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Web Psychology – A Journey through the Mind August 19, 2015

There are times I like to think about just how powerful, intuitive, and adaptable our minds really are. We have the mental capacity to continue learning throughout our entire lives. While some people think that all our thought processes are pre-determined; that we’re only fooling ourselves into thinking that we have control over our actions and decisions – I often wonder if this is really true. After all science and theorists has been wrong before, but what if they are right; that we truly have no control over our actions, decisions, thoughts and emotions? It makes my job as a Web Specialist much more interesting and wonderfully challenging as I must to consider the world of sciences and theories when determining the best approach for each project I start. If I don’t, I am denying the value years of evolutionary research, social conditioning, and theorists have to offer me. That is one very major aspect of reasoning and application you just can not get out of a pre-packaged web template.

Every business has different needs and different audiences and amongst those audiences the expected behaviour is different as well. One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is to generic their online marketing with a template. My advice: Don’t blend into the masses; stand out amongst them! Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for those web templates – but in business, there is a lot more that goes into the creation of a web site than just plopping content in a page, filling it with SEO in the hopes of cracking the first page barrier without getting blacklisted by big named search engines.

Not Every Web Designer is Created Equal – Understanding Transferable Skills

Psychology for web is a science and there is a reason why there’s been an escalated demand for web specialists in the industry who possess a background in Psychology (specifically human behaviour and cognitive theories). It’s not just about art anymore, it’s a fight to stand out amongst the masses like the stars in the milky way. It’s about becoming globally recognized, successful, and trusted as a company. In this article, I will be touching on some areas as to how we make decisions based on our background or socioeconomic status, and how some decisions are made so fast without us even knowing it based on our cognitive conditioning. This is why knowing how to present your content online and areas of focus is critical in the success of your website.

In my opinion, I feel that every web specialist should possess some knowledge in the areas of psychology, behaviorism, cognitive psychology and sociology where they can apply that knowledge to the creation of a website that works for the end user and meets the goals of the business. Some may wonder why Sociology? Essentially to understand that where cognitive psychology is limited to decisions based on evolutionary reasonings, our behaviour based patterns based on our socioeconomic statuses can sometimes take over. What one culture finds normal, others may find it odd. Colour theory is one large example of these patterns into ensuring you are not going to offend your targeted audience. In fact many big named agencies and companies have gotten it wrong before over simple oversights in the areas of socioeconomic understanding and marketing to different audiences around the world.

The area of cognitive psychology is an area of strong focus for me when it comes to learning why we do the things we do. It’s an area of study which is still quite young in the world of psychology, but has become to be one of the most popular areas of study today. Cognitive psychology covers the area of thinking processes, problem solving, attention and retention (memory), and language acquisition to name a few. It studies the connections between mental processes including how we think, perceive, remember, learn, how we store information and retrieve it at a later date, as well as the ability to improve ones memory, increasing decision making accuracy and structuring enhanced learning. Unlike behaviourism, it is invisible and connected internally within the brain which is why there have been so many varied scientific approaches into the study of our mental processes. Our mental processes have kept our ancestors alive and is fired in our brains at a rate much faster than our recognizable thoughts. These firings in the brain are known as ‘visceral reactions’ and stem from within our CNS (Central Nervous System).

Processing Model Theory

Throughout time since it’s separation in 1967 from being classified as behaviourism by American Psychologist Ulric Neisser, Cognitive Psychologists, have developed different models on how to study the mind and it’s functions. One of these theories is known as the Processing Model Theory (PMT). This approach compares the mind to a computer and the correlations as to how it breaks down information and stores it into different regions within the brain. An example of this is the functionality of our eyes and how it transfers what it sees into electric neural activity and codes it into the brain where we can remember and recall that information at a later date. This theory has been used in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cognitive Neurophysiology, and Social Learning Theory. It’s also been detrimental in the understanding of learning styles in education.

