Have you ever thought about psycho-analysing your customers?
Yep.. that’s right… mood boards are for lightweights… let’s get down and dirty and realllllly model our customers mind…
Ok maybe a little too scary however Rob Stevens (Bunnyfoot) gave a very interesting talk at the UK UPA AGM tonight that warrants quite a bit of thought. He linked Jungian personality profiling, eye-tracking recorded data and persuasion centred design…
Jung’s theories on personality are not actually consigned to the Edinburgh University Psychology Library and Woody Allan’s psychoTHErapist (think about it.. WHY would you walk into an office with that on the name plate)… they eventually found their way into mainstream business through the Myers-Briggs and Kearney personality profiling tools. You might have seen some quick online questionnaires that allow you to find out your type after asking a barrage of anywhere between 20 and 80 questions that get you to answer across a scale of responses to questions about how you would behave/react/think in a situation.
Some of the work Bunnyfoot have been doing in the warren that is their research lab (I’m sorry but I always think about them all sitting in some dark hole somewhere, nibbling on carrots, twitching their noses and coming up with cool things to do with getting inside our heads… I digress)…
Some of the work they have been doing has been looking at simplifying the 16 personality typings from MyersBriggs into four fundamental categories based on an axis of Time and Emotion in the decision making process of consumers (especially of course… online consumers)
- Spontaneous
- Methodical
- Humanistic
- Competitive
Rob showed us how he could map Eye-tracking results for where people’s attention was focused into these four categories. He challenged us to think about why and how that should be interesting to us.
If I take a spontaneous versus methodical person as examples of two people who may hit the same page on a website or after a SEO interaction. Do I try to make a page that kind of hits both of them somewhere in the middle in terms of matching their profile OR do I understand that methodical people (According to our eye-tracking data) are going to scan the whole page in anycase… so I can place some of the content that is going to really snarl them in later on so that I can place the cool, fast, comparison fact-based stuff at the top for our spontaneous person. In fact Rob showed us how it was possible to design a page that catered to all four types, specifically, with different copy and still had integrity as a whole page.
The discussion that followed was very interesting… we were just looking at copy in the example Rob gave, but are there interactions that can be designed for the different personality types, are there visual stylings and design patterns that can be embedded into a page? What analytics can we use to determine a personality type online through previous interactions such that we can serve up even more specific content?
Welcome to the world of persuasion centred design…. In the field of personal development we’ve been talking about Persuasion Engineering and Ethical Influence (instead of using the word “Sales”) so it’s no surprise to me that UX is heading in this direction… User-Centred versus Persuasion Centred…
thoughts…
PS Rob’s presentation will be posted here within a few days if I can convince him to give us a PDF copy…