User Experience & Persuasive Design

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One of my favorite UX quotes comes from Chikezie Ejiasi, Head of Studio and Design Systems at Google.

He wrote: “Life is conversational. Web design should be the same way. On the web, you’re talking to someone you’ve probably never met—so it’s important to be clear and precise. Thus, well-structured navigation and content organization goes hand in hand with having a good conversation.”

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Form design

If you’re not following form design best practices, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

While forms aren’t the sexiest part of conversion optimization, they tend to be the closest to the money—the macro-conversions. Spending a little time optimizing forms can be some of the most important optimization work you can do.

Of course, best practices don’t work the same on all sites. It’s contextual. But generally, implementing form design tactics that work more often than not is a good way to get started.

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Simple websites

A study by Google had two key findings:

  • Users will judge websites as beautiful or not within 1/50th to 1/20th of a second.
  • “Visually complex” websites are consistently rated as less beautiful than their simpler counterparts.

Moreover, “highly prototypical” sites—those with layouts commonly associated with sites of their category—that also had a simple website design were rated the most beautiful.

In other words, the study found that the simpler the design, the better.

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Cialdini's principles

Back in 1984, Dr. Robert B. Cialdini wrote a book called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. This posited six principles of persuasion and explained how to use them. Since then, it’s been widely hailed as a seminal book on marketing—something everyone in conversion optimization should read.

In 2016, he published another key book, called Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. This added a seventh principle of persuasion to the list, and provided new inspiration to a whole new generation of marketers. Robert Cialdini’s influence on the field of marketing has been immeasurable.

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