Understanding psychology can help improve your UX research and designs
How to design products that might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars
I truly understood how psychology helped UX when designing products costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Psychology is a field we often associate with UX: After all, understanding user behaviors, motivations, and needs usually require understanding what drives people.
However, it’s often hard to see how it can influence your daily UX work. Yet it’s often not the big ideas or designs that use psychology the most: it’s the little patterns and iterations that an understanding of psychology truly influences.
The more you understand human psychology, the more likely you will get critical user insights from your user research. Moreover, this understanding helps you incorporate small design patterns that can influence persuading users.
To explain this, let’s talk about user insights.
User insights, or the power of knowing a lot of stuff
User insights are ideally what User Research wants to uncover through user interviews and testing. User insights are the “Aha” moment that isn’t just about one user’s experience: user insights are helpful revelations about people that help organizations design better user experiences.
However, it can be tricky to understand how to find user insights or how to present them to stakeholders. Luckily, Jeff Humble, the co-founder of The Fountain Institute, has a handy framework for defining user insights:
“I saw this” + “I know this” = user insight
The “I saw this” part comes directly from user research, such as user interviews, testing, and more. User insight, in this case, is deep, meaningful, and contextual understanding organizations can take action on.
The “I know this” comes from your accumulated life experience, learning, and worldviews as a UX professional. This part is greatly aided by an understanding of psychology, as you can quickly understand the context that helps you solve the problem.
For example, imagine 4 out of 5 user test participants couldn’t find how to check out quickly on your page. This is the “I saw this” portion, and there could be many potential reasons. For example, the checkout process is flawed; the buttons are non-obvious, or several other reasons.
This is not a user insight because organizations can’t precisely act on this knowledge alone. We need the “I know this” portion to help us understand why (and to figure out what to do).
This example was the problem that the UK version of Amazon (amazon.co.uk) faced: for some reason, users were having trouble finding out where to check out after selecting products.
This was because of a mismatch with the user’s mental model. People in the UK don’t go shopping with a shopping cart; they go shopping with a basket. As a result, they didn’t understand that the term “shopping cart” would take you to what you’ve already chosen to buy.
This turned it from a user-testing fact (which was hard to take action on) into an insight (where organizations can devote time to fix this). Furthermore, understanding user psychology (and UK culture) allowed them to quickly develop the right design solution.
However, it wasn’t until I designed products for users that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that I learned how to use psychology for persuasion.
The psychology of persuasion and social proof in B2B UX
Users don’t buy a $25,000/month service the same way they approach buying a $10 T-shirt.
Instead of impulse and one-click shopping, many more steps are involved, including sales pitches, demos, contracts, and more.
You might think UX has little to do here, but you’d be wrong. Nowadays, customers don’t always start the process by talking with a sales agent and being hand-held through the process: they start by Googling which companies might have the solution to their problem and which ones are worth exploring.
That means that your website design might be the first step for customers, and how you design the website might determine if the customer will contact your company to schedule a demo (or talk with sales).
While you might not be able to change what your company offers, we want users to have an “Aha!” moment browsing the site if it seems like your company might have the solution to their problems.
To do this requires an understanding not only of user motivation and goals but the psychology of persuasion. Doing so lets you know design patterns you can implement to persuade users to learn more.
One of the most common design patterns that help you do this is called Social proof.
Social proof, or not being the first one to jump off a bridge
There’s a little design pattern most B2B businesses use, and you might not have realized its importance. It’s called social proof, and it’s often portrayed through a set of logos visible on the homepage.
According to Robert Cialdini, social proof is one of the six principles of persuasion, and it’s one UX Designers most often use.
B2B businesses use this a lot as a persuasion tool for one key reason: users don’t want to be the first person to jump off the bridge. In addition, a B2B product often costs a lot of money, and users want to be reassured that this will not be a colossal waste.
Understanding this key user motivation helps us understand the overall mindset we need to have when designing the website: we need to design the website to reassure users that they can trust our site and that we have the capabilities to solve their problems.
Here are some things you might push for in website design after understanding that mindset:
Providing social proof, such as logos of who else buys this Product
An About Us page that clearly shows credentials and tells a compelling story
Providing clear value and benefits in your explanations
Hiding the pricing page entirely (i.e., they need to talk with sales to talk prices)
Providing a robust “Free option” or “Trial” doesn’t require a credit card.
Providing sample documents or visuals for users
Simplifying friction for users wanting to schedule a demo
etc.
Some of these will no doubt require talking with the rest of your team (especially Product), but this understanding of the psychology of persuasion can help UX design things that meet their user’s key motivations.
As a side note, if your organization is pushing for you to use dark patterns, I recommend reading Robert Cialdini’s Influence to understand the six principles of persuasion and other design solutions you could try.
Psychology is often the backbone of your user research and designs
UX professionals, at their core, often rely on human psychology to justify their design decisions.
We might not be familiar with business KPIs to point to (or there might not be good ones to rely on), yet we’re often making future decisions. Essentially, we’re telling the business, “Build what I designed here, and 90 days after this goes public, you’ll see the metric shifts (or business goals) you’re looking for.”
That’s a huge ask; sometimes, people want assurances (or justification) of why we believe that. In that case, our understanding of psychology helps to justify user behavior, motivations, and unmet needs.
Not only that, but understanding psychology can help turn the user research you’ve observed into insights on which organizations can take action.
So if you’re reading through UX textbooks (or other books), wondering when this will be useful to understand psychology, don’t fret. It’s more applicable than you think to your daily work. You need to understand what drives users like you always should.
Hi, thanks for the great article!
One question about one of the key elements of user motivations: "Hiding the pricing page entirely (i.e., they need to talk with sales to talk prices)".
How could it be motivational for users when you hide the price? Maybe so for some users but maybe not for others. Some users might think having price up front is more helpful than hiding it because they don't want to bother calling the sales. I agreed on the other key elements but I wasn't sure about this element...