More and more marketing and e-business directors want to improve their short-term online results. This means they don’t invest in complete update works. Instead, they choose to do expert interventions of a chirurgical nature on very precise pages.

Even though we have numerous tools with which to analyze quantitative data (the ‘how much’) on a user track, the time spent on a page,… we also see that there is a lack of techniques when it comes to understanding the ‘why’ of the different types of behavior.

As a result it is difficult to know what needs to be changed in a user track or how we need to improve a page to:

1. Avoid weakening the current results
2. Obtain better bottom-line results.

This happens quite often: organizations modify a page and the bottom-line results go down, without them knowing the origin of the problem.

There is no magical formula to guarantee results – the person finding that formula would soon be a billionaire! – but there are techniques that drastically limit the risks and that allow us to modify pages posing a problem.

Before we go into this method, I want to draw your attention to a truth that is all too often forgotten: the only thing to make sure you can meet your objective, is to keep in mind that a well-built screen should generate identical behavior with the majority of users.

That’s why it is important to focus on the targeted behavior you want to see when users are visiting your page, and not on the design of the page.

Easy, right?

Here’s how I take on things:

1.    Clearly define the bottom-line objective you want to meet.

This step is fundamental in achieving results. Without a clear objective, it is impossible to adapt your page.

Why? Because it allows you to guide your reflections. It will ensure the buy-in of all people involved in the project and it will allow you to find the right resources.

An example of a clear objective: “To increase the sales of product A by X % over a period of six months, via the site.”

2.    Identify the scenarios that users will want to follow and that are in line with your objective.

This second step is just as important as the first one. You need to make a difference between the motivation and the needs of the user on the one hand and your objectives on the other hand (managed in step 1).

An example of a clear scenario: “A manager with children has water damage. She can’t get away from work during working hours and she will want to make an online claim”

3.    Define the behavior that should be observed on the page (targeted behavior).

It is in this step that neurosciences start to come into play: it comes down to establishing, millisecond after millisecond, the activation order of the different neural circuits (conscious and especially non-conscious) that will make up the targeted behavior of the user.

Here is a hypothesis of a behavioral sequence, just to give you an idea. The terms (between brackets) are the brain zones that are observed during tests in order to check whether the targeted behavior is indeed generated:

• My vision center receives visual stimuli and perceives the spatial configuration of the different zones of the screen with ease (BA 17, BA 18 & dorsal BA 19).
• In parallel to this basic visual treatment, and based on summary visual data, my emotional brain:
• Generates immediate and instinctive pleasure when seeing the screen (Putamen) and doesn’t feel any danger or fear upon seeing the screen (Amygdales).
• Detects the booking zone and emotionally codes it as being interesting (Thalamus).
• Also detects the news zone and the zone with tips and emotionally defines them as being pleasant and motivating (Thalamus).
• Excites my logical brain in order to draw its attention to these stimuli and to focus on the ‘good’ options (Globus Pallidus).
• Since the task is easy and the targeted stimuli have been identified, my logical brain will need but few attention and working memory resources to plan and coordinate the in-depth analysis of the targeted zones (BA 9).
• My logical brain receives the spatial data (BA 7) of the relevant zones and will direct the eyes towards the relevant zones in order to collect as much precise data as possible.
• Since the screen has a good structure, my logical brain will easily draw my visual attention to the stimuli that are perceived as relevant (temporoparietal junction BA 39 and right BA 40).
• My logical brain evaluates the content and finds the stimuli attractive (BA 31).
• Since the content of the different zones is easy to read and easy to understand (BA 39 and left BA 40), the high-level reflection is not complex (BA 9, BA 46).
• The user experience is gratifying (BA 10) and the different zones of the screen have a rewarding value to me (BA 11, BA 12).
• No aversive information (Insula) blocks my emotional brain from functioning. My emotional brain and my logical brain work well together.
• My decisions and judgments before performing a task on the screen get a positive evaluation (caudate nuclei) and I don’t perceive any risks (anterior cingulate Brodmann cortex 24 (ventral) and cortex 32 (dorsal)).
• I have a strong motivation to act and that is translated into my wish to click (BA 6).

