Cennydd Bowles on user experience.

Archive for March, 2008

The Fox goes shopping: cognitive dissonance in e-commerce

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

One of the most widely used metrics in e-commerce is conversion: simply a measure of the proportion of people who go from x to Sale, where x might be simply visiting the site, or perhaps adding something to the basket.

Of course, increasing conversion is generally a Good Thing because it makes big red lines point up and to the right. To achieve this wonderful state of affairs, e-commerce designers tend to focus on incremental improvements, hoping to push 17.0% to 17.3%, for instance. There are some straightforward means of doing this: tweaking help copy, clarifying calls to action, shiny Buy Now buttons, etc. And it works, but it’s far from sophisticated, and I think we’re missing a bigger trick here. For the last few days I’ve been playing around with the idea of approaching it from the other angle, and exploring the role of cognitive dissonance in the purchase process.

Cognitive dissonance is a tension arising when we have to choose between contradictory beliefs and actions. A classic example is the fable of The Fox And The Grapes. In it, we see our protagonist conflicted by a dissonant state which he then rationalises, much to his satisfaction.

Initial dissonant state:

Resolved consonant state:

Although written 2,500 years ago, this fable perfectly outlines our typical response to cognitive dissonance: we seek to resolve its tension immediately, in one of two ways. The easy way is to change the belief, usually by introducing a new one that modifies it. The hard way (much less frequently practised) is to change the behaviour that’s causing us the conflict. In our example, the fox took the easy way out, reducing his mental anguish by introducing a new belief: the grapes were sour.

The Fox goes shopping

The same process happens regularly in commerce (for example, I’d contend that both buyer’s remorse and store cards both have their roots in cognitive dissonance). Let’s say a potential buyer is about to spend £50 on a Super Widget. It’s highly likely they’ll experience some dissonance:

Being human, our shopper will find this dissonance uncomfortable and want to resolve it as soon as possible. So typically a third thought is thrown into the balance, which will modify one of the existing thoughts. This will cause consonance and will result either in the purchase being approved or rejected. A negative consonant state could be:

Net result: no sale. A positive consonant state could be:

In which case, the Super Widget is bought.

A lot of the time, we can’t do much to bring about a positive modifying statement. It’s often intrinsically generated, based on one’s life circumstances (“I’ve earned it!” / “It’s OK, I’ve been to the gym a lot recently” etc). But we can do a lot about negative statements, because a lot of the time we simply hand them to our users on a silver plate. People with biases look for means to confirm them. And by forcing them to surrender their details before the appropriate juncture, giving them tiny photos, burying our phone numbers, we make it all too easy. In short, the more opportunities we give them to introduce negative modifying statements, the less likely they’ll buy from us.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to have thought of this, but looking at things from the other side can reveal facets previously hidden in shadow. So here starts an experiment: rather than focusing on increasing sales (in effect, pushing people into purchasing), I propose we’re far better off removing the barriers that prevent them. It seems to me a more humanistic, less sales-driven approach, and one I think is better for us all in the long run.

Posted in psychology, user experience | No Comments »

Muxtape

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Muxtape may not last all that long. Its beauty and simplicity will probably put paid to that, as it collapses under the weight of piracy and lawsuits. Until then, I’ve uploaded a handful of songs I’ve written, should anyone be interested.

Posted in music | 1 Comment »

Easter links

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Posted in links | No Comments »

The death of page views, and why we should care

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

Ask any web geek and they’ll tell you that the page, as we know it, is terminally ill. For many years, it was the proud atom of the web: an unbreakable, fundamental unit. However, much like the atom, it has now been broken down further, and in modern times is being bypassed by Ajax, Flash, desktop widgets, APIs, and RSS.

This breakdown of the atomic structure of the web is, in principle, laudable since it opens the door to a Semantic future. However, it causes at least two sizeable issues: first, the question of how we plan, architect and design this new world, and second, the impact on how websites make money. I’m going to focus on the second for now; the first is another post altogether.

