VOICES
Interview
“It’s important to know and be aware of
how it works,” he cautions. “You can use
things like the scarcity effect: on Booking.
com, for example, it will tell you that only
two rooms are left at a certain price. Or the
bandwagon effect, another psychology
technique that suggests you’re more likely
to buy something because everyone else is
buying it. You’ll see things like ‘25 people
are looking at this item right now’.”
But while these techniques can work, you
may find that the return they offer doesn’t
really justify the cost. “There are a lot of little
things you can do to make people buy or cl ick
on something but the y on ly have a ver y smal l
effect in terms of the overall conversion
numbers: you might only see an 0.01%
increase in sales,” Joe warns. “For Booking.
com that’s fantastic because for them that’s
still a large return but if your sales volume
is relatively low, it won’t have much of an
effect. Also, all of these things create a tiny
bit of anxiety. They’re making people feel
emotionally a little bit tense, and I don’t find
it particularly acceptable that we’re playing
with [their] emotions. I find it all a bit murky.
We shouldn’t be pushing that as a way to
increase sales; it's a terrible way of runninga business. All it’s going to do long term is
[encourage] our customers [to go] somewhere
they’re comfortable and happy, not
somewhere that’s going to make them feel
slightly anxious.”
Joe freely admits that he’s used such
techniques in the past and has learnt for
himself how unpleasant dwelling in this grey
area can be. At the start of his career, he
worked for a major UK bank on a project to
redesign a credit card application process.
At the t ime interest rates were low and ban k s
were making money on selling insurance
that protected the applicant against illness
and unemployment. The commercial focus
on selling these products led to a lot of
pressure on him as a designer to use
psychology in order to influence uptake. “I
felt uncomfortable,” he remembers. “So much
so that I held ideas back.” Since then, the UK
government has ruled that the practices of
the time were unlawful. “The lesson I learnt
was it was important to know your
boundaries, to not get involved in projects
that had the potential to use design for the
wrong ends. It spurred me on to develop my
own code of conduct: don’t trick, don’t cheat,
don’t lie, provide positive benefit.”And this desire to use psychology to bring
about beneficial design experiences has
evidently borne fruit: Joe has just founded
his own startup that aims to do just that.
“We’re looking at the complexity of family
lives and the problems parents have in
keeping on top of it all,” he explains. “The
theory behind it, shared social cognition,
refers to how we hold pointers to information
that other people have in their heads. We
want to support the conversation between
you and your partner [and ensure] you’re
both aware of what you have to do, so you
don’t leave the kids at school because you
both think the other person is picking them
up, for example. We’re building an app called
Our Canary to help link data shared across
a family. It’s a tool to share the cognitive load- the total amount of information your
working memory can handle – that sits inside
of everything that you already use like
Facebook Messenger and Alexa.”
Psychology, it transpires, goes hand in
hand w ith U X. It’s indispensable i f you w ant
to fully understand your users and create
products to improve their lives. And who
would want to be an architect that doesn’t
understand physics?
Photo: Richard Wiggins Photo: 2018.websummercamp.com