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.

Writing a book called How the Mind Works is an ambitious undertaking, and Steven Pinker has definitely succeeded. In a thick and dense book, Pinker puts forth a rigorously researched theory that the mind works much like a computer does, with current items (what you are thinking about right now) up on a “desktop” and other items available in the “hard drive” (the sum total of your knowledge). His evolutionary model explains how the mind came to be and how the “programs” our mind uses can even be strengthened through repeated use in the same way that a muscle will grow if you lift weights. He then continues with the evolutionary model to show that our mind is adapted to a world of foraging hunter-gatherers but is now saddled with trying to make sense of today’s information overload.

The book is entertaining, engrossing and incredibly educational. Here are three things that really struck me in terms of how the mind relates to websites.

Geons.

How does the human brain recognize objects? If you had only seen a photo of a suitcase exactly from the side, would you only recognize suitcases in profile? If it was lying on its side, would you still recognize it?

In addition to some neat tricks like being able to mentally flip and rotate a shape in your mind, a prevailing theory also states that we compose every object we see as a collection of some basic shapes, called geons. Several of these geons (see below) can come together to form anything: from a suitcase to a car. In much the same way the letters of the alphabet can be combined in countless ways to form every word or sound imaginable, geons can construct a mental object in our minds.

The psychologist Irv Beiderman has fleshed out….an inventory of simple geometric parts that he calls “geons”…Beiderman proposes twenty-four geons altogether. Geons can be assembled into objects with a few attachment relations like “above”, “beside”, etc. [In much the same way words are built from the 26 letters in the alphabet, shapes can be built from the building blocks of the 24 geons.] p. 270

People can make complex things out of a group of small, basic parts. Why would a web page be any different? Search boxes are usually at the top right, logos usually the top left, etc.

With this in mind, we can see that everything from a suitcase to a website is simply a collection of parts. For our user to recognize them, they simply have to follow a general pattern that the user has already noted on countless other sites. It’s not at the framework level that we should look to engage our users, they need to be in an environment they are comfortable to explore.

Everyone basically believes that they are right.

Call it irrational optimism, but humans are hardwired to believe that we are right by default. This mindset has allowed mankind to survive through dim circumstances and to accomplish things others did not think possible.

But it has a drawback: when we always think we are right, we quickly become discouraged when that assumption is challenged. This is the driving force of all usability because the user always has to feel like what they are doing is correct. Steve Krug touches on this in Don’t Make Me Think: it matters less how many times a user has to click as long as they feel like they are on the right path.

I challenge the notion of not making people think. My goal when designing a website is not to dumb it down to the lowest common denominator, that’s unrealistic. Instead, make it easy to use and encourage the user to become a bit more immersed in the site. As long as the small challenges I provide easily enough mesh with an average users’ sense of how the site should work, the site will be successful. I will have engaged the user.

Thinking is Hard

Steven Pinker likes to bake bread. At one point, he was dissatisfied with the bread he had been baking, so he tweaked a few things. The resulting batch was much better, so he was happy. Did he go back and rigorously research which of his tweaks had made the difference between good and bad bread? No. He just ate the good bread.

The mind is powerful because it is ruthlessly efficient. Do you remember every word from the last conversation you had? No. But you do remember the point of the conversation and any outcome it may have had. The brain does not waste energy on things it does not need to spend time computing, if it did, we would be overwhelmed as soon as we woke up. Instead of just checking the time on the alarm clock, you would be enthralled with its color, how it works and more.

After the invention of the telegraph, there were people who claimed that the short messages would be the death of thoughtful communication, which they claimed were hand-written letters. Similarly, there are those who bemoan writing content for the web. They want to write a detail-packed essay and it’s my job to convince these writers that web readers will be looking for succinctly written copy that is broken up with sub headings to make skimming it easy. (As mentioned above, of course we both think our conflicting methods are the right one.)

The goal needs to be to engage users thoughtfully. Give details for dense information, but maybe break it up into a bulleted list. Don’t bury a phone number in the middle of a paragraph. Evaluate the message you want to convey, and then determine how to present it in a concise form.

To imply that we do not want the user to think is too simplistic. We just do not want the experience to be too complicated. We want to engage the user. This does involve a bit of thinking, we just need to make sure that they can get the information they will be thinking about in as easy a process as possible.

David Brooks’ great new book The Social Animal argues that psychology is missing a lot by only focusing on an individual’s mind. He presents a strong argument that we’re missing a vast amount of important information by not paying attention to two other key drivers of a person’s mind:

1. Their social interactions
2. The messy and more abstract nature of the unconscious mind

The conscious mind is like a general watching a battle from on top of a hill, while the unconscious mind is like thousands of scouts reporting back important information. Too often, we overlook the importance of our unconscious mind as well as the importance of our relationships with others. A human is more than cold logic, they are the ambiguous and messy collection of subconscious thoughts and relationships that cannot be neatly summarized.

