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Psychological Manipulation in User Interface Design

Inspired by a UX Booth article

Walk into a modern retail store and chances are that you will be bombarded by cleverly implemented psychological manipulation to induce spending. You might not realize it but that supermarket features a layout and design that is intended to make you add more in your shopping cart than you might have intended. E-commerce websites are also just as prone to encouraging buyer behavior, in this case through implementing certain user interface design elements. Naturally, psychological manipulation in user interface design raises the specter of ethical transgressions but that is par for the course. All major e-commerce sites are doing it one way or another, namely, justifying spending habits and making users feel better about their transactions.

The most basic way that the user interface design of an e-commerce website can lead to users spending more is by getting the default settings and layout right. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has written on the “power of defaults”. Most users usually stick to the default user interface design and user experience, leaving a lot of customization options untouched. An example he gives of improving the default user interface design is of registration forms for events. If a user registers from, say, New York it would help if the country field would say “United States”. That way many users are saved a bit of work and it is this obliteration of small frictions that steer users to repeat purchases. One such example is the mental hurdle of shipping costs. One of the ways of dealing with this hurdle is by giving users the incentive to spend a little more for free shipping, for example. In other words users are made to feel smarter for spending more.

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Another method of making users feel like they should purchase an item is to introduce the 4th dimension. Adding a countdown to the user interface design brings a sense of urgency that can move a user from thinking “should I buy this really?” to “I better get this before I lose the opportunity”. Sites like Ebay and Groupon exploit this very well. In the case of Groupon it even takes on the characteristics of peer pressure. The user interface design features a big buy button but it also makes it a point to show how much a user would save, as well as how many other people have signed on. Should a user still feel like they won’t buy it the user interface design features a very visible ‘Buy it for a friend!’ option. It is all contrived to make the user think “this is a great opportunity, so good that even if I can’t make it, maybe I should get it for someone because it would be a shame to let this pass”.

E-commerce websites have also found a neat way of countering the shopper’s guilt that can come from impulse buys. This can in turn foster thoughts of returning a product as a way of dealing with the guilt. A technique Apple employs with the App Store is to not send out receipts right away. This is necessary because the App Store apps have no trial versions. Sure some apps have free variants with their wings clipped but once you fork out a wad (for an iPhone app) you might realize that you never really needed it at all. According to UXBooth seeing the consequences of a purchase is considered negative feedback when it comes to the impulse buy. The user interface design of e-commerce could, and should, also be about return on investment, such as with Niehaus wireframes. Next time you’re about to go on a shopping spree online ask yourself who’s pulling the strings?

Source: ArticlesBase.com

Citrix Web Interface – Customized to Meet Modern it Demands

Modern day IT demands fast customization and implementation of tools to gain competitive advantage. This trend has encouraged many companies to develop customized solutions, Citrix web interface is one of them. It makes IT relevant to the business instead of limiting IT executives and their teams to just modernizing their systems and optimizing business processes.

Today more than 200,000 organizations across the globe including all the fortune 100 companies swear by Citrix as it gives them the flexibility to change on demand, without changing their environment. Now with Customized Citrix Web Interface they can handle multiple challenges concurrently, and push the productivity and profits further.

Citrix has just posted Citrix Web Interface 4.6 for Windows and Unix/Linux web servers. It works the new Citrix Presentation Server™ 4.5. Citrix has brought many features with each of its new releases. This edition has the following new features:

1. Client detection and deployment process – Often increased security restrictions in modern web browsers and operating systems make it difficult for users to download and deploy Citrix clients. But the new Citrix Web Interface provides client detection and deployment process detects which clients can be deployed within the users’ environment and then guides them through the deployment procedure, reconfiguring their Web browser.

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This helps users get optimal launch experience from even the most secure environments. The Web Interface and Conferencing Manager Guest Attendee sites benefit from the new client detection and deployment process.

2. Reconnection through workspace control – Now users can reconnect previously disconnected applications or applications currently being delivered to the user on some other client device, through workspace control. Workspace control ameliorates the security settings of Internet Explorer 7 to unblock the download of files that do not appear to be directly initiated by the user. In some critical situations where reconnection is not possible, users are given the option of reconfiguring their Internet Explorer security settings using the new client detection and deployment process.

3. Launch Persistent URLs – Using the persistent URL feature of Citrix Web Interface users can launch published applications directly using URLs. No need to browse the Web Interface application list. In scenarios where application launches are blocked by the security settings of Internet Explorer 7, users are presented with a clickable link to launch the application, quite in the manner that applications are launched from the application list.

4. Change password through the Program Neighborhood Agent – Citrix Web Interface user who log on to the Citrix Program Neighborhood Agent using explicitly supplied domain credentials now can change their Windows password if it expires, regardless of whether their computer is in the domain to which they are attempting to authenticate. This helps the users deploy the Program Neighborhood Agent such that client desktops in the workgroups can change their expired passwords by authenticating to the domain.

The above four are just the major new features. There are many such nitty gritty things that make Citrix Web interface a leading and necessary IT implementation.

Source: ArticlesBase.com