The created sequence is the ideal targeted behavior.

It will be the foundation for the analysis of the gap between the current behavior and the targeted behavior.

It also allows me to form an opinion on the problems of the page that needs to be adapted.

4. Analyze the current behavior of users (current behavior).

There are different ways of proceeding in this step, depending on the requirements of the planning, the strategic importance of the question at hand, …

In order to check the current behavior, the techniques can go from the heuristic analysis of the page by an expert in neurosciences to the use of an fMRI or advanced eye-tracking.

Thanks to the techniques used in neurosciences, we can accurately measure each zone of the brain that is involved in the current behavior.

5. Adapt the page in order to transform the current behavior into the targeted behavior.

After having constructed the targeted behavior and after having analyzed the way users behave on the problem page, all we need to do now, is to adapt the page in order to generate the expected behavior. This may include the geometry of the page, the type of elements, the content and etcetera.

6. Check whether the expected behavior does indeed occur on the new page.

By doing objective tests, we can measure the gaps between the ideal behavioral sequence and the sequence generated by the new page. And of course, all this is based on the user scenarios that have been defined in step 2.

And now it’s up to you!

Several times a year, we meet people working in large organizations who have never been informed of the new possibilities of using neurosciences when conducting user tests.

Over time, studies have evolved around two main principles:

• Quantitative tests, whose representativeness allows for an exact and precise research, based on a large number of testers.
• Qualitative tests, whose in-depth explanation allows for a detailed understanding of the behavior of a smaller sample of testers.

The origins of the current studies and techniques can be found in the marketing world and we see that their use in the digital world doesn’t provide the whole picture.

A simple Google search gives a clearer view of the used techniques:

• The so-called rational qualitative techniques: the use of silence, the stimulus of certain subjects, the reformulation of what users say, …
• The so-called projective qualitative techniques: open analogies, Chinese portraits, role-playing, imaginary constructions, … with the aim of putting the imagination and the creativity of the participants to work.
• Quantitative techniques: surveys, panels, questionnaires, …

All these techniques interrogate the 5% of cerebral activities of a participant that are conscious. In other words, with these techniques, participants are asked to use the zone of their brain that is responsible for high-level thinking.

But what about the 95% of non-conscious activities that go on in their brain: their emotional level, their level of commitment, their genuine understanding of what they are reading, their desire to click, …? All these activities constitute the majority of the cerebral activity of a user in front of a screen…

Neurosciences can offer an answer to these questions.

The fundamental principle of neuro-scientific tests is to measure what a facilitator or a human observer is unable to pick up: the real behavior of participants.

This can be compared to the Pareto principle: 80% of the traditional techniques used to evaluate screens can only collect 20% of the real use. The 20% of tests based on neuro-scientific techniques can measure 80% of the behavior.

User statistics are excellent indicators to measure the behavior quantitatively but of course, this requires the site to be online.

With neurosciences, we can:

• Understand the reason-why of behavior that has emerged from user statistics, or
• Predict the behavior on a screen.

Thanks to neurosciences, we can provide an answer to the questions all web managers have:

• Which track do users follow?
• Which zones draw the attention of users?
• Which zones are looked at by users?
• How do they analyze/understand the zones they look at?
• What is the level of complexity of the analyzed zones?
• Which emotions do the zones generate?
• What is the level of commitment in relation to the different zones?
• Which zones make the users act?
• Which zones are memorized/remembered by users?
• What do users verbally say about the zones?

My team has put together a list of 63 different indicators to answer these questions.

• With advanced eye-tracking, we can measure 16 indicators (most eye-tracking analyses in the market only use 2 or 3 basic indicators).
• The 47 other indicators use neuro-scientific techniques, including functional MRI.

When a user performs a task on a screen, it goes without saying he will use his brain and his eyes to analyze the content of the pages.

