Joe Leech – The psychology of decision making in UX | The Conference 2015

hi everybody how you doing hi good to hear you talking back a little bit okay yep so today I'm going to be talking to you about psychology and how we apply that to user experience design and I'll be talking about two theories from psychology designing for the fast way we think and designing for the slow way that we that we think so hands up hasn't if you've ever booked a hotel online hands up yes very good hands up if you've ever bought something from a famous international auction site of four letters yet hands up if you've ever booked a train ticket online in the UK few of you alright so you've all used something that I've designed over the last twelve years of working in digital design so my background is psychology I use psychology to apply and to design large-scale stuff for large scale businesses typically the stuff is really complicated a few years ago I wrote book anybody read the book yeah anybody bought the book a lot people buy it because it's only three quid but nobody reads it you should do it's called psychology for designers and it basically does what it says on the cover it's a great guide if you're a designer or you work in digital product product design and you want some help from psychology so in my job I do three things pretty much 1/3 of my time spent researching so going out speaking to consumers and watching them use digital stuff again back to Peter Pettis earlier stuff I always watch people using digital stuff rather than asking them what they want I spent a third of my time then formulating that to help businesses make a decision about what they should do again if you're working digital businesses you know what it's like you'll know what you've got to do half the battle is convincing everybody else that you've got to do it now it's been a third of my time then getting my rolling my sleeves up and doing actual digital design and throughout my career user experience I've applied psychology to a lot of the design process and designs that I've worked on and there was one book which was published in 2009 by a gentleman called Daniel Kahneman and fantastic book talks about two systems in the human brain one of which allows us to make decisions immediately quickly based on emotion around survival and getting stuff done quickly it talks about another system which makes decisions slowly previous experience allows us to understand and predict what's going to happen and we think about what we're going to do and so I'm gonna talk I spent the next eleven minutes or so talking about the two ways of thinking thinking fast and thinking slow and how to design for both sets of systems I'm going to do this in 11 minutes if you're coming to my master class of doing a master class on Thursday I'm spending four hours doing this so I'm gonna try and be as quick as I can and do it in 11 minutes but if you come to my master class on Thursday I'll go into this in a lot more depth so let's talk about so as I said I studied neuroscience and psychology my mom was a psychologist my dad was an architect I've got design and psychology I've had that throughout my life and certain events have happened to me my life that made me think well how was psychology and design coming together at this particular point anybody been here anybody near the city when it's Aires in Argentina yes I've been to Buenos Aires twice and the same thing happened to me both times in Argentina I went to an ATM machine put my card in took my money machine ate my card five mixtapes are always my cash card Bank kid eaten my card that was back in 2006 I went back in 2009 this is the first machine that ain't my card took a photo of it for for the bank just in case they went to see it this is the second time I went back to Argentina and my card got eaten the second time I went back to Argentina and it got me thinking it got me thinking well what's wrong with me one earth was my card my cash got eaten twice by the ATM machine in Argentina and I searched the internet sure enough hundreds and hundreds of British European and American travelers had been to Argentina and they've had the ATM cards Eden and it wasn't a technical problem it was a human problem and that's silly what the bank said to me when I tried to get my cash card back and well they better charge me both times they said you failed to pick your card up it was your fault not the bank's fault and that got thinking so how can psychology help us understand what's going on when it comes to using an ATM here's me using an ATM this is the second time we took this video the first one I actually showed myself typing my pin number Joey's not a very good thing to do at a conference so I thought well how can psychology help me understand what happened when I was using the SI ATM and why ATMs in Argentina in particular eat everybody's ATM cards so this is the process I go through in the UK first thing I do enter my cards I enter my pin number I select the amount of money that I want I remove the card I get my cash now this is important thing in psychology called goal state goal state is when you've made a decision yeah you get the thing that you want at the end of it go through a process you hit goal state in case of using an ATM your goal state is to get cash money out of the ATM machine I mean not rocket science this is what's called the Gulf State so I thought this is how we use it in the UK pretty much similar to the way it's used here in Europe how and what went wrong in Argentina so here's the process of using a cash machine in Argentina enter card and to your PIN so far so good select the amount of money that you want then what happens you get