Brandwash Your Website

Martin Lindstrom takes the consumer’s side in Brandwashed, detailing the tricks and practices used by today’s marketers. He builds from elementary psychology tools that have been used for ages to the aggressive data mining used by today’s online powerhouses.

The data mining portion is as fascinating as it is scary; covering all ways we unwittingly allow marketers information about ourselves. He adds a lighthearted touch by outlining a hypothetical shopping trip in which he deceives the store’s data mining strategies by tricking them into thinking that a white male from Denmark is a black woman, simply by purchasing things he’ll never use. It’s a nice way to bring the reader back after scaring us with the knowledge that some stores use tracking chips on their shopping carts to plot customer’s paths. (By doing so, they can figure out how to slow us down, therefore making impulse buys more likely.)

Not to discount the importance of data mining in site development, I was also struck by how many of the methods discussed could easily be implemented through solid user experience design.

Somatic Markers

A “somatic marker” is a short cut the brain makes to cut down on excess thinking. It’s a hypothesis put forward by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio that is essentially the same thing as a heuristic ; a well-worn path in the mind that is repeatedly used because of its past success in decision-making.

In much the same way we tend to have a favorite dish at a restaurant or we always fold towels the same way, we know what works and have to challenge ourselves to try the process differently. There’s a reason that successful websites share a lot of the same traits: they work.

Bestseller lists make decisions easy

Remember the first time you walked in to one of the big box book stores? The immense amount of books they had was overwhelming. While it was great that all these books were on hand, where would you possibly start?

That’s the point of bestseller lists, Lindstrom explains. He details how he had the employees of one such book store remove all but one table of books from the front of the store. They were allowed to put a dozen different titles – stuff that they liked or was popular – on that table. The result was a two percent (which he assures us is a big number in book sales) increase in sales.

Bestseller lists are an analogy to “top links” on a website. The idea is to display a mix of what is popular and what we want to push at the user. It’s why Amazon lists things like “People who looked at this ultimately bought…” and “People who looked at this also looked at…” Whether it helps us navigate the wealth of options or simply allows us to do what everyone else is doing, these short cuts make the user’s experience easier.

A smaller box

In a similar story, Lindstrom discusses a focus group he ran in which he asked participants to choose a chocolate, either from a box of thirty or from a box of six. They overwhelmingly chose to pick from the box of six, again because they were not overwhelmed by options and could more easily eliminate some options and come to a decision.

I took this as an excellent analogy for the importance of taxonomy on a website. Following Steve Krug’s rule that a user will click as many times as necessary as long as they feel like they are on the right path, it is important to remember to do the hard work of organizing our content. It’s easy to slack off when there is a search box on the site. The goal should be to have the search box as the safety net, with user testing and thoughtful content analysis as the preferred path.

Related posts

1. Why Does Your Website Exist?
2. The Social Animal as a User Experience Manual
3. How the Mind Works with the Web
4. Test as You Go
5. WSS 3.0 Site Search Not Working