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Andy Marshall, Head of User Experience How to seamlessly link your brand and customers with a consistent user experience The sake of consistency
| Date post: | 21-Apr-2017 |
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Andy Marshall, Head of User Experience
How to seamlessly link your brand and customers with a consistent user experience
The sake of consistency
1
consistencyUnderstanding
I want to tell you a story…
1 Understanding consistency
It’s California, and it’s the mid 1960s.
Two Stanford University students and a handful of recruits are going door to door in the suburbs, asking
homeowners if they’ll agree to a request…
1 Understanding consistency
Compliance Without Pressure: The Foot-In-The-Door-Technique, Jonathan L. Freedman and Scott C. Fraser
Group AOne group of homeowners are asked to put a large sign on their front lawn, encouraging people to ‘Drive carefully’.
1 Understanding consistency
“Yes”
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Unsurprisingly, the number of people in this group who say “yes” to the ‘large’ request of having a sign in their front lawn is relatively low.
17%
Group A
A second group of homeowners are instead asked to put a small sticker in the window of their car.
Group BThree weeks later the researcher returns and asks if they can put the large sign on their front lawn.
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76%
Group B
“Yes”
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17%
Group A
As you can see from the results, simply having a ‘small’ request first increased the likelihood they would comply with the subsequent, ‘large’ request.
Looking at this through the lens of UX
UX design involves looking more deeply at how people behave, and what makes us tick.
In UX we’re interested in things like:
• Peoples’ behaviours, and what motivates us
• How we process things and make decisions
• How we experience, and remember things.
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“Yes”
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76%
Group B
17%
Group A
So when we see experiments with results like this, we’re very interested in the ‘Why”…
76%
Group B
17%
Group A
“Yes”
Why?
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What drives this behaviour is interesting. It’s about our self-image; how we see ourselves, and how we try to be consistent to this.
Our personalities and behaviours are shaped by culture, social norms, our beliefs, and experiences.
And we adopt different ‘personas’ for different social situations.
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Andy at work
PersonasAndy at play
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For example, I will adopt a persona at work that you won’t see at the weekend when I’m not at work, because these are different social situations.
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When we make a commitment to something, even a small one, it forms part of our persona.
And once we’ve made a commitment, we then strive to be consistent to it in the future, because
we want to be consistent in our behaviour.
“Yes, I am the type of person who thinks driving carefully is important.”
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By agreeing to displaying the car sticker, Group B made a small commitment to the message of driving
carefully. When later asked for the ‘larger’ request, they were simply remaining consistent to that commitment.
76%
Group B
17%
Group A
“Yes”
1 Understanding consistency
Consistency is a human characteristic. It’s how we behave. We seek to be consistent and we look for consistency in others.
consistentlyBrands behaving2
1 Understanding consistency
We assess brands by their ability to behave consistently, so it’s crucial for brands to consider
this aspect of how they behave.
2 Behaving Consistently
From tales of staff tilting screens to a specific angle to encourage the customer to touch the laptop before they can try it, to the reported use of consistent lighting across both website photography and in stores so products look the same
wherever they’re seen, Apple is a brand with an insane attention to detail in crafting consistency.
2 Behaving Consistently
Virgin Atlantic’s brand promise is, ‘To be genuine, fun, contemporary in everything we do at a reasonable price’.
And what is a brand promise if it’s not a commitment, which instills a desire in the organisation to be consistent?
Virgin Atlantic deliver on this commitment through their people, for instance, their ‘employee advocacy’ programme where they motivate their staff to share brand content through their own social channels.
2 Behaving Consistently
Employees at Fitness First’s are key to delivering their brand promise, ‘Whatever you’re aiming for, we’ll help you go further’. After all, it’s people, not machines or facilities that motivate their customers.
To achieve this Fitness First have redefined the skills, competencies, and behaviours expected at leadership level, whilst training gives staff the tools and emotional intelligence needed to help members achieve their goals.
2 Behaving Consistently
How brands behave in a digital experience is another important aspect of consistency. For example, working with The AA, Rufus Leonard have redesigned the ‘request breakdown recovery’ feature of their main app.