The brain of users, such as yours or mine, consists of 3 layers: the reptilian brain, the emotional brain and the logical brain.

The emotional brain is a filter: it instantly detects and selects information in summary data that is potentially interesting for further analysis.

Over time the different functions of the brain have remained the same: millions of years ago, the emotional brain allowed humans to instantly and summarily detect a prey in a given landscape, thus allowing him to hunt. Today, it instantly and summarily detects the potentially interesting zones on a screen that will allow him to place an order, to find information, etc.

If information in the visual landscape of the screen is deemed interesting, it will be amplified and as a consequence, our attention will be drawn to it. If the information is not interesting, it will be inhibited.

This filtering is adaptive in order to make the work of the logical brain easier. This brain will direct the eyes only to those zones that are ‘good options’, to what is essential to be further analyzed in order to perform a specific task.

The emotional brain has another fundamental role: it significantly participates in the storage of memories.

In order for information to be stored, reinforced and possible consolidated into the long-term memory, it is essential that the interest generated by the information, its emotional load or the generated experience is gratifying.

A lot of sites build an impressive wow-experience based on the postula that isolates the emotional and the logical brain. They forget that these two types of brains function in parallel.

Indeed, the logical brain and the emotional brain perceive content on a screen at practically the same instant.

They can collaborate or dispute the control of thoughts, emotions and the behavior to be had.

When users are in front of a site that excites their emotional brain, the emotional brain will send a signal to the logical brain containing the elements it wants to be analyzed. However, if the logical brain decides the content doesn’t respond to the expectations, there will automatically be some kind of competition between the two brains.

In the most extreme case, the cognitive brain will inhibit the functioning of the emotional brain in order to focus on a cognitive task and to detach all emotions.

We can indeed have a site design that looks more attractive than a previous version but still obtain a lower conversion ratio.

All forms of competition between the cognitive brain and the emotional brain will be a bad experience for users.

But when the two brains complement each other – the emotional brain gives a meaning to what the user feels and the cognitive brain makes sure the user can progress in the most intelligent manner possible -, users will experience interior harmony.

The logical brain as we know it today is over 10,000 years old. And the emotional brain does even better as it is several million years old!

So when designing a screen, it is essential to get the emotional brain to show an interest for the important zones and to make sure the emotional brain doesn’t oversell the less interesting zones to the logical brain. Otherwise, you risk that the logical brain takes over and cuts off the information from the emotional brain. As a result, users will go into a rational mode when visiting your site and they won’t have a positive memorization of the experience.

Understanding the human brain is only in its starting blocks and there is already an enormous amount of information and scientific publications at hand.

In order to best use the information present in the human brain, we focus on:
-    consolidating scientific research to feed our base of knowledge and analysis,
-    share this knowhow within the universe of digital interfaces.

I had started to describe the effects of Gestalt used by my team when they were developing screens.

Excuse me for having you wait so long before coming back on it, but the past year, I’ve had but very little time to write new posts.

So, here it is, at last: the rest of the series.

The idea is to position a zone above another one in order to create the perception that the smaller one, the one above, is in fact real content, whereas the bigger zone behind it works as a background.

It is one of the elements that increase the saliency of an element within a page.

It goes without saying that this principle in itself will not be enough but it complements the principles of similarity, proximity, good continuity, …

Just have a look at the two analysed screens.

On the central buttons of the Ethias site, the set of basic principles is strengthened by the principle of Smallness/Area. This gives the buttons added saliency.

First of all, a word of thanks to everybody who has asked questions via comments, twitter or e-mail. I will take the time to answer all questions that could interest the user experience community in a special article.

Dushan (http://www.ressources-marketing-internet.com/), whom I want to thank, wants to have some more details on the relevance of analysing a screen using shades of grey.

When a user visits a website, his visual system plays an essential role: without it, the brain wouldn’t receive any of the information that is displayed on the screen.

The visual information penetrates the eye, where it is captured on the eye’s retina. There are two kinds of captors: the so-called cones and sticks.

