important to you? Are there other options out there that are a better fit?
• Exploration and research 
  Get out there and start asking questions. The more people you speak to and the more questions you ask, the more information you’ll get and the closer you’ll get to finding a clear direction.
  Try friends, colleagues, former colleagues, blogs, forums and careers fairs. If you find out about a role or an area of work that interests you, then research in more detail.
  You could also consider job shadowing, part time work, internships or volunteer opportunities to help you reach a decision.
• Decision making 
  Bring together your self assessment analysis and your research on career options to produce a list of career-related goals.
  Look at the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. Compare your skills and experience to that of the roles and careers you are considering. Identify the gaps and work out how to close them.
• Action 
  You now have your career strategy so it’s time to take action. Be proactive with your career plan and ensure you keep motivated and follow through with what you’ve decided to do.
  Remember, a career plan is never set in stone. It is a living document for you to check and adapt as you progress through your career.

https://justcreative.com/2017/05/15/14-psychological-triggers-that-boost-sales-like-crazy/

14 Psychological Triggers That Boost Sales Like Crazy!

The subconscious mind has a lot to answer for when it comes to consumer behavior and understanding how it works can unlock a huge benefit for marketers.

Consumers may like to think that they are happily clicking along the virtual aisles, looking to make purchases that that they put some “thought” into, but in reality – they’re at the mercy of their own psychological triggers.

What’s ending up in their shopping cart has a lot more to do with clever “neuromarketing” than a conscious choice. This does not mean that they are being hypnotized against their own will, but rather that digital marketers have learnt how the human brain works and are giving consumers the perfect solutions that will ignite their psychological triggers.

Directing Desire

After a shopping spree, a consumer could be asked to justify the choice of the products in his or her cart. He or she would most likely spout loads of different plausible solutions to explain the purchases. Perhaps the consumer has always had that brand or that the product just seems better than the rest. But in reality, the “neurodesign” of the product is what has ignited that consumer’s desire to buy.

So as a consumer, your brain is getting expertly massaged by powerful visuals, textures, odors, colors, shapes and sounds to assist you with your final choice. Each of these elements talk to a different part of the brain and illicit completely different reactions.

QUICK FACT:

Our first impressions are made by sight. We make up our “minds” really quickly (in a half a second).

Using These Triggers to Get Consumers to Buy

For marketers, understanding the elements of this new science will reveal how using certain psychological triggers will result in higher conversions. First, let’s start with visual triggers that are essential to marketing:

Visual Triggers That Activate the Buying Impulse

Our brains are constantly trying to make sense of the visuals captured by the eye. If we understand what makes us look and where, we can use this information to entice the eye with visuals that can be easily processed.

• Where should I look first? – The brain creates a kind of an algorithm to steer our visual focus. You can help the brain by giving it contrasting elements. For example, you can provide a large, bold, bright colored button that is strongly contrasted with its background and you can be sure it will have the visitor’s attention. The same principle applies to products sitting on real life shop shelves. Contrast is king.
• Look left, read right – If you have an image that you want a customer to take notice of, it should go on the left side. For some reason, our brains favor processing images on the left first.
• Bulls eye – When faced with many images we look first to the middle of a configuration if it has an obvious center point. If no clear center, we’ll look top left first.
• Mirror neuron mimetic – If you show an image of someone touching, holding, interacting or picking up a product – we naturally want to do it too. This is known as mimetic desire. We are mirroring the effect we are witnessing. This entire process can take place entirely in the mind. We don’t have to actually pick up the object in reality, we are just inspired to want to pick it up and so we simply must buy it for ourselves.
• Keep it simple – Unpack the most amount of info with the simplest visuals. It’s why we love infographics so much. Our minds process “simple” as “familiar” and we have an outright bias to anything that feels “familiar.”
• Make it fast – Make sure your visitors can view your page’s content as fast as possible. This means optimizing your website from a technical standpoint so it loads quickly and your visitors aren’t waiting.