This key feature is more than just a button; it sits in front of a complex system, supported by clear communications to ensure the safety of members. It has been designed to reflect how The AA behave in times when they are most needed.
consistencyAesthetic3
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Of course, behaviour is only part of the story of consistency. Aesthetics also play an important role in consistency.
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System 1
SubconsciousFast
ImplicitInstinctiveEmotional
System 2
ConsciousSlow
EffortfulAnalyticalRational
There is a widely accepted theory that our brains have two modes of working, commonly
referred to as System 1, and System 2. To a degree, there’s an inherently lazy side in all of us.
Source: © Steven Merriewells flickr.com
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System 1 has some remarkable pattern recognition abilities.
Colour Orientation Shape
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There are some perceptual tasks that we’re naturally good at. These show off the pattern recognition machine in your brain doing its thing.
Perceptual tasks we’re good at
Position Length Direction
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And here are some more perceptual tasks that we’re naturally good at.
Perceptual tasks we’re good at
Angle and area Volume Saturation
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Then there are perceptual tasks we’re not naturally good at. This includes assessing the space taken up by irregular 2D shapes, the volume of 3D spaces, and we don’t have a natural order to colour, hue, or saturation.
These tasks require effort, or System 2, to get involved.
Perceptual tasks we’re not good at
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Our brains are naturally tuned to consistency in aesthetics. These breed familiarity, and trust.
Consistency in aesthetics saves us from having to think, because for most tasks we’re just looking to
glide through a frictionless process.
3 Aesthetic consistency
Brand guidelines are a must when designing for aesthetic consistency, of which Google’s Material Design is a great example. Not only have Google considered the visual aesthetics of elements, they’ve also considered how these interact.
Interactions in Material Design are based almost entirely on physical metaphors, which in my book is the secret sauce to creating intuitive interfaces, because interactions are based on prior knowledge and experiences.
3 Aesthetic consistency
Sometimes brands underestimate the importance of aesthetic consistency. eBay started its life with a yellow background, and one day decided to change the background from yellow to white. They received so many customer
complaints they quickly changed the colour back to yellow. They (apparently) then went on to change the background colour after that incrementally over a number of weeks, so they got what they wanted, without upsetting customers.
3 Aesthetic consistency
IBM’s ‘Design Language’ is a well considered and thoughtfully put together set of guidelines. Like Google, IBM have taken inspiration for animations and interactions from real world, physical analogies, this time based on the mechanics of classic IBM computer hardware. It’s a nice idea, though I do wonder how many people will
‘get’ these analogies, which defeats the purpose of using physical analogies to create intuitiveness.
Putting consistencyto work
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Behave consistently. Present your brand consistently.
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First and foremost, consistency is as much as about how you behave as it is in how you present your brand.
Have a brand promise and values, and ensure everyone in the organisation is empowered to stick to them.
Start small, then build
4 Putting consistency to work
Source: © Naterally Wicious, flickr.com
Leverage the desire to be consistent amongst prospects and customers. Start by asking your prospect to agree to a simple request or a small transaction. This could be answering a questionnaire, sampling a product, or just saying “yes”
to a simple question. A commitment, no matter how small can lead to a larger transaction.
Build on existing commitments
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Have prospects build upon a commitment they’ve made with messaging that invokes the Rule of Consistency.
For example, if you’re selling children’s books and your prospects are parents, then your prospects have a ready-made commitment, and highlighting the importance of learning to read at an early age would be a powerful starting point.
Keep prospects actively involved
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We are more likely to remain consistent with an actively made commitment than a passive commitment.
Instead of having a prospect think something, get them to say it out loud. Instead of getting them to say it, get the m to write it down. Instead of getting them to write it, get them to do it.
The more actively involved a prospect, the better.
4 Putting consistency to work
Public commitments create a greater desire for consistency. When we declare something publicly, we introduce social pressure, and this drives us to be consistent to the commitment.
Where appropriate make commitments public
Attract customers with offers directly related to your product or service
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Finally, think about your offers. Offers not related to your product or service can increase sales but lead to prospects who became customers because of the reward and not the desire to be consistent to your brand.
The more closely aligned an offer is to your product or service, the more a customer will associate themselves as the type of person who would use your product or service.
Andy Marshall, Head of User Experience
Thank you
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