Instead of a GPS, the mind is an EPS, emotional positioning system. All previous experience and knowledge act as the maps, coloring your possible choices with excitement, fear or nervousness based on the ways your mind wants you to react.

Here are three points in which the book shows us how it could help guide user experience with the web.

Reinforcing the Argument of Heuristics

A heuristic is the well-worn path our minds will always try to revert to in order to solve a problem. It’s a comfortable groove for our thought to travel along. Every time I go to the grocery store, I park in the same basic section of the lot. I do not even have to consciously plan to guide the car there any more, it’s that ingrained. Years ago, it occurred to me that if my car is always in the same area, I would save myself the embarrassment of wandering around the parking lot with a cart full of groceries.

That is a heuristic: a repeated, experience-based process that I can mindlessly follow in order to get a desired result.

The more neural networks perform the same activity – driving a car, brushing your teeth – the stronger they become. And of course, we find it easier to rely on the stronger connections, so we use them more, which reinforces and strengthens them further.

Domain-specific learning is often the easiest for us. This is any learning that is done within the context of an area in which you already have a good deal of expertise, where a professional chef would have a much easier time figuring out a complicated recipe than the average person would.

Brooks cites a study in which chess grand masters are given quick glimpses at a chess board, and then asked to describe where each piece was. They were remarkably accurate. Does this mean that a chess grand master has a photographic memory? No. They were able to reconstruct the boards by placing them in the context of a game, another example of a heuristic.

When the boards were flashed at the grand masters with the pieces in a totally random order, which would in no way correlate to a chess match, the masters’ ability to reproduce the board dropped off significantly.

“The mind stores certain ‘if…then…’ rules of thumb, which get activated by context and can be trotted out and applied in appropriate or near-appropriate circumstances.”

He goes on to detail how children need to feel that they can explore with the comfort of a safety net of security at home with the parents. A parents’ job then is to match discipline with warmth, depending on the need of the situation. He then subtly points out that these learned traits do not really change much as we grow up, implying that there is still a lot of truth in the idea that we will only tentatively explore new ideas as long as we have a secure safety net.

As a designer, it’s really pretty dull to always have the search box on the top right corner of your site, but that’s where people are going to look for it. When I was immediately out of college, design for its own sake was my goal, but I have learned that a truly successful website is the one your users enjoy. And I still believe that you can break the mold a bit, enough to challenge and engage your user.

As a Social Media Strategy Guide

All of us would like to think that we are rational and intelligent people, but we would also have to admit that we continue to do inexplicably dumb things. Brooks discusses the “rational animal” that the Enlightenment wanted humans to be, but points out that we’re just not a bunch of Spock-like creatures.  Instead, what separates man from animals is our ability to understand, relate to and empathize with each other. He quotes scientist Ulric Neisser , who thinks he has identified an anatomic distinction in humans:

“It is worth noting that, anatomically, the human cerebrum appears to be the sort of diffuse system in which multiple processes would be at home. In this respect it differs from the nervous system of lower animals. Our hypothesis leads us to the radical suggestion that the critical difference between the thinking of human beings and of lower animals lies not in the existence of consciousness but in the capacity for complex processes outside of it.”

He goes on to explain that we really cannot help but be drawn in:

“Your unconscious wants to entangle you in the thick web of relations that are the essence of human flourishing.”

How to use all of this to advantageously market to people via social media is really much better summed up in the different people involved in a Malcolm Gladwell Tipping Point, what this book adds is a deeper understanding of why we want to connect with others online, even through superficial relationships like Facebook friends.

Brooks argues (though I am not entirely sold) that Americans are an individualistic but basically trusting society. The point he seems to be driving home is that humans all have a basic belief that other people are generally good. My issue with this is that there seems to have been a big backlash against “faceless corporations” lately, at least from the rational, conscious part of people’s minds. This leads me to think that there is an innate distrust of any company or organization, especially since the recent recession.

So what do we as social media and web planners do? My argument would be to humanize our brand as much as possible by emphasizing great customer service that makes users really feel like we care. Secondary goals would be the focus on “putting a face” on the brand through the use of photos and videos that capture the happy experience of using that brand.

Not So Easy a Caveman Can Use It

In the book, Brooks makes a somewhat controversial use of characters that we can at times relate to and other times dislike, but they serve as his narrative means of bringing the reader through all of his findings.

The main character is Harold, whom he covers from his inception to his death. While Harold is in high school, Brooks discusses the stages of learning.

