#dont ask me why this is the context i chose to create their human designs in for the first time. i dont know either

[tobyisave]

wearing a salmon suit

[jamiekturner]

7 Principles That Influence Our Behaviour

The default setting of a product may create a better or worse habit for your users. Nudging people with a message may increase their spendings.

Or sometimes, creating an ambient environment may influence what you buy in a store. There are several principles that we interact with on a daily basis, which might help us design better products. Or not.

Image source: 42courses.com

Limit the number to increase the amount bought

When there are a limited or scarce resource and high demand, people are more willing to pay excessive amounts for the product or service. And the perceived fear of missing out on something is particularly motivating as we are loss-averse too. What this means is that we find losses roughly twice as painful as gains are pleasurable.

One experiment tested the power of limiting the number of soup cans that a person could buy. When a limit was set, the amount of cans customers purchased went up. On average by 70% from their usual 2 or 3 cans.

The suggestion that something is in scarce supply makes us want it more.

Also, a great example here is Adidas with their NMD shoe collection. The company being on a decline for some time, a couple of years ago they decided to launch a new, now very successful, shoe collection called NMD. Besides the fact that the design was cool, they sold only a limited amount of shoes for each collection launch (10k of pair if not mistaken). So if you were one of those people who wanted to buy the shoes, they were sold in less than 24 hours.

Image source: 42courses.com

Context may influence your behaviour

Sensory Priming is about how our behaviour can be influenced by each of our 5 senses (sight, sound, smell, taste and touch). An experiment in the UK tested playing music from different countries in a wine shop. The research found that French wine easily outsold German wine when French music was playing and vice-versa. Only 2% of customers interviewed afterwards even mentioned the music;

A similar thing happened to me. It was at Sephora in Amsterdam, and they were presenting a new collection of skin care and perfumes for men (inspired from Japanese culture). And they added decorations to the room in a Japanese style. And created an entirely new environment only for the collection. The music, the ambience, the smell. And in the end, I bought those items…

Image source: 42courses.com

Remove the symbol to reduce the “pain”

Only thinking about spending money can make you experience a kind of physical pain. If you were to be put into a brain scanner right now and we played a game where you lost your money, the part of the brain that would light up is the same part that feels physical pain.

Studies have shown that by removing the currency symbol ($) or the currency word (dollars) from menus, average spending can increase by 12%. This is because people who see only the numerical value, are less concerned about the price of what they are ordering.

The same thing applies to paying with credit cards. Only the fact that we don’t see losing money (paying for something) makes the act of paying less painful and stressful. Which leads us to our next cognitive principle — loss aversion.

Image source: 42courses.com

We hate losing stuff

Loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equal gains. “It is better to not lose $5 than to find $5.” What distinguishes loss aversion from risk aversion? The utility of a monetary payoff depends on what was before experienced. Or was expected to happen. Some studies have suggested that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.

We are by nature loss averse. We hate losing stuff — no matter if it is money or simple points. An interesting experiment of gamification was applied and implemented in Italy for drivers.

As a car driver, you receive a certain amount of points (20). And every time you violate a traffic rule, for example ignoring the traffic light, you lose points (in this case 6). This psycholgical trick decreases the chances that you will do it again. And due to its effectiveness, many countries applied this demerit point system (more info).

Note: Some countries do it vice-versa. They give you points for violating a traffic rule. And giving instead of taking will skyrocket a terrible behaviour. There’s evidence that drivers were boasting between themselves on who had the most points for breaking the law. Giving points for bad behaviour means encouraging it.

Image source: 42courses.com

Increasing commitment with friends

I see this common mistakes in fitness apps. People think and believe that why people don’t stick with a plan or don’t finish one is because the workout is a problem. Or that you need some motivating music in the background to keep you encouraged. Or a new type of training or a library of quadrillion workouts that nobody will ever do or watch. But the problem lies in commitment.

The problem is not in the training program, reps, how often, but whether are we socially committed to something. Whenever you train with a fitness trainer or with a friend, the chances that you will go to the gym and finish a training program increases by 90%. Think about that when you try to create a movement or community around your product. And the answer may be in the fact that we should do it with a friend.

