We don’t think about emotions much when we consider optimization. But isn’t it conceivable to say that no decisions you ever make are based purely on reason? I mean the basis of your reason is driven by several emotional factors in your mind. Sometimes your brain completely eliminates certain decisions choices based on emotional factors. When we’ve discussed personas in the past, we’ve noted how important it is to get understand the user, but more importantly is getting inside a user’s head. We like to dig deep and  understand what works and what doesn’t and how they “FEEL” about certain things in order to gain perspective on what do about a specific website. It’s really quite an extraordinary concept.

Psychology is at the core of any conversion optimization project. Just trying to understand simple human behaviors such as social validation, social proofing, dissonance, etc. will give any ecommerce or website designer a better perspective on what to do and how to do it.

But is unethical to apply some of these tactics to on visitors? For instance, in a study done revolving around how heightened emotions lead to “irrational reasoning,  two groups of men asked to cross two different kinds of bridges. One was rickety and scary while the other was a very normal bridge. Before crossing the bridge, a very attractive woman was always there to give instructions to the men. Guess which group of men was more likely to ask for the woman’s number? The men who crossed the scary, rickety bridge. To be exact, they were almost 75% more likely to ask. WHY? As their heart rate went up, and they had that adrenaline rush, what did they attribute that feeling to? Well of course not the bridge (although that is exactly what giving them that heightened frightened feeling); but the woman.

How is this even related to conversion optimization. Well, those are tactics that optimization experts use. Raise that fear, interest, dissonance, and you can play on that heightened emotional feeling of a user to persuade them to purchase from your website.

So now let’s go back to the initial concern. Is it ethical? We’ll  probe into this further in the near future.