Using Neurodesign to Increase RFI Conversions

Andres (Presenter 1): My name is Andres Zapata. I am from the university of Baltimore and I am with my friend Deborah. We both have other jobs outside of the university. I run a studio called ID5 and Deborah is a consultant for the government.

Deborah (Presenter 2): Andres and I have discovered what basic knowledge of brain function can do for design and we wanted to share that.

Andres: I want to take you down a journey for how enrollment works from an advertising point of view. We make the ads and they cost money. They need to have a good targeting strategy and they should point people to marketing landing pages where you will request an RFI form.

Those ads cost money, so they need to be good and they need to send people to the landing page and to take that traffic and convert them into leads, which are nurtured through email, phone calls, etc. And those leads will turn into enrollment.

This is John Wanamaker. He is known for modern advertising and he said half of his advertising investments are wasted. The ads of his time were not focused and didn't drive performance. That has changed a lot since digital media arrived 20 years ago. It's still expensive and a lot of it is wasted, especially when the marketing pages aren't good. A lot of money is being spent on digital media. This is just the US. That's 107 billion dollars as of 2018 per year. It's only growing.

This matters. What we are trying to do, is through minor design adjustments, increase performance of the landing pages to get more traffic and more money from those advertisements. You have 50000 impressions and 1000 clicks. If 20% of the leads convert to apps, you will get one enrollment. We can increase the performance by increasing the yield to the traffic. The impressions and clicks are the same, but if you look to the right, the enrolments went up because the designated landing pages were converting people more accurately.

How can we calibrate our designs to get the most out of the investment? We have to do this quickly. The brain makes fast decisions in less than 50 milliseconds. That's incredibly fast. Immediately after that, the brain looks for evidence to confirm the decision it made, or feeling it had. This is called confirmation bias. This will make it actively ignore evidence to the contrary, so we have to make the right impression.

We thought we should dive into the biology of the brain. Dr. kohl will tell us about the frontal lobe.

Deborah: The frontal lobe takes care of the decision making and persistence. All of the things you think you are doing on purpose. A lot of the work done in this environment targets people under 25. The brain doesn't fully mature until the late 20s for men and early 20s for women. The myelination becomes an issue because an immature brain doesn't pay attention well and doesn't make decisions well. It needs extra prods to take action. The site will provide better performance if it encourages more action.

The limbic system supports our emotional reactions to things. The limbic system has dominance. You will be motivated to do something and not know why. The non-fully myelinated brain will take decisions from the more primitive impulses, unless able to drive their behavior using their rational self. We have frontal limbic friction between emotional and rational self. Our design needs to take that into account.

The neurotransmitters permit the brain to function. They send signals from one neuron to another. Dopamine and serotonin have effects on mood and motivation, and they make for more positive moods and increased motivation. We will talk about behaviors that increase dopamine function, which results in more persistent behavior.

When we move from pure biology to functional, humans are visually dominant. Our occipital lobe processes visual information. Whatever is coming in visually will be attended to first. A lot of what we do in web design are based to capitalize on this dominance.

Andres: As we cover those ideas, we will give you those ideas in action. This is a landing page for the Dornsife school of health. One thing we just talked about was conventions. We need to understand what conventions people are used to. We need to follow those mental models and not violating them. They are freed up to focus on the content on the page. The logo is one thing to focus on. It needs to be in the upper left corner. The form needs to be visible and clearly delineated from the rest of the page.

You need to pull the eye to the right place. One method we used to see where the eye is pulled is to squint. If you squinted at this, your eyes should go to the yellow parts, which is where the form is. The bolding and visual hierarchy should direct the attention where we need it to be.

Deborah: One powerful thing about employing these, you have experienced users that know what to expect, if you violate that, you create a negative reaction, which results in communication with the frontal lobe that it's a bad site. The user might not come back, so we want to avoid violating this convention.

People's convention for how mental models work, they will know what to do and they will know to expect something specific to happen. These are unconscious but very powerful. If a thing is supposed to happen one way and doesn't, we violate that expectation.

The brain observes the world in different ways. The organizational principles are called gestalt principles. We try to make things whole. We use schemas to predict what happens next. If the user sees what they expect, they can focus on the more intentional parts of the task.

Andres: We have the yellow and the user can effortlessly differentiate between two things, allowing the brain to focus between them. Grouping is also one of these principles. Grouping is automatic so we need to use hierarchy and spacing, so it doesn't require effort to see what is related. They can skip content that's not relevant at any point in time.

Schema is how we understand dates. Nothing tells us that this is the month, day or year pulldown but we know what to expect, and a violation is going to upset the user and get them to feel things that aren't productive to the end result.

Deborah: One other peculiar thing is that although we have a great deal of capacity in our ability to learn, but we have limited ability to pay attention, which extends to the number and length of time we are paying attention. We have 2 attention systems. Effortful, which is where you are trying to pay attention and the other is automatic, which is what developed to make sure the tigers don't eat you.

The monitoring system takes into account time, where things happen, how frequently and how familiar things are. These are all cues that let you hold on to what is happening and shift your attention to the new thing, or the thing you need to focus on in the moment. If we manipulate our design elements to remove pressure from the effortful attention, we are more likely to allow people to use their attention on what we need them to.

Andres: That's important when deciding how much content goes on a page. Every word and every image adds to the cognitive load the user is carrying as they view the page. We need to limit the information put on the page to manage the cognitive load. The form can't be submitted unless all of this data is entered. It's how their CRM was built. In an ideal world, we want few form fields, so the user can focus on where it matters most.

