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Interview

success than if you’re just copying the way
Amazon do it and taking a cookie cutter
approach to it. When people buy shoes,
they’ll pick them up and do things like judge
the waterproofness by the quality of the
stitching. That gives you a clue. If you’re
designing a page for selling shoes, you will
want to include a zoomed in picture of the
stitching, so [customers] can see if it’s
waterproof or not.
“A n o t h e r e x a m p l e w o u l d b e h o w p e o p l e
buy washing machines online,” Joe
continues. “They don’t trust bullet-pointed
feature l ists: the y look for zoomed in pictures
of the control dial as it will tell them what
the washing machine can do. Understanding
these mental models and what people
actually look for is going to help you
transform your website. The biggest effect
by far that I’ve seen in terms of drastically
changing the metrics and improving sales,
up to a double digit increase, has been
through such mental models.”
Apart from product innovation, Joe also
consults with his clients on product discovery,
helping them make the progression from
idea to prototype to product as quickly and
efficiently as possible. He also gets involved
in crises, for example when a high-profile
site has launched but the numbers have gone
w rong, or the relationship has broken dow n

between management or client and the team

delivering the site.

A prime example of how psychology can

be appl ied to aver t ing large-scale crises came

a few years ago when Joe was working with

eBay on its search results. T he company w as

just about to shift from offering buyers items

from the UK only to items from the whole of

Europe. “They worried that the inventory

increasing by about 20 times overnight would

overwhelm people,” Joe remembers. “So we

turned to psychology to understand how to

redesign the search interface and modelled

the interaction based on an idea called

procedural memory.

Everything we learn we

typically include in a

sequence and create

context around it. So

when we looked at the

procedural knowledge

flow for designing search

[f u nc t i on s], w e a n a l y s e d

the steps that people go

through on a micro level

to search for something. For example, they

automatically look for a search box at the top

right of the page.”

Joe and the team also used an eye tracker

to understand what people were looking at

and found that they used the search filters

as cues. “They just wanted to know if the

filters were relevant to their search,” Joe

explains. “So if they searched for a football

shirt, and the search filters didn’t include

the word ‘size’, they’d wonder if it was the

right search. We also spotted that they would

use the length of the scroll bar down the side

of the browser as a cue to understand the

[quantity] of search results that were there.

If the scroll bar was quite short, it would tell

them that there [were] lots of search results.

We found that most people were taking [in]

these cues in the first half second that they

looked at the page! They weren’t aware

that they were doing

it: they were quickly

scanning through and it

was almost happening at

a subconscious level.”

In his psychology

workshops (dates are

coming up at Pixel

Pioneers Bristol and

SmashingConf Toronto in

June, as well as Mind the

Product in San Francisco in July), Joe teaches

a framework for understanding how to use

psychology to improve your product and

design processes. But he doesn’t shy away

from covering the dark arts of persuasive

design and exploring the ethics involved.

“Data w i l l tel l

you that something

is happening.

Psychology can tell

you why”

Photo: Marc Thiele