My colleagues and I went to Dconstruct - a one-day conference about designing and building the latest generation of social web applications.

All of the talks were interesting, although I found some too techie for me as a designer. However, one talk by Joshua Porter was particularly interesting.

Joshua talked about biases that affect the way people think and make decisions. He also shared some insights into how to use cognitive bias to get people signing up and using software. Here are some notes.

Examples of cognitive biases:

Bandwagon effect – people tend to do things because other people do the same. This is related to group pressure – if we don’t know something we follow the others, we use shortcuts rather than do the logical thing, which would require gathering all needed information (we act like sheep).
Example:
• Freshbooks uses the bandwagon effect tactic to attract new users by emphasising number of new users, showing them on a worldwide map, and displaying reviews from “Happy Users”.

Representational bias – people tend to follow like-minded people
Example:
• Freshbooks uses a representative selection of happy users on their homepage with authentic photos, job titles, quotes, real names, etc.
• Yelp.com – for review of the day, they’ve chosen people that are very active on the site (lots of friends, lots of reviews). This is the desired behaviour that is valued at Yelp.

Loss aversion – people prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains.
Example:
• Best buy – you can shop there without creating an account, but at the end of the shopping process they say:” Create an account to save time the next time you shop”. Would be more effective if it was: “Create an account so you don’t lose the ability to track your package.”

Ownership bias – people value things more when they feel sense of ownership. Some websites can get you engaged by creating something first before asking for any sign up – this creates an instant feeling of ownership.
Example
• Slide – instantly engage you into creating a slide show without signing up. They encourage you to sign up afterwards so you can edit this slideshow later.

• Geni – gets you started very quickly, they just ask you to fill in three bits of information and you can start building a family tree that you can share.

• Flickr – using “You”, “Your” – gives users a feeling that they own it

I agree with Joshua that it is very important for web designers to understand and translate social psychology into a positive experience for web users.

By understanding biases designers can use them to their advantage to attract and convince people to sign up and use the service.

Equally, if it’s not clear what the site is about and the proposition isn’t strong enough to attract users, then it won’t build an audience. And what’s the point of that?