Take a peek inside someone's head, and you'll find not one, but three brains, says Susan Weinstein. Understanding how to build and design sticky Web sites requires an understanding of how these different brains work, she says.
Weinstein, the author of "Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?" and technical chief for the consulting firm Human Factors International, says it's the "old brain" that focuses on what we need to survive, the "midbrain" that processes emotions and pushes us to impulse purchases and the "new brain" that processes speech and language.
Why should CIOs, CMOs and business unit heads care about the three brains? Weinstein says firms need to be aware that the processing occurring in the old brain and midbrain happens subconsciously, yet often drives decisions about what to buy or whether to bail on a retailer or Web site. That means those who build customer-facing Web applications need an IT toolkit that includes a mix of psychological, marketing and IT savvy that's generally only possible via cross-enterprise cooperation.
BTN: What kind of work does Human Factors International do?
Weinstein: We do consulting and training for work forces in the field of usability. We have a number of clients in the financial sector, including Citibank and American Express, as well as retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart and entertainment firms such as Disney.
How does banking differ from other sectors?
Because we are dealing with people, there are certain usability principles that apply to all businesses, such as you have two eyes and the three "brains." But every industry has its own set of challenges. For the banking and finance industry, it's in the mix of back-office and front-office systems; and the teller [and customer-facing] internal systems that are very intensive.
What challenges are posed by this intensive environment when it comes to developing and maintaining Web sites?
There are generational differences that you can't ignore, for example. You have some consumers that have a mental model of a bank being a building that you go into and interact with a loan officer that you may have a relationship with that goes back 35 years. They'll be reluctant to bank online and harder to reach. But then you have young people who are attuned to banking online, and assume that an online bank will have all of the bells and whistles and convenience. They will demand those bells without fees and will want it to be easy to set up other accounts. So it's important when building a Web presence to understand the expectations of different groups going in, especially along generational lines.
As electronic channels become ubiquitous, how does that change the way a bank uses automation to entice consumers?
Some people are now choosing where to bank based on what's the best place to bank online. People aren't deciding based on whether there's a branch on the corner; they're deciding based on who has the best online bill pay or online banking...Banks that are active [in online baking] are paying a lot of attention to user experience [in automated channels]. So banks that are more traditional are going to need to step up their game. And to do that, the online software has to be really good.
What kind of psychological savvy does deploying this "good" software require?
A bank has to put together a multidisciplinary team. You want marketing people involved, and IT people involved. … Who in the bank is looking at the deployment from a user's perspective? Who is making user experience front and center?
What are some misunderstandings banks have about usability?
Usability doesn't mean that after you put a system together, you get someone to make it look "pretty." Usability is not just the design of the screen. It's important, but it's not all there is. You need to think about the user experience from the get-go, from the time you are deciding on the very features and functionalities that you are going to use. Another misconception is that building user experience into projects increases the costs of those projects. But user experience work can pay for itself. What is the sense of implementing a $23 million system only to find out that it doesn't work or live up the business goals and has to be redone? It is better to spend some money up front to do user experience work.
How does usability or user experience strategy work?
Traditional usability is based on cognitive psychology. When you look at a screen, do you understand where the link goes? Does the organization of items on a Web site make sense? To the user, these are all conscious processes. I can ask you what each "button" on a site means. But what we're understanding now is that most of the mental processing when looking at a site actually happens unconsciously...You don't evaluate Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab and HSBC's Web sites and decide which one is the easiest to use. We might think we're making the decision based on those basic factors, but we're really not. We're making decisions based on factors that we aren't even consciously aware of.
What are some factors?
Social validation is one. We are influenced, for example, by what everyone else is doing. So if we see a marketing message on a site that 2 million people have signed up to use a particular online bank, that affects us...It's a fear of losing or missing something — people reacting more out of fear of loss than the possibility of gain.
What other subconscious factors can serve as triggers for consumers?
Trust is also a big issue. People's feelings about banks have changed in the past year...User experience is broader than providing ease of use — it goes into persuasion, emotion and trust. If we're talking about designing Web sites and software for consumers in the financial sector, with the recession and all of the change that's going on in the banking, the issue of building and designing a site to enable consumer trust becomes really important.