1. Mastering the material, in which Harold basically just reads up on his subject and does what he can to master the facts.
2. Processing what you have learned. Here, Harold goes through a journal-writing exercise in order to straighten out his thoughts and to either solidify or discard weak connections.
3. Revising, Harold continues to muddle through what he has learned.
4. Making everything coherent, the final stage in which Harold lays out all that he has learned. It is here one would make a final point about what they have learned.

There’s a great quote by designer Joshua Davis:

“We shouldn’t assume that the general viewing public is an idiot. We should try to evolve the medium by making intuitive systems that educate the user – not design to what level we think they can handle”

By knowing how people learn – the process, that a safety net of known options leads them to be more comfortable trying out some new things – is where user interface design can really continue to evolve well. It’s so easy to get caught up in the idea of making sure that your site or app looks the same on a variety of screens that we often forget that our goal is to make it so awesome that a user wants to use it.

Every website, social media property or web app has a goal: get the customer to buy something or learn about what you are trying to do. Our job then is to take that goal, put it in an enticingly-challenging situation and to continue to adapt to make sure that we are meeting our goals by helping the user meet theirs.

I was surprised at the depth that Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics: An Hour a Day provided in terms of detailing the entire analytics landscape. I had really expected the book to be geared for the entrepreneur looking to optimize their online business – which it did address – but it was definitely more geared to large organizations.

The book’s real successes come from being easy to skim for whatever you need help with as well as his tone, which is not the data “quant” you might expect, but someone who wisely focuses on using the data for a desired outcome. The data is simply a record of what has happened and he does a great job of reiterating the importance of using it to make intelligent decisions about the future. How do we shape all the data we can collect into something useful?

Here are three things worth noting from the book:

Customer Centricity

Time and again, Kaushik cautions that web analytics offer tons of data that can easily swallow you. His term “customer centricity” means to keep the focus on what customers want, not what management thinks customers want.

This approach offers a more holistic view of your site users (he states that only 15-25% of visitors to an ecommerce website are there to make a purchase, so imagine all the visitors you are not accounting for) and gives you a more realistic way of affecting positive change using analytics.

Competitive Data

It’s too easy to get focused on the avalanche of data you can collect on your own site and it’s worth the reminder that getting data on your competitors is perhaps the most effective way to gain a strategic advantage.

Success or failure for your web properties does not exist in a vacuum, you need the ecosystem context: what is happening in the landscape that could have caused these outcomes vs. what you are causing?

This competitive intelligence is key to helping you understand your performance in the greater web ecosystem and whether results have been caused by trends, your actions or your lack of actions. It can help you:

• Exploit market trends
• Build off the success of your competitors
• Optimize your SEO program

Use Site Overlays to Communicate Important Ideas to the Big Stakeholders

This was a great insight: anyone in your organization can understand a site overlay. They can see the data. So the key here is to make sure that you really understand what your reports are saying, where focus needs to go, and to then use those overlays to publicize your goals.

In the end, Kaushik has written a very actionable and detailed book I would recommend to anyone looking get a solid understanding about website analysis.

This book is not just about selling; it’s about getting your ideas implemented!

I am a little embarrassed to admit that The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas by G. Richard Shell and Mario Moussa sat on the “to read” section of my bookshelf for a few months. The reviews I had read were obviously good enough to get me to buy the book, but I could not get over the idea that this is a “how to sell” book.

And it is a sales book, but what you are selling are your ideas. This book gives thorough, step-by-step guidance on how to get your ideas implemented. They quote Lee Iacocca, “you can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.”

It’s a shame that I waited so long to read such a great book. Here are three things that really stood out to me:

Meet face to face as much as possible. Call if necessary and use email and IM as a last resort.

This one is tough for me. Sure, I can fall back on the excuse that I work on the web, but that’s just an excuse. They give great examples and a lot of detailed research supporting the simple importance of a face to face conversation. No excuses!

The PCAN Model – Problem, Cause, Answer and Net Benefits.

Just having the idea is only the first step. You have to work to polish that idea to perfection and – because you never know when you’ll really have a great chance to convince someone else how great it is – you need to be able to deliver it like an elevator pitch.

The PCAN Model is a simple way to do it. You develop a concise statement that defines the problem or need that your idea solves. You give a brief explanation of the cause of the problem itself, state your solution and then explain why your solution is the best available.

I love books that provide actionable advise and this terse method is the best I have heard since the SEER technique. (And no, I am not the “Tom” in this forum thread.)

Secure Your Commitments

In order to safeguard the longtime success of a persuasive decision, it is vital to deal with politics at both the individual and organizational level.

This might be the most helpful part of the book. Buy in today does not mean implementation tomorrow, so the authors offer great advice and ways to ensure that all your hard work does not go to waste. Yes, it involves a little office politics, but as they point out: the good politicians are usually the ones who get their agendas pushed through.