If I said ‘click here’ would you jump off a cliff?

Like water and electricity, the internet has become a utility. We use it everyday and so, naturally, we are becoming more conscientious about using our time and resources wisely. We’re more considered now about what videos we watch on YouTube, who we follow on Twitter, what emails we open and what links we click. Because of this, more and more emphasis is being placed on User Centric Design.

I love User Centric Design, it’s a big part of my job, but I do think it’s too easy to get caught up in the word ‘user’. Makes it sound like users are a special breed of human only found online, somehow different to people in the offline world. I prefer to call it ‘people centric design‘ – because, as humans, we base our decisions on past experience. Offline experiences definitely influence online behavior.

What the brain does when confronted with your content

Something I think we, as digital marketing people, wrongly assume a lot of the time is that the choices we make are always conscious. Everyday the brain gets bombarded with thousands of different stimulus (from adverting alone) and tries to make sense of it all, regardless of the medium. But, as clever as we humans are, the brain can only process one stimulus at a time (yes people can multitask, but it’s essentially how quickly your brain can move between stimulus making it seem like multi-tasking) and within a millisecond the stimulus has been put into one of two boxes a. needs more attention b. irrelevant at this current time. How the brain makes that choice is based on all the information it can gather in that millisecond before.

A stimulus can be anything from a new email in your inbox, a call to action to ‘click here’ or someone asking you to jump off a cliff. The brain doesn’t treat offline and online differently when making this decision. Online stimulus are ignored just as instantaneously as stimulus in the real world.

So. To get people to do stuff online, we need to tell the brain, in a millisecond, why it needs to pay attention before it has chance to put the stimulus in box b.

Why ‘click here’ will get you in box b.

Here is an example of why using only ‘click here’ and adding a hyperlink will get your carefully crafted content in box b.

E.g. 1. Hyperlinking is essentially the same as bolding. It tells the brain ‘hey, look at me’. So it does. And by having only ‘click here’ as your call to action you’re limiting the information the brain can get quickly from the text.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Click here to Find out why jumping off a cliff is bad for your health Proin ut blandit ipsum. Morbi augue nulla, viverra non mollis id, pretium eget tellus. Maecenas adipiscing leo convallis nunc iaculis in pharetra lacus laoreet. To see the common injuries as a result of jumping from cliffs, click here. Donec erat neque, vulputate in mattis eget, interdum non ligula. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Nunc porta posuere arcu, non posuere nisl viverra sed. Jump from cliffs safely – to find your nearest parachute club, click here. Sed aliquet risus non nulla rhoncus suscipit. Sed sem ante, molestie nec feugiat id, blandit at neque.

E.g. 2. This example gets the brains attention right away. Telling it instantly what the text is about without having to actually read it.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Find out why jumping off a cliff is bad for your health Proin ut blandit ipsum. Morbi augue nulla, viverra non mollis id, pretium eget tellus. Maecenas adipiscing leo convallis nunc iaculis in pharetra lacus laoreet. Common injuries as a result of jumping from cliffs Donec erat neque, vulputate in mattis eget, interdum non ligula. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Nunc porta posuere arcu, non posuere nisl viverra sed. Jump from cliffs safely – find your nearest parachute club. Sed aliquet risus non nulla rhoncus suscipit. Sed sem ante, molestie nec feugiat id, blandit at neque.

So you’ve made it to box a. What now?

Should the stimulus make it to box a. the brain then takes a number of steps to decide the appropriate reaction.

1. It breaks the stimulus down in to a number of questions depending on the complexity i.e. Email = who is it from? What do they want? Will it benefit me if I open it? Jump off a cliff = Why? How far is it down? What are the chances I’d die?
2. One-by-one your brain searches through all the years of experience you’ve had and tries to find a similar, first-hand, past experience that will help you solve your current problem. If it finds one, bingo. Problem solved.
3. However, if there is no similar past experience to draw upon, your brain will then move to second-hand experience given to you by friends, family, magazines or even the telly.
4. Failing that, this is when the search for an appropriate reaction moves outside your own body and experiences. This is when most people move to the internet for answers.

Ok. Lets say I ask you to jump off a cliff. What would you say? Well hopefully you’d say no. Why? Because some kind of past experience tells you it’s a bad idea. So why should it be any different if someone asks you to ‘click here’. As a person in the digital world, when you see example 1. and are asked to ‘click here’, questions arise: ‘Why?’ and ‘Where will it take me?’. Then you have to devote time to reading to the text before the link to find out why you should ‘click here’. Then it’s too late, attention lost.

People will spend an average of 4 seconds scanning a webpage to find information of relevance to them. You know how many milliseconds there are in 4 seconds? 4 million.

That’s 4 million chances for the brain to disregard your content. Fact.