How your Design can Influence someone’s Perception of Reality
Imagine, you are hungry after a night out and walk through a street full of food trucks. To decide upon your meal, you could gather all information by going through every menu, talk to each individual chef, ask for food samples etc.
In practice, you will not do this. It’s too time consuming and the investment of time and effort will simply not seem profitable to you. Instead, you use selective input to construct a perception of reality that suffices for your availability of information to make that decision. This shortcut (heuristic behavior) is a common, subconscious, method for us to solve problems that involve less desired complexity and time to save our brains from doing unnecessary labor.
As (ux)designers, we should know that we are using heuristic patterns to start conversations. By designing a frame between a person and a message, we can initiate a minuscule process to influence the perception of reality for a pleasant and interest provoking experience. This way we may increase the time spent with the message from 5 seconds to 5 minutes.
The following two steps may help you to understand this better, so you can find your way to apply this in your next design for a website, installation, article, presentation or anything else that requires an audience’s attention
1 . Understand who you talk to
It is fundamental to understand the level of your audience. What is the estimated pre-existing knowledge and experience of the topic and everything associated with the topic? What is the situation in which your audience may find itself in while accessing the message? A proper understanding is important to divine the degree of attempted influence in your design.
Simply put; if your audience’s level is estimated as too low and design follows accordingly, the display of your message will not be considered as interesting to the audience. Heuristic behavior will be used to cancel out further time spent and effort on your message.
If the estimated level of the audience is too high and you design accordingly, the response will be repellency. Heuristic behavior will be used to avoid the rest of your message.
2 . Design your framework
In the middle part (A) of the graph above, you will see the target (an audience’s perceptive reality), leading to a decision moment. All other elements (which I describe below), attempt to affect that line of reality.
Let’s break it down to understand why this can improve positive outcome* for your audience’s decision. (*changing the perception of their reality to make the decision to take certain action, e.g. delving into deeper content)
B. Familiarity (availability heuristic)
Understand that familiarity (pre-existing knowledge) is relative to your audience, hence the importance of step 1. Giving too much new information or asking for too many new ways to interact, can create a repelling response. In which case, our minds will prefer familiarity far above understanding the truth, since that already exists as the truth in our minds. For decision making, the easier it is to recall the consequences of something, the better those consequences are usually perceived to be. However, too many expected patterns will lead to dull, monotone conversations. Keywords: simplicity, consistency, expected UX patterns — Example:
C. Stimulus (affect heuristic)
Pulses to stimulate emotional engagement on small (or big) levels are not only most effective in influencing the perception of reality, but also changes the energy in which the content is presented in. This provokes interest and reduces dullness, which can improve time spending with the message and eventually, moving to a decision point with the a new perception of reality. Keywords: Emotion, look & feel, tone of voice — Example:
D. Anchoring (anchoring heuristic)
By establishing early dominance on selected highlights of your message, the mind creates a starting point for judgement based on those first encountered parts of information. First contact counts double. All new judgements, will be subconsciously influenced by what you have seen, heard and/or fell on first contact. Keywords: Big numbers, big typography, composition, attention-Example:
Conclusion
Give the audience the needed, carefully selected, information to make them feel in control and part of an insightful conversation. At the same time, speak to the emotions to help influence their perception of reality to increase and maintain the interest of the conversation. If you managed this, you might just have changed an audience’s perception of reality by letting them accept new facts that will play a role in their upcoming decision.