Currently several educational facilities teach their curriculum at a level where only 2 maybe 3 different learning styles are being met; whereas at the post-secondary level this is much higher which is why most students perform much better in college than in the regular curriculum found in North American public schools.

If a child growing up and happens to fall outside the curriculum recognized methods of teaching, the child is immediately labeled as being learning disabled. Its a stigma I had to grow up with my entire life and can be detrimental in how a child views themselves and the world around them. It wasn’t until I was in college when I learned about cognitive processing, the more than 36 methods of learning styles, and the processing model theory when I realized I wasn’t learning disabled, I simply learned differently. This is why in your business – you may know if front to back, sideways and around again, you must not and cannot assume your online audience will know what your talking about. You need to do your due diligence and learn about your consumer who are going to use your product and/or service.

Decisions Based on Knowledge Breakdown

The unit of knowledge breakdown can be understood as concepts, prototypes and schemas. A concept can be defined as similar items that have been grouped together in the mind to form a category. We have concepts for items such as a mouse, or a dog, and concepts of love and hate, or beauty and the unappealing. Prototypes can be defined as a recognized example of a concept item. An example is to think about what comes to mind when describing a house. You can recall that a house has windows, doors, locks, roof and so on. When you think of those items they are the prototypes in your mind that make up the concept idea of what you constitute as a house. A schema can be defined as how you understand and interpret the world around you. Concepts are essentially the building blocks that assist you in building schemas. Each member in society has a schemas for a multitude of objects, people, places, ideas and experiences whether they be good or bad, valid or incorrect, based on age and interpretation of a generation and so forth.

Think for a moment of what you deem as a good web site? I guarantee your ideals will be different as you delve into the specifics with your friends and family, but these items below I guarantee will remain uniform across the globe:

Ease of Use and Navigation

Ability to Locate and Recall Previously Learned Information

Accurate and Easy to Understand Information and Content

Ability to Visualize the Product and/or Service

Ability to Contact and Connect with the Company

This is why many marketing agencies use a method known as ‘chunking’ to group information into meaningful chunks to enhance the experience of everything listed above.

Chunking and the Online Experience

‘Chunking’ in psychology is a process in which information is collected into chunks or small bits of information to assist with recall and memorization and processing. For web, this process is achieved by ensuring information is displayed in a format that our brains can easily identify, understand, and store based on aforementioned information I provided earlier in the article. Think for a moment of when you visited a website that felt odd, or items were out of place, or not in correlation with the surrounding information. Your brain is amazingly fast at picking this information up without you even realizing it. You can immediately and unconsciously loose trust in a company because your thought processes have determined that this company is not trust worthy because their site has been deemed flawed in your brain.

It’s no surprise that content drives websites. By breaking content into meaningful chunks will greatly assist the user in learning about your product or service and will be better able to retain what they’ve learned about your product and/or company. Chunking content allows your user to explain to others about your product since word of mouth marketing the the most valued and trusted form of marketing which gets the most attention.

In Closing…

Pay close attention to your content and ensure you’ve considered the perspectives, and psychological interpretations of your targeted audience. How your content is presented on the page essentially sets the tone of your company. Some companies create ‘User Personas’ to achieve a deeper level of understanding to ensure their content meets the needs of its online users, while others determine through case studies or competitive research to determine the best approach. My only word of caution when comparing yourself to your competitors is that they may have not considered the needs of their audience and therefore you run the risk of your content being too technical for the average user. If your content doesn’t get to the point, or beats around the bush, seems indirect or hard to follow, users will think that of your company and the trust in your service becomes affected.

Let’s face it… everyone loves to gossip whether it be good or bad. Social media provides an instantaneous way of allowing one to be heard amongst the masses and I guarantee, it is much harder for a company to re-establish trust online once it’s been broken. According to Neilsen 92% of consumers believe the recommendations of friends and family over ALL forms of advertising. This is also why social media has taken off so heavily in establishing an identity with its consumers. Your online reputation matters and if you don’t think it does, then you are eons away from the millions of companies who have gone online.

Cheers!

 

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