What Designers Know That Marketers Forget
Whatever we find ourselves immersed in has its own vocabulary for the same handful of truths. What behavioral economists call a "bias" psychologists call an "effect" while designers, borrowing from physics, call it a "law." The terminology or label may change, but the underlying mechanism of how a human brain actually processes information, makes a choice, and forms a memory does not.
If you look closely at the laws of UX (written for people building interfaces), you'll notice something peculiar. Yes, they are about interfaces, but they're also about attention, memory, and decision-making under constraint, which means they're also about marketing.
For the next seven days, I'll be looking closely at a handful of these laws and asking a simple question: what can be gleaned from each to help a practitioner do better marketing? I'm not asking "how do we exploit this," and by the end of the series, you'll see that if you come to understand these laws, you'll be better at marketing and building trust with your customers.
Let's begin, shall we?
Stop trying to be original where it doesn't matter
"Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know." Here's a question for anyone running a rebrand or a redesign: how much of what you're changing is actually improving the experience, and how much of it is just satisfying your own boredom with the old version?
People don't evaluate your product in isolation. They evaluate it against every other product they've ever used. A shopping cart icon in the top right corner isn't a design choice anymore. It's a promise. Break the promise, and you get a customer who has to think, and a customer who has to think is a customer who is one click from leaving.
Do not confuse familiarity with mediocrity, and redesign the checkout flow, restructure the navigation, invent a new term for "pricing," all in the name of standing out. Standing out and being understood are not the same goal, and when they conflict, understanding wins. Save your originality for the parts of the experience that actually carry meaning, including the product, the point of view, and the story. So before doing anything, ask, "Does this novelty create value for the customer, or does it just create work for their brain?" If it's the latter, all you are doing is adding friction and calling it innovation.
Innovate on what you say and conform on how people find, use, and buy it.
Familiarity isn't the enemy of differentiation.