your cash what step is missing here you're looking for the step what steps missing you remove your card after you get your cash so what's going wrong when US Europeans and Americans are using ATM machines in the in Argentina is the goal state is achieved before the end of the process so everybody's like right I've got the cash I'm finished I'm done you walk out of the bank you leave your ATM card and it gets stolen it gets eaten by the cash machine that's there this is what we call I use the journey were mentally model of the steps that people go through when they're using a particular service and the way that we work as humans we build mental models of how the world works around us we spend all our time understanding how the world works and we take these mental models of how the world works and we apply them to new and novel situations so all of our past experience helps us make decisions and choices for the future but when something goes wrong it causes us real problems so when something goes wrong through these processes that we've worked the slow process of building up the experience of how something works but something goes wrong it's a real problem for us his cash machines around the world I mean the order is different but the gold state is at the end is the same way around it doesn't matter if you're using a cash machine in Japan or the USA you've still going to hit the gold state at the end and it doesn't matter too much it might be a bit and you might be unsure what's going on but not gonna make the same mistake that you used in Argentina so how does this apply to digital design how can we better use this to design our apps our websites to better fit human needs so I'm gonna talk about cruising and specifically a project I worked on a few years ago force cruising for the over-60s in the UK so for older people in the UK now booking a cruise is a really complicated thing there are hundreds of decisions to make we went through and we worked out there's about two hundred and thirty-four decisions that people have got to make when they're booking a typical vacation or holiday especially on a cruise liner 234 decisions and supporting people through that many decisions is incredibly difficult and here is what the cruise come now worked for this was their idea of how people brought two cruises online no really simple this is what you do you choose what type of cruise you want you choose what type of sick you choose the itinerary the detail the cabin the flight and then the passenger details this is the order that they expected things are happening so we did some pretty basic research we went out and we spoke to ten people about how they booked cruise holidays online now we know what you're thinking now and yes the gentleman there is wearing a wig and it was the most difficult use research there should have ever worked in this isn't the actual picture of him it was quite hard for me to Train somebody with a week he's at the room people I spoke to I spend an hour speaking to people and watching them use the website to book a cruise pretty simple stuff and we just discussed how they did it Hey I watched them do it step by step by step they kept a diary of how they booked it over the six months that they were booking and deciding on a cruise we spent a bit of time talking to them incredible piece of research to understand how people make decisions by on the information they've already got also spent an awful lot of time in the customer call center listening to calls of people phoning out and saying how do I book a cruise online and more importantly how the people the other end of the telephone helped them make a decision how the people on the telephone selling the cruise holidays helped people make a choice she did you choose Kevin 432 or Kevin 431 on the cruise holiday itself you could choose exactly the cabin that you wanted on a ship there were 2,000 cabins on most cruise liners how do you choose exactly the cabin that you want on the phone these guys just chose the cabin for you but online you care the whole view of the ship and you could choose a cabin choice as Renata said the tyranny of choice 2,000 cabins is impossible to make that choice I also spent a week on Andover sixties cruise I've got some incredible stories to tell from this particular time if you buy me a drink in the bar later I'll tell you all about this phenomenon called cabin hopping so we went through and we looked at the website as it was we looked at the order that people went through in and then we looked at information people wanted as they went through we then do this spaghetti diagram and what the spaghetti diagram helped us do was show what a mess their existing digital design was remember that second third that I mentioned about making decision getting business simpler make a decision I showed that their digital distaff was a complete mess this diagram is called the spaghetti diagram and unlocked all of the money for us to go and fix and design a brand new website we designed a brand new website for them very simple user flow through the site in the order that people expect the steps to go in based on the mental model fantastic we base this around the idea of slow thinking okay making decisions bit by bit based on previous knowledge limiting decisions and helping people make decisions so my first tip designing from the Fast and Slow is to understand what people want the order they want in and design to match that mental model if you're doing this you're going to be in a great place because you're understanding what people want and you're giving it to them at the point when it's needed and you're hoping to make decisions by giving them the right in formation at