Posts About ‘user behavior’

Applying Behavioural Economics to Digital Marketing

Behavioural Economics

Classic economic theory works off of the assumption that consumers make rational, informed decisions about which products to buy. Under this assumption, market forces will lead to the best producers with the highest levels of quality and service to be successful, leading to a meritocratic marketplace.

Anyone who’s ever even taken a casual glimpse at consumer behaviour knows that this is simply not how people behave. We are not rational agents making informed decisions. Instead we are creatures of habit and instinct, making decisions based more on gut feeling and psychological biases than any rational consideration.

A relatively new field of economic theory called behavioural economics endeavours to understand human behaviour in the economical sphere, and give marketers tools and data to encourage sales. (more…)

The Optimal Website User Experience (Part 2)

Buy-Key

Last month I wrote about my experiences on how I recently for the first time had been involved with website re-design and creating valuable on-site directions for site visitors to improve the user’s online experience. In my first post I talked about the ‘Flow’ Notion, Identifying Your Visitors Online Persona, The 4 Online Personas, Trust and a Community and Social User Experience.

This is part two of my learnings in which I will be talking about looking at your competitors, mobile and devices, perceived affordance and the differences between offline and online customer experience management. (more…)

The Optimal Website User Experience

facebook-frustration

Recently I have for the first time been involved with website re-design and creating valuable on-site directions for site visitors to improve the user’s online experience. My professional background is not too tech-heavy therefore I started by looking at the psychology of online users to gain an understanding (in the deeper sense) why someone is visiting your website and what the motivations are for doing so.

I came across the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  who is best-known as the architect of the notion of ‘flow’, as well as being one of the leading researchers on ‘positive psychology’.  His theory is that people are at their happiest when they are in “flow” mode. In other words the condition where motivation, attention and the current situation meet resulting in a kind of productive harmony or feedback. The challenging part for us marketers though is to create the right conditions for individuals to achieve this state. The art though is to strike the right balance between the skill of the performer and the challenge of the task level. If one or the other is too easy/difficult ‘flow’ will not occur. So how can we transmit that to a website? To increase the likelihood for your visitor to experience the flow state try to remove unnecessarily distractions from your site. Reason being that once the visitor is in the ‘flow’ he/she has to ‘automatically’ block stimuli that are interfering with the task/purchase/sign-up engagement. Therefore we ought to help users not to get distracted. (more…)

Google now tracking your typing behavior. Why?

It almost seemed like an April Fools joke: Google introducing a keyboard function within the Google interface. Allegedly they introduced it to “overcome the difficulty in typing in local language scripts”. While it could be useful for people facing these problems, this doesn’t explain why they are going to push it out to such a large group of users. For example, the Dutch keyboard is basically the same as the US version. However, Google shows the virtual keyboard in google.nl. As always there’s probably a secondary goal for Google: data collection.

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