For our final foray into design, we’ll be talking design hacks — some brief, easy methods you can use for your own designing.
To start off… remember our Behavioral Economics series? If so, you’ll be at an advantage — the default option and incremental improvement lessons from those episodes are of massive use here. Use the default option to your advantage, and make it so that users only have to do a little more each time. It will help lead users toward your ultimate goal!
While keeping with the behavioral economics theme, the ability to generate scarcity also helps users get to your CTAs faster. An example includes Uber Eats’ zero delivery fee rotation, where a selection of restaurants will have zero delivery fees, but only for a certain amount of time. Another example is Ebay’s use of “X people are watching” on product pages, which makes users anxious into thinking that someone else who is watching will buy before them.
There’s a lot of design hacks related to visuals as well. For example, people respond more to the color of something than merely the word for that color. A study that showcased this idea saw that between two jewelry ads, one having the words “golden” strewn throughout whereas the other one not mentioning it but having the title text in golden font, the one people were most interested in was the one with color. This is because the word is simply an abstraction for the actual process, the process in this case being the literal color gold.
Our final hack is that visuals often matter much more than mechanics. An article by Lyft Engineering detailed an interesting realization while developing algorithms for getting riders to their destinations faster: “We started learning that passengers didn’t want to go backwards, and in fact the angle of the lines they saw on the map would affect their satisfaction with the match.” (italics added). Even when going backwards sometimes meant a faster time to destination, people still didn’t want to do it!
So that’s all I have for Design. After our inspiration intermission, we’ll be back with a whole new series. See you again soon!
Apalla 