the right time that's the slow talk about the fast again the study published in the year 2000 again ATMs who could have been an obsession with ATMs this was a study about two designs of ATM one of which was designed with graphics one of which was just plain text on a plain background exactly the same interaction the same steps that people went through what happened which one when they asked people which one did you prefer using which one did you find the easiest to use was it the plain one or was it the designed one it was the designed one the design one was always shown for people felt it was easy even took them slightly longer to complete the tasks but they preferred it the preference was there when we're thinking quickly beautiful things are more appealing rather like Pettis card trick choosing the most attractive people which who's more attractive things there was something else it's worth spending time in the design so what did this beautiful design look like and here you're asking where's this beauty beautiful epoch of digital design on ATMs here it is ladies and gentleman there is the perfect ATM design it's in Hebrew they put a massive graphic on the left hand side even so this thing that we're all thinking this is really ugly was really important because it felt more easy to use than plain text it's worth investing time and effort in design client I work with Club ritz-carlton a lot of time and effort in design because design helps make decision choices identical booking process on merit comm because they own ritz-carlton - ritz-carlton people make better decisions with more info evocative imagery people make more choices they convert better on ritz-carlton versus Marriott exactly the same process but the more beautiful imagery helps support people get through it so beauty evokes emotion and emotion incredibly important in the human brain is a fantastic way of supporting the far system so we talked about the slow system match the mental model the fast system is to evoke emotion if you're working in motion and making people feel good about doing what you're doing by creating beautiful imagery fantastic fonts and design that emotion will make people people feel better about using your service even if it's not the most perfect thing out there you'll help them understand and support what's going on to do both of these things if you do the both of these things you're gonna be in a fantastic place says psychology to improve your design and the third I'm going to talk about is this kind of gray area of instinct I'm also going to talk about digital design as part of this as well final ATM story anybody know this movie yeah this is Terminator 2 Judgment Day this came out when I was 15 and what happens in this movie is Edward Connor breaks into ATMs by trying to hack them he subtly tries to get into an ATM by trying to hack it so when I was at school some kids at school we spotted this particular thing and these kids I went to a pretty pretty bad school these kids not the best parents somehow got somebody together to buy the identical computer here which is the Atari little Atari handheld they bought me one of these clean yours good at computers and we went out we tried to hack cash machines my mother's watching this please don't tell my mother sorry mom I know this is being live-streamed I did put it on Facebook's if you're watching this sorry mom I got involved in a bit of crime did it work did it help no way we tried to hack so many crime machines I mean we just got chased away and I lost my nerve the gang who worked with after we left school they went on and they were incredibly successful at crime especially relating to ATMs do you know how they did it this is how they did it they've stole a JCB lapel at a local tractor they went in they took the whole ATM and they went away this taught me an important lesson subtlety doesn't work action if you want to get stuff done this is the way that you get stuff done learn a little bit from crime there who says crime doesn't pay taught me an important lesson and the same true digital design we tried this settle crap we try images of happy people because all yeah happy people are going to make people buy stuff from us this stuff absolute crap okay stock imagery of happy looking people doesn't work mental models work beautiful imagery works this crap doesn't work okay this junk how to use ten psychology theories to persuade people absolute bullcrap if you're resorting to this stuff something's very wrong with your mental model something's very wrong with the beauty of your product your design you get the mental model the beauty right you don't have to go to these debts of doing this really awful persuasive nudge that's out there these days people built their careers on this crap you don't need to go to these lengths all you need to do is not by tracking not your linguistic programming nothing like that don't bother and so how did it work for me the cruise site that I worked on the first transaction in the first week 43,000 pounds somebody booked a cruise for 43,000 pounds in the first week that I did it now in the u.s. survey I did this presentation people clap to that number so I'm quite pleased that our Europeans day no don't be vulgar we're not going to do he's gonna pull me off the stage now so my final three tips match the mental model evoke emotion just do those things you'll be absolutely fine ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for your time

Channel: The Conference / Media Evolution

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Keywords: 2015, decision and choice making, the conference

Id: QgiB8KhbGKY

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2016