Image source: 42courses.com

The power of a default option

As humans, we like to go with the flow of a default setting. Whether you buy a new phone and don’t change the basic settings or shop in a supermarket. Thinking is an effort (which all should practice), so when we’re recommended an option, we’ll often take the path of least resistance for our brain.

When the default size of the various types of stuff we use change, so do our actions and behaviour. For example, when supermarkets double the size of trolleys, people buy 40% more. The default portion sizes in cookery books since the 1930s have increased every decade, and so have the proportions of many people.

Image source: 42courses.com

We tend to choose the middle option

When given a range of options from high to low people tend to go for the middle option. This is known as The Goldilocks Effect. In a study at a McDonald’s outlet, people were asked to choose between a range of different drink size options. Regardless of the size options offered, 80% of them always chose the median size option. This happens because we assume the middle option is the typical option. We will always go with the option that requires less effort to think about. And which is most bought or chosen (social proof).

Like reading about design?

I’m sending out a 5 Week Design Newsletter. You’ll receive each Tuesday an email about the basics of design, mistakes we make and my own experience and learnings. The articles are exclusive to newsletter subscribers only. Sign up here. ❤

The post 7 Principles That Influence Our Behaviour appeared first on Design your way.

from Web Development & Designing https://www.designyourway.net/blog/design/7-principles-that-influence-our-behaviour/

[theconservativebrief]

I remember the first time I saw the strange, ominous Confederate flag waving from my neighbor’s door. I had moved to Matoaca, Virginia, from Illinois. I was 7 years old.

From my bedroom window or front yard, I could look up to see the flag waving proudly from its post beside the door of the neighbors across the street.

I don’t remember the exact words my parents said when I asked them what the flag meant. All I remember is learning that this flag celebrated the South’s unsuccessful fight to preserve the right to own human beings. From that point on, that sinister symbol became permanently stitched into the fabric of my life.

I grew up seeing the stars and bars flown outside of other neighbors’ homes. I learned to drive on Jefferson Davis Highway, behind pickups with the flag sprawled across their rear windows and sedans with faded, more modest Confederate bumper stickers. An ultra-polite high school classmate carried around Harry Turtledove’s alternate history book of the Civil War in which the South wins. He venerated Robert E. Lee as a gentleman and a patriot and proclaimed Lincoln “not my president.” I shopped or watched soccer games alongside men and boys wearing the flag on their sweatshirt or T-shirt, emblazoned with the words “heritage, not hate.”

I did not realize how habituated I had become to this symbol until one day I drove my youngest sister to visit her shy, white fellow band-geek boyfriend and came face-to-face with the flag sprawled across his parents’ garage. Watching her walk inside, I understood that I was being asked to trust the members of this household to treat my sister with kindness and respect even as they signaled their admiration for the nation that would have kept our ancestors enslaved. I couldn’t do it. The shock of seeing the flag in this context made me realize that even though I knew it represented something I despised, it had become background noise.

These are the symbols and emblems of hate that saturated the landscape of my youth. So when white supremacists showed up in my current hometown of Charlottesville on Saturday, I didn’t understand why the term “Nazi” was being used to label all these groups. I still don’t. Not only does it ring false, but it is not useful.

“Nazi” feels like a foreign import, something that was defeated long ago. But the white supremacy that descended on Charlottesville last weekend is not some distant threat. It’s a homegrown ideology — and it’s one that we have far from defeated.

“Nazis” are easily legible as a long-since-conquered enemy to human decency. Neo-Nazis are easily dismissed as clinging to an antiquated ideology of white racial superiority in an age when the idea of a “master race” has long been banished in polite society.

To utter the term “Nazi” is to invoke universally condemned images of death camps, terror. To say “Nazi” is to imply backwardness — that this ideology is a throwback to a more ignorant and intolerant age in human history. To say “Nazi” is to disavow the Americanness of anyone who dons a swastika or gives a Nazi salute, to reflexively cast them as counter to the values of tolerance and diversity that our nation holds dear.

To say “Nazi” in reference to the mobs who wrought havoc on Charlottesville this weekend, arguably, is expedient. After all, reasonable Americans have reached a consensus that the genocidal violence of Nazi Germany was some of the worst the world has ever seen and that the ideas and actions of today’s neo-Nazis are abhorrent. Why split hairs in a search for more precise terminology? Why not refuse to adopt the terminology of “alt-right” and “white nationalist” and instead use a label that we can all understand and that ultra-effectively resists euphemism?

