When I think about my own habits while browsing a website or when trying out a new service or product, I am putting myself in the user experience designer mindset to some degree. In these moments, I consider why I feel a site may not be worth more of my time or why I feel like deleting certain apps from my phone. Take the LinkedIn website, for example. While undoubtedly useful (and I plan on continuing to use it forever), I dislike how LinkedIn doesn’t allow visitors to accept connection requests by right-clicking and opening a different tab. Instead, I must navigate away from the page I already have open when all I want to do is click “Accept.” I’ve found various other apps to be a waste of my phone space, such as apps that are ‘free,’ but all the services the app company touts come with fees.
As someone who works in digital marketing, I can empathize with how many different problems a product designer must solve as well as predict, ideally well before a user points out potential flaws. This is why it was fascinating to dive deep into Susan M. Weinschenk’s article “100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People.” Through her commentary and takeaways about what design strategies do and don’t work, we learn why a product user resonates with certain design features – some more so than others. Much of predicting what a user of one’s website, product, or service actions will be involves being able to gauge his or her emotions. There are seven universal ones, Weinschenk writes: joy, sadness, contempt, fear, disgust, surprise, and anger (Weinschenk, 2011, 165). As with marketing, selling products requires zeroing in on the positive emotions a user does want to feel when using a product. That means eliminating any visuals or verbiage that evoke any negative images, along with any frustrations a user may experience while using a product. What I found most interesting in this week’s readings was psychologist and user experience design expert Nadine Kintscher’s commentary on the art – or rather, the psychology – of persuasion. In her essay “Combining UX Design And Psychology To Change User Behavior,” Kintscher identifies two types of motivations that compel consumers to repeatedly use a product or return to a particular brand; extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation may include material rewards, such as money, while intrinsic motivation comes from an inherent enjoyment of an activity. However, Kintscher believes that such extrinsically-motivated rewards should be used strategically and perhaps sparingly. “Rewarding someone for an activity they already inherently enjoy might lead to a short-term increase in this behavior,” she writes. “But as soon as the reward is taken away, the activity is often pursued less than before the reward was given. Because rewards are a powerful way to get people to change behavior in the short-term, including them is tempting…the reward [that is] linked to performance…has shown to be very effective and not as prone to the over-justification effect” (Kintscher, 2019). Additionally, a product designer must be able to motivate a consumer to take action when the following three factors all line up: motivation, ability, and triggers (Kintscher, 2019). They key is being able to identify why and when a person wants to make a change (by using a certain product or service), whether they are motivated intrinsically versus extrinsically, and what challenges they may face. All this said, let me circle back to my earlier example about LinkedIn’s interface. LinkedIn is a powerful network, perhaps the most prolific virtual professional networking platform in the game. It’s functional, whether you’re a job seeker, headhunter, or industry thought leader, it’s aesthetically pleasing, it’s well-designed and relatively easy to navigate. While I may have some minor grievances with the site, it’s not enough to make me abandon LinkedIn. The rest of the platform is functional and user-friendly enough to make me stick around. The intrinsic rewards that come with using LinkedIn include the connections I make with other working professionals while the extrinsic reward would be nailing a dream job thanks to the connections I was able to make. In a perfect world, product designers would be able to more easily anticipate the functional and aesthetic needs of prospective consumers without too much trial and error. But of course, real life doesn’t quite work that way. In the meantime, designers must continue to delve into user psychology to create user-friendly spaces with interfaces that tap directly into consumers’ needs. Sources: Kintscher, N. (2019). Combining UX Design And Psychology To Change User Behavior. Retrieved March 27, 2019 from https://www.ceros.com/resources/combining-ux-design-psychology-change-user-behavior/ Weinschenk, S.M. (2011). 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (1st ed., pp. 165). Berkeley: New Riders.
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