Pushing Our Emotional Buttons

Our eyes are feeding all of these visual images to the brain and we’re making our buying decisions on the spot. Or are we? What about those emotional triggers, the psychological aspects that push our buying buttons?

Here are the psychological triggers that we are all hardwired to respond to:

1. We like to side step any pain and somersault into pleasure – However, the snag here is finding out what your particular customers associate with their pain and pleasure reactions. Ultra marathon runners endure hellish physical pain to experience the intense pleasure of making it across the finish line in record time. This is not a pleasure for everyone’s palate but you get the idea. We are apparently even more motivated to avoid pain. If you highlight the potential dangers and possible pain spots a customer could be experiencing in life and then position your product as their own personal ninja warrior that will do battle on their behalf so nothing ill befalls them, you’ll make the sale.
2. We love the new – We all get a rush of dopamine to our brains when we experience the unfamiliar. Newness feels like a lovely, big reward. Let your customer know about the “new” upgrade or product model coming up and they will be lining up to take advantage of your new promotion.
3. We are all searching for meaning: Don’t just tell your customer about your product, but explain why they should invest in buying it and what they will get from it. Come to the event BECAUSE… (fill in the sentence and you’ll be giving them a reason to attend)
4. Story time lights up our emotional brains: Stories transport us into another world where the brand is the heroine. Our emotional brains respond to the power of a great story well told.
5. We exemplify the law of least effort: We’re all a little bit lazy. It’s okay, we’re all the same in this regard because we gravitate to the easiest option to fulfill our desire. The shortest root with the best possible outcome. If the product can make our lives faster, simpler and easier, we’ll jump on board for the easy ride.
6. We like to gang up on the bad guy: We will rally around a product that links us with a community that is doing “battle” against a common “enemy.” Not an actual person, race, religion or political opponent but rather a concept like “a power hungry boss” archetype or the “rat race.”
7. We love our curiosity to be tickled: We like filling in the gap between our knowledge and the unknown. That gap, and our desire to close it, gives us immense pleasure.
8. We listen to other people: We are social creatures who like to take advice from our communities on what actions could serve us. We’ll peruse reviews, testimonies and social comments to determine if a product is right for us. We make our decisions through the filter of others experiences and perspectives.
9. We want to feel important: if a company makes us feel valued we’ll give them our business with ease.
10. We value scarcity: If there are only a few items left and it appears that you will not be able to get the product again, the more you will want it.
11. We like a little controversy: Some polarizing and definite stances on issues can make us more engaged and enlivened by a product, especially if our anger is stimulated. We can feel prompted to buy the product to take a stand or align with a cause.
12. We like it when people do things for us: When someone offers us something first, we feel obliged to reciprocate and return the kindness by buying the product or engaging with the service.
13. We like to see something 7 times before we buy: We need to be exposed to a product at multiple points so we can get familiar with it. If the information is all housed in one place it won’t stick at the first read. We like to see the love spread across the website we are visiting. We’ll pick up the product information from everywhere – the sidebars, headers and footers, the home page as well as social media advertising. We like a little shadow to follow us around so we can get to know it better before engaging.
14. We buy when the context is right: We buy popcorn at the cinema, ice-cream at the beach, corn dogs at the game. We like it when products go hand in hand with a specific environment. If we like where we are online and the context presented makes perfect sense as a frame for the product offered, we’ll buy it.

Conclusion

It’s good to know how we all respond naturally to these psychological triggers. When you translate this understanding to your business’s marketing efforts, it will lead to more conversions because you are speaking directly to the subconscious desires in all human brains. You don’t need to guess at anything because you know what people want and how to give it to them.

More Conversion Tactics

• 3 Proven A/B Testing Tactics to Skyrocket Your Conversion Rate
• Top Design Mistakes Killing Your Conversion Rates
• Double Your Conversions with a User Journey Map
• 7 Psychology Principles Web Designers Must Know