Some people at Saturday’s rally identified as actual members of the American Nazi Party and carried flags with swastikas. But the label doesn’t encapsulate the people who showed up representing America’s homegrown ideology of white supremacy.

For me, as a scholar and a resident of Charlottesville, the Nazi label erases the ordinariness of this impulse to display and defend the symbols of a fallen iteration of white patriarchy. The people I grew up with — the families that fly the flag on their property, the teenage boys who wear the flag stitched onto their khaki baseball caps — are not Nazis. They are ordinary white people who deny that their veneration of a mythologized South amounts to white nationalism. The spectacular displays of violence characterizing Charlottesville’s conflicts over Confederate monuments, when viewed in local and historical context, point to white racial pride that has its source right here in Virginia, not Nazi Germany.

It’s easy to argue that appreciation for Confederate history does not amount to personal racial hatred. But Confederate flags and monuments do the symbolic work of invoking historic violence — on the part of governments and individuals — against African Americans. Beyond representing the Confederate States of America, the historic project designed to keep African Americans enslaved, Confederate flags and monuments signal the many forms of racial terrorism that white Southerners inflicted upon black Southerners in order to shore up racial supremacy in the wake of emancipation. Fresh after the end of the Civil War, for instance, it was a group of Confederate veterans who created the Ku Klux Klan. The white racial pride encoded in these symbols is built on the oppression of African Americans.

Charlottesville is a city filled with tributes to white supremacist patriarchy. In terms of statuary, in addition to the statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, there are monuments commemorating eras of American history before and beyond the Civil War. Some of them have long been a topic of conversation among people concerned about the city’s representations of history in public space.

Traveling down Main Street toward UVA, you walk past a statue of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, with Native American guide Sacagawea crouching below the two white men. Further down the street is a statue of Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark, called “Conqueror of the Northwest.” The statue depicts Clark as a grand hero while Native Americans beg for mercy at his feet. Both statues venerate local men whose exploits furthered extended white supremacy by seizing the North American landmass and subjugating all of the peoples contained therein.

No discussion of monuments to white supremacist patriarchy would be complete without including Thomas Jefferson, the founder of UVA and a thinker who laid some of the ideological foundations of America. Statues and paintings of Jefferson abound in the city and on campus, presenting an often uncritical picture of the Founding Father. Yes, Jefferson famously objected to slavery — but less famously, he articulated the many reasons African Americans could not be incorporated into broader society on a basis equal to whites. He argued both of these positions even as he fathered children by Sally Hemings, an enslaved girl he owned.

This fact, while accepted by professional historians and the many African Americans who trace their ancestry to Jefferson, is denied by many white Virginians who resist any slight to the character of this local hero.

The public discourse surrounding last weekend’s rally has obscured the controversy surrounding the statue of Robert E. Lee, which still sits proudly in the recently renamed Emancipation Park. Anti-racist activists have spent the past year trying to take down this one statue in a city where bronzed figures of white patriarchs loom prominently in public spaces. It’s a statue that represents a failed attempt to preserve the institution of slavery — an institution that most Americans can agree was contrary to the values we hold dear today.

But efforts to take down the statues have been met with violent resistance by groups who insist that the uncritical celebration of white heritage, even in the treasonous form of the rebellious Civil War, is preferable to creating public spaces that acknowledge and attempt to repair racial injustice. And it’s at this site that white supremacists from across the country chose to gather last Saturday to spread their message of hate.

I can understand how people unfamiliar with the ubiquity of Confederate symbols in the South might find the analogy to Nazism compelling. However, for many of us who observe the conflict from south of the Mason-Dixon Line and with the benefit of historical context, the term “Nazi” cannot sum up the groups that appeared in Charlottesville this weekend. We recognize it as something much closer to home.

When we’re talking about people who are galvanized in large part by defending Confederate symbols, the term “neighbor” is far more accurate.

Lindsey E. Jones is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia. She studies histories of black girlhood and African American education, with special focus on her home state of Virginia. Find her on Twitter @noumenal_woman.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

Original Source -> Don’t call all American white supremacists “Nazis.” Their ideology of hate is homegrown.

via The Conservative Brief