Millions of commercial sites rely, of course, on advertising, for which page views (PVs) have been the predominant measure for years. Crude though PVs may be, it’s fair to say that if lots of people looked at lots of pages, your site was a good proposition. Same principle as why a TV ad during Corrie costs a lot more than one on UKTV Style. However, the page no longer means what it once did so, as the page dies, the PV goes with it.

The web advertising industry has yet to find a suitable replacement. The auditing companies (ComScore, ABC, etc) are of course striving to find a suitable heir to the throne; unfortunately, the obvious choices each have disadvantages:

So there’s a good chance that we’ll end up with a hybrid measure that mixes these ingredients with how much users are actually doing on the site. So far this equation has been lumbered with unpleasant, mechanistic labels like “engagement” or “attention”, or clunky acronym (I’ve heard recently of the “User-Initiated Rich Media Event” – yuck). Whatever we call it, this magical new measure will quantify how much people are interacting with the sites they use.

And this is why I’m worried. There’s always been something of a creative tension between maximising advertising bucks and acting in the best interests of users. To earn the cash, a site should increase PVs by splitting articles over numerous pages, hiding content deep down in navigation, and so on. However, this clearly isn’t good news for the user. The recent Guardian redesign, for example, has been accused (fairly or unfairly, you decide) of maximising page views at the expense of findability. It’s an emotive issue, to say the least. (As an aside, Merlin Mann has a fantastic solution:

“Thank newspapers for paged site content by sending subscription checks in 10 torn pieces. Y’know. For convenience.”)

My concern is that if the primary commercial measure of a site’s success won’t be page views, but user interactions, this broadens for the scope for evildoing. Bad practice won’t be restricted to nerfing navigation and adding unnecessary pages; site owners can now inject this nastiness into the page itself. More mouse clicks, more reveals, more forcing the user to request information they ought to be given straight up. In short, an interaction design nightmare.

Sure, it’s self-regulating to an extent. A site that takes the piss won’t have users for long. But if a site owner can double her revenue while losing just 10% of her users, will she be tempted? (And would she really be wrong to do it? Yikes.)

This, to me, is a real challenge the web design community needs to shout up about. It’s easy to consider it as purely the domain of advertisers, commercial managers and auditors, but as with so many things if the user isn’t considered in this process we could end up with a system that encourages sites to act in a very user-hostile way.

Postscript
It’s tempting to say, ultimately, there are big question marks over sites that rely purely on an advertising model. Perhaps. I think certainly it’ll take a couple of years for the less smart advertisers to accept the demise of the PV model. Maybe, as a result, the next few years will favour subscriber models, while ad-supported sites gently stagnate in an old PV model until the industry catches up.

Posted in design, user experience, web | No Comments »

New pastures

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

Well, it’s out in the open now, so I should quickly share it here too – I’m leaving uSwitch early next month. I’ve learnt a great deal working there; it’s just that the company is going through a bit of a reshuffle and it strikes me as an appropriate time to move on to some new challenges.

My plan is to freelance for a short while, and return to a permanent position when I find the right company to commit to (I’m a romantic at heart). Until then, I’ll gladly accept offers of luck, as well as work. You’ve got my email address, right?

Posted in personal | No Comments »

Metaphors

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Having one of those jobs that defies snappy explanation, I spend a while explaining it to others. I came up with this one a few months ago, and so far it seems to be holding up.

Formula 1 teams spend millions on tyres. The tyre companies themselves spend millions more. Their extensive R&D programmes pour money into perfecting the mix of rubber and testing the compounds in extreme conditions. Different circuits need different tyres, you see: some are slow and twisty, some have fast corners and heavy braking. Some are hot, some are cold, some are wet. You can’t expect just one type to work in all situations.

The reason they spend all this time and effort? The tyre is the one thing that moves the car, being the sole surface contact. All the skill of the driver, the power of the engine, the manoeuvrability of the chassis is meaningless if you’ve not got excellent tyres.

Me? I make tyres for websites.

Posted in personal, user experience | No Comments »

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