The retina has about 125 million sticks and 5 million cones. There are three kinds of cones (red, green and blue) but there is only one kind of stick, and that one can only see shades of grey.

That’s the first reason why a screen analysis in shades of grey is important: less than 1% of receptors is capable of treating colours.

The sticks also capture the luminosity of the different zones of a web page, and as such, capture all contrasts. When we talk about contrasts, what we really talk about is variations of light intensity. The sticks are mainly in the zone of peripheral vision.

99% of the eye captors (sticks) treat the information of a web page in shades of grey. 1% of captors (cones) treat the colours. The latter are located in the Fovea zone.

Only a few are located in the peripheral vision.

On a 1024 screen, the foveal vision – we are simplifying things here -, the eye (foveal vision) only sees clearly about 7% of the width of a page. This is the net zone, which consists almost exclusively of colour captors.

The other 93% of the page is seen with a lot of sticks and very few cones. As a result, colours lose their vivacity and vision becomes more and more blurred, as we move further away of the point at which the eye is looking.

So, in short:

Most of the screen will be blurred and information on the colours is progressively lost in favour of information on the shades of grey. That’s why it is important to analyse screens in shades of grey.

An example on the design of our new site that will be released in a couple of weeks ☺

The button ‘View Case Study’ is an important one. But will it be seen?

Let’s start with an analysis of the sticks (shades of grey): by fixing each cross on the screen, the button is easily visible by its contrasts in shades of grey.

By simulating the peripheral vision on one of the crosses, the button rests very visible, even when blurred.

So, let’s now have a look at the analysis of the cones (colours): by fixing each of the crosses, the colorimetric information strengthens the contrast of the button’s shades of grey.

In peripheral vision, the button is very visible.

Conclusion:

- Sticks: OK
- Cones: OK

If I want to give visual priority to one button rather than another one, I use the same principles to decrease the visual importance of the elements ‘Interested’ and ‘Stay tuned!’ by decreasing the saliency in shades of grey and by putting no colour whatsoever!

Now, it’s your turn!

Some months ago, I posted a simple question on LinkedIn: what does a designer/UX expert do on a daily basis?

In receive a lot of answers and I would like to thank :

Rob (http://twitter.com/rfitzgibbon), Adam (http://x31.net/), Christopher (http://subtxt.us/website/), Elizabeth (http://www.elizabethdavis.net/), Paul (http://www.design.philips.com/), Chris (http://www.chriswillet.com/), Beth (http://www.tandemseven.com/), Aimee (http://www.treetopcreative.com/), Georges (http://uxsurvey.wordpress.com/), Paul (http://www.virtualfloorspace.com/), Paul (http://uxarchitecture.wordpress.com/), Alexander (http://shelter.nu/), Kirk (http://www.homeaway.com/), Tony (http://tmoura.carbonmade.com/) for their answers.

So, here a typical day in the life of a designer/UX expert :

Get into work, fire up the Mac and launch all the programs I’ll need for the day.

Make coffee or some juice while the machine loads stuff like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Entourage, iChat, … Without coffee I am useless.

My workday centers around 7 general activities:

1. Interview stakeholders / gather requirements: this could be remote or in-person. Document meeting notes.

2. Brainstorming meetings: these are the get-togethers with coworkers to discuss solutions for clients, how to structure a sales pitch, that sort of thing.

3. Research/information gathering/heuristic evaluation: reading stuff, browsing the web for successful websites, print-out screenshots and evaluate current website.

4. Schematic creation:  this is building blueprints, site maps, wireframes, process flows, using tools like Axure, Visio, Mindmanager. What’s being built and why will depend on the particular project.

5. Design creation: this is creating screens with Illustrator, Photoshop, … 5% design, 95% communication re: the design. I spend most of my day convincing teams to get on board with specific choices, debating with colleagues, championing my and others design directions and gathering momentum for new ideas.

6. Usability testing: when I sit with the client in a soundproof box with a one way mirror and watch a subject take our schematics out for a spin. (Or occasionally have a dead battery in the driveway.) Sometime, when confronted with a usability issue, the only solution is to replace the user.