When you don't have control of how much information goes on the page, that's when you rely on other design tools. Like chunking, grouping things together using lines, color, etc. You can also do timed loading to help the user manage how they see the information presented to them. They process the information on the page

Deborah: Another area is in memory. It's what is going on at any point in time. Our working memory is fairly limited. One thing that happens in brain stuff, we take advantage of the stimuli people process with the least capacity. We come into conflict with words and images. When a human that knows how to read sees a display with words is to read them. We have to divert them away from that if we want them to do something else first. Images are more powerful and easily remembered. Words eat up memory capacity.

I would like you to go to the application slide.

Andres: Looking at this, we are asking the users to keep a lot in the short term and working memory. The thing to do is to make sure the hierarchy is strong so people can quickly scan and move from one place to the other and not retain the information they are reading, but to emotionally commit to provide the information and guide them into where it's being collected, so they don't have to keep it in memory.

Deborah: In a situation like this where there's a lot of information, there's a lot of reasons why it might not be completed. A causal applicant may not complete the form because of the personal questions. Or people could be distracted from completing this task. One thing neuroscience has shown us is that finishing something causes a burst in dopamine. The more you get, the more likely that you will like and finish what you are doing. If you don't finish the task, it causes anxiety and attention residue. The memory can be stuck on what you are doing and district you from the next thing you will do. There will also be a drop in dopamine if you leave something incomplete.

You remember the task better so you remember you didn't finish it which can make you feel bad and avoid completing the task. The emotions will override the logic here, so we have to be careful of our design for the immature brain.

Andres: When we think about motivation, it comes from within and outside. As we talk about recruitment, we have to talk about what kind of recruitment we are trying to achieve. That gives us better perspective for who the user is and how their brain works. Undergraduates might have less mature or myelinated brains than an older student. The motivation might be outside from their counselor, parents, or friends. Graduate students, their motivation might come from within to learn more and become more. When you think about motivation from within and without, it maps to the limbic system and the frontal cortex.

An older student is going to probably be more motivated by long term outcomes, so in this example, images of a practicing public health professional could motivate them more than someone in a classroom or writing a paper, where the short term outcome of the process is what will motivate a younger student.

So, as we think through motivation, what kind of images we use here. The motivation should drive the calibration for the image and copy information we have.

Deborah: We need to mention delayed versus immediate gratification. Younger students need immediate gratification. The student information form provides cues to the accuracy and completeness of the form. We saw a missed opportunity to provide a response to say you did it the right way, which motivates the person to complete it.

Andres: You don't want to hit people over the head, but you need subtle elegant touches that what you just did worked. That's important. If it didn't work, a subtle hint that it needs to be fixed as you fill out the form instead of waiting until it's finished.

Deborah: Behavior is more constant if it's reinforced constantly. You can switch your reward schedules around but the takeaway from this message is that feedback is so important. Particularly when you are dealing with immature brains. They need to maintain the motivation to complete the task. We need to put feedback opportunities into our design.

Andres: There are 2 types. As you are moving through the experience, subtle acknowledgments or encouragements, and the ultimate feedback at the end that confirms what they set out to do has been completed. A sense of expectation framing, and don't let it end right there. Know your audience and what might be their next step. Guide them to that next step. If they are a graduate student that showed interest in a program, there is a social media property, or video or blog that possibly you can connect them to. You won't have them be more interested in this program than at that time when they just completed the information submission. Take advantage of that dopamine burst that the task is done and ride that wave to the next path to begin the nurture process.

This shows errors. The way it's handled is not the best because it's coming all at once and not helpful. It's using red, which is alarming, and the language isn't telling you how to correct it. One way to handle this is that if there is an error, give them hints or feedback as they are typing. If you give them hints, they can do it right the first time.

Any comments or questions?

Eric (Room Host): I will pass the first question. This audience member heard earlier that male brains mature later than women. At what age do male brains mature?

Deborah: It is a range but most research suggests that around 26 or 27 is when the male brain is myelinated. Women tend to myelinate earlier between the ages of 19-21.

Andres: We're saying myelination is maturation.

Deborah: Myelination is correlated with complete and inefficient brain function.

The mature execution of those executive functions like thinking and problem solving and planning and suppressing impulses and all that good stuff, you are doing all of that with an immature brain, but not as well as you might be, particular when it comes to self-initiating behavior and self-control.

Eric: Another question we received is how do you wrestle or negotiate violations vs evolutions of design parameter expectations?

Andres: There are conventions that you have to know in order to connect with user expectations and help them complete the task successfully. That is important but what happens is when people leverage conventions, they are almost on autopilot and they aren't paying as much attention to details as we would like. Or they might not register as much as we want them to. When you break convention, always do it when you want the user to slow down. If you want them to remember or be deliberate, break convention. A switch or button, things that are common, or expected, I would only break that convention if you need to. Otherwise I would adhere to those conventions.

Eric: This question says "you spoke a lot to visual design and how it relates to design. Have you done research on how people who are visually impaired react to similar designs?"

Deborah: We have to be careful with how we define visually impaired. We don't have the same sets of parameters for presenting information tacitly or audio. Information overload happens at a lower level than someone who has "normal vision." Research suggest the modifications benefit all users and it has to do with whether the information is audio. You need balance the information that needs to be assessed. Reduce the amount of information that is required when a person is processing information. Smaller amounts are more effective for visually impaired folks.