If you are reading this review on your tablet, laptop or any other digital screen, you are more likely to finish it, but less likely to remember what you read. Easy in, easy out, is it? In fact, the latest iPhone model now features more dots per inch (401 DPI on iPhone 6 Plus) than the finest printed books (closer to 300 DPI), but this improvement in screen quality does not lead to higher levels of comprehension. Surprised?
Now, consider these facts: people value items more when shopping on a tablet; students may get lower scores when taking the SAT on computers; and you are more likely to add high-calorie toppings on your pizza when ordering online. It is strange how digital screens influence our decision-making. In The Smarter Screen, author Shlomo Benartzi, a leading behavioural economist, reveals how people make decisions in the digital age.
Unlike before when the quality of screens was a problem, super-screens today are very good—at least when compared with paper. Although initial studies blamed the poor quality of monitors for the digital reading gap, the current generation of LCD screens makes reading very easy. Thus, the brain doesn’t work hard enough. The author terms this ‘fluency’ and says making things easier is not always ideal, as we remember more when the information is hard to process.
The digital world tends to assume that high levels of fluency are always better, but psychologists reveal that the deliberate use of ‘disfluency’ can actually be helpful and can make us think more carefully about what is on the screen.
Now, consider e-commerce. Digital has changed our lives like never before. Everything is available at a click of a button. There is a deluge of options available. For instance, Amazon offers more than 8,000 different coffee beans from more than 100 different brands. Unless you know what you are looking for, you are more likely to be overwhelmed by the variety available and might not purchase at all. And if you do, research shows you might not be happy with your choice. But this doesn’t happen because Amazon uses very advance data analytics tools to personalise web pages for consumers and help them make the right choice.
Today’s tech-savvy consumer doesn’t want endless possibilities, but effective curation. However, curation alone can’t help. Benartzi says people often think very fast on screens and are more prone to making wrong purchases—blame it on ease of one-click purchase, too many options or digital blind spots.
The one-click buying system has made shopping online very easy, but has also led to a rise in impulse shopping. Consider this: taxi-hailing app Uber, which brags about its ‘one tap to ride’ feature, had to introduce disfluency (a separate screen) after several complaints about surge pricing. It introduced a separate screen that forced customers to acknowledge the surge in fares before booking a ride.
But it is not just about ease of shopping. What we notice on the screen also impacts our decision. Have you considered the ‘middle bias’, ‘top-left bias’, ‘cold spots’ and various such visual biases when shopping online? Just as items at the centre of a supermarket shelf are more likely to be chosen, so do items on the screen. For instance, more people will purchase items displayed at the centre of the screen. Or in a situation where the middle choice doesn’t exist, our eyes will notice the top-left items first. Unless a marketer is taking these perceptual habits into account, he is missing a powerful opportunity.
While the digital age has amplified the importance of our visual biases, we are also dealing with more number of choices than ever before. So is it a bad thing? Psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book, The Paradox of Choice, argued that too much choice can cause decision paralysis.
Benartzi suggests that digital players should provide tools to find suitable consideration sets out of the thousands of options available. “Slice the shelf and personalise it according to each individual,” writes Benartzi. But cognitive overload isn’t caused only by a number of options—it can also be triggered by the number and complexity of attributes. “Displaying dozens of features of each health care plan, for instance, could result in confused users, even if consideration set is just three or four options,” writes Benartzi in the book.
We live in a digital world where we are constantly distracted by the sheer number of screens we use to communicate. We have more information, more choices and the ability to act faster than ever before. A majority of our waking hours are spent interacting with screens. But are we aware of the various visual biases and behavioural patterns that impact our decision-making on the screens? The book provides interesting insights to maximise the upside of the digital world. It is a must-read for today’s digital marketers to understand how their target audiences make decisions online.