7. Keeping up on industry trends: again this is mostly browsing the web/mobile/twitter, and its basically just “surfing the digital tsunami”, finding out what’s going on and learn new things and techniques. I’m fortunate to work in an industry in which checking my Facebook account at work isn’t frowned upon but is de rigueur!

After the 8 hours are up, get everything you worked on to a stopping point, clean out the coffeepot, and go home.

Thinks I like doing each day

1. The actual design part of design, implementing those designs so I can see the results of my work.

2. Constructive debate with clients & establishing relationships with them.

3. Client presentations. This is the “dog and pony show” in which we get cleaned up and present our work. Great fun – I love presenting.

4. Discovering a new tool or a new system that makes the production and busywork portion of my job easier/faster so I can spend more time on “1.”.

Things I hate doing each day

1. Paperwork (includes billing, timekeeping, etc.)

2. Accounting (includes billing, justifying costs to a client who got hit with a higher invoice than expected, dealing with vendors who hit ME with a cost higher than expected, etc.)

3. Seeing a client take the “safe” design concept over one that is “better”, usually because the client made the subjective decision in a committee. Customers have expectations, some are healthy while others are not. So the UX Designer is part technology therapist. Managing expectations takes up to 10% of the time – 5% pre-design therapy and 5% post-design therapy!

4. Gratuitous documentation

Don’t hesitate to comment in order to complete this first list.

At a conference, organized for the board of a European company, I specifically emphasized the importance of user experience when you want to succeed in building an online business.

Everything that follows is quite simple and plain common sense. Nothing revolutionary. But it is so easy that a lot of organisations seem to have forgotten all about it.

An organisation has objectives to be met. In order to do so, it can use its means, either in marketing, IT, sales, hr, …

Who is going to allow the objectives to be met? The target group of course!

But the target group isn’t interested in a company’s objectives. It is there to meet its own objectives and no one else’s.

In short, the objectives of one party depend on those of the other party.

The equation is simple: in order to meet your business objectives, you should offer your target group the means that will help it to meet their own objectives. That’s what we call a win-win.

This means it is vital for an organisation to foresee the CONCEPTION when it is developing something (a product, a telephone helpdesk, a website, an e-mailing) in order to generate a maximum TARGET EXPERIENCE, which allows the target group to meet its objectives. This will indirectly allow the organisation to meet its objectives as well.

This point of view is vital: the business results of my team have only been possible because all means the organisation had at its disposal, with TARGET EXPERIENCE as a central point, was used as a means to an end: that of ensuring the relationship between Target and Organisation is a win-win.

In order to anchor the importance of the TARGET EXPERIENCE CONCEPTION, the analogy is the stem of a cherry is useful.

If you take the stem of a cherry, the DNA of the two sides of the stem will lead to two cherries. In order for a digital experience to be a success, the TARGET EXPERIENCE and the CONCEPTION must be two fruits of the same DNA.

In nature, we can’t grow a cherry on one side and a tomato on the other. But in the business world, it is quite common. If an organisation conceives an experience that is disconnected from the users’ objectives, it will harvest something different than it had foreseen.

It is this DNA ‘against nature’ that prevents organisations to realise their online objectives.

The results can easily be observed. If an organisation is not satisfied with its online results, the overall target group probably hasn’t been able to realise its objectives in its dealings with the organisation. It will probably be able to do so with another organisation that has thought about TARGET EXPERIENCE CONCEPTION.

The fundamental notion that allows organisations to create a strong Target Experience is to understand human behaviour.

All principles of a successful TX Conception is based on the automatic analysis of human beings:

-       Current behaviour

-       Habits

-       Behaviour that the organisation wants to generate.

User Experience Design doesn’t win ADC prices, it wins percentages.(September 17, 2010 – Oliver Reichenstein)

User Experience Design doesn’t win ADC prices, it wins percentages.(September 17, 2010 – Oliver Reichenstein)