Ghost Writing - Assanka: Every Possibility

The human brain is fantastic at filtering information. So good, in fact, that almost all of what you see is de-prioritised and instantly forgotten to make room for stuff that's deemed worthy of further scrutiny. This happens online as well - is your message getting through?

You may remember the film Mercury Rising, in which an autistic boy is able to decipher a top secret government supercode but doesn't realise how he's done it. This isn't very realistic (and not a particularly good film either) but it demonstrates what happens when the filters in our brains stop working. If they weren't there, you'd try and interpret absolutely everything around you, and quickly become overwhelmed by the task. As a result autistic children are often highly gifted in some areas but seem withdrawn and socially incapable.

Novice internet users are a little like this, in that everything hits them with equal force, and as a result their navigation patterns can be sporadic. They're more likely to be diverted by advertising, and don't necessarily spot the items of content that they are actually looking for. This can be a problem when it leads to frustration and the impression that your service is difficult to use.

On the other hand, experienced users often filter too much. Because these sorts of people have lots of existing knowledge of web pages, those memories are fed into the processing centres of the brain and influence how we interpret what we see. So if our pre-existing knowledge is forming a strong expectation of what will appear on a page that we haven't loaded yet, the power of those expectations can be stronger than the evidence in front of our eyes. This results in not only the ignoring of areas of content that we did not expect, but in some cases the invention of content that does not exist but that we expected to see.

One of our clients recently placed a quiz on their website, and of the comments received from the people who tried it, one recurring question stood out: "How do I know which ones I got wrong?". In fact, after every question the user is given immediate feedback - "Well done" or "Sorry, here's the right answer", but the same page also contains the next question. And it wasn't that the answers were difficult to spot, but users were subconsciously filtering out anything that wasn't the next question, and ignoring it. One solution in that case could be to repeat a summary of the user's performance at the very end of the test.

So you need to consider not only the needs of the novice, but also the experienced user who can be equally disadvantaged by badly designed content, but in a different way. The best way of satisfying novice users is, where possible, to ensure the key parts of a page are the most likely to attract attention - and that doesn't necessarily mean making them bigger or bolder. Surrounding something with a generous amount of white space can work equally well, and if your page tends to appear in the browser incrementally, try and make sure the important bit displays first (often the first thing to appear as a page is loading is an advert).

For the experienced users, what's on the page is less important than the user's expectation of it. A user will have a clear idea of the kind of structure of the information they want to see, and their subconscious will seek out those patterns before they get around to processing them intelligently. So in the quiz example, perhaps a better solution would be to change the button text on each question from "Submit" to "Check answer". By doing so we've aligned the user's expectation of the content of the following page more closely with what's actually on it.

To an extent, getting inside the head of your visitors may ultimately help you get inside their wallet as well.