Psych Design Series #4: Familiarity
More than a week had passed since my last psych-induced Medium story and I’m a bit guilty about that. It seems that I can’t write often when I’m busy doing some design work and project planning. So my posts might be less frequent (from weekly to once in 2 weeks OR twice a month). So, without further ado, I would like to introduce you to something familiar.
Do you remember a time when you encountered something unfamiliar? It may be a new policy at work, a friend bringing a new person you don’t know, your first day of school / work, changes in the UI of your favorite chat app, your favorite TV show being replaced, a new virus without a sure vaccine, being in place with totally different culture, or even meeting a total stranger. There can be countless examples, but my limited memory can only retrieve a few. Do you remember what your reaction was during those times? You may feel a bit mad for a sudden change (the chat app, or TV show for example), or you may feel lost (being in a new place with no friends and family), or worst feel some fear, as you go into the unknown. These emotions are on the negative side, which means it doesn’t give pleasant feelings to our brain. And our brain is in constant search of something that will feel good (Oxycontin increase). This is the reason why people back-off from something totally unfamiliar. Because, they are not sure of the outcome of something they are not used to.
This fear of the unknown is just part of our DNA, and a means to protect us from danger / bad outcomes. This can be as simple as choosing an ice cream flavor. Imagine that you are walking outside on a hot day, and passed by an ice cream store, you want to choose your favorite Vanilla flavor, but you notice a few different flavor names that are unknown to you. Being naturally adventurous, you want to try those new flavors. But deep inside a small voice is telling you to just choose the flavor you used to love. You rebel against that small voice, so you end up trying the new flavor. Then, when you had a first taste of the new ice cream flavor, you realized that its not that delicious as your plain old favorite, Vanilla. So, you regret not listening to that small voice inside, and ended up having a bad day, for having an awful flavored ice cream.
As I write about this now, it makes me realize that this fear might be the cause of previous wars. One civilization with an existing culture would find the invading foreigners with a different culture totally unfamiliar to them. And in those times, people are not that knowledgeable in psychology yet, and Internet didn’t exist yet for both parties to research about each other’s culture before meeting. As a result, one culture would fight the other because neither would want to get out of their comfort zones. (Anyway, this is just my theory, and haven’t done enough research about previous wars.) There are more aspects to consider why war happened before, and I think this is one of them — the fear of the unknown / unfamiliar.
It all makes sense why some people would ignore / snub something they don’t know about. Some people would mock another person who knows something, merely because that something is unfamiliar to them. Those people might be unhelpful, but its merely because they can’t relate to something another person is trying to convey.
Think of below scenarios for example:
- Bullies ridiculing a nerd at school. They simply can’t relate to the complex stuff another student does.
- Local people on a small town gossiping about someone who did something that didn’t conform to their social norm. One of their conversations might be, “Why would he do that?”. They simply can’t understand the reason of something that is unknown to them.
That’s why various psychology-related advice are written to make negotiations smooth and move better proposals to approval / action. Because in reality, people will just reject something that are unfamiliar to them.
Before I started my design journey 2 years ago, I would notice some brands who are obvious copy-cats. It’s one thing to make another successful design style your design inspiration, but it’s totally different to just merely copy and paste another person’s design. There’s really no sense of originality here. But as I began to learn more about the psychological aspects of a design, I somehow understood why some people do the copy-paste strategy.
If you’re the artsy kind, you would probably raised your eyebrow to anything made out of pure imitation. You would probably curse the creator of that something because of his pure lack of originality and imagination. I would understand such feelings of hatred and disgust. But from a designer perspective, where every design decision has a corresponding reason, those who do copy-cats or near-copy-cats definitely have a good reason for doing so.
The reason behind all the copy-pasting thing is people normally respond to something familiar. This is scientifically known as the “mere-exposure” effect or Jakob’s Law.
“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Design for patterns for which users are accustomed.” — Jakob Nielsen
The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them.
This phenomenon is also explained briefly in Charles Duhigg’s book, where he explained why the funk-pop song “Hey Ya!” by Outkast didn’t initially became a hit on the radios, even if Hit Song Science predicted it to be a hit because of its tunes. The reason was that the song was too unfamiliar at the time. And just like what Jakob Nielsen said in term of user experience, people will abandon your website if there is a steep learning curve. The more unfamiliar something is, the more steep is the learning curve. This applies to basically anything, including songs. Before radio listeners learned to appreciate Outkast’s songs, the DJ’s would play it in the middle of their usual radio sticky songs. In this way, the listeners would not quickly change radio stations when they suddenly hear the new strange song from Outkast. If Outkast’s record label and radio stations didn’t do this strategy before, “Hey Ya!” might not be a hit since it can’t reach a broad audience, because when people hear their strange music on the radio for the first time, they would quickly change channels.
Hence, the most effective way to introduce something new / unfamiliar, is to blend it with something old / familiar to the audience.
I see two good reasons for using a familiar design:
- Reduce learning curve — The more familiar something is, the easier it is to understand. So less learning effort is needed.
- Cures fear of unknown — If something is familiar already, its not really scary. It becomes comfortable.
Below are some scenarios where something new is injected into something already familiar:
- Fusion restaurants — these are restaurants serving food that are a mixture from different cuisines. They are trying to create a new flavor, but retaining some familiar feel/taste of the original recipe. (Example: Pad Thai Taco. Its a mix of Thai & Mexican cuisine.) So if you are of Mexican origin, and curious to taste some Thai cuisine, choosing something that has a familiar Mexican feel might be your first choice.
- Fast food chains in different locations — If you notice, certain famous food chain (e.g. McDo or KFC) will have a slightly different menu in different locations / countries). For example, if these stores are in the US, their menu items will be burgers, fries, and salads. But these same store franchise in Asia would have rice meals in their menu. It’s because they want to serve something familiar to the local market. If people in this area used to eat rice, then its of their best sales strategy to add rice in their food items, else they would have less customers.
- Material Design inspired apps — Material is a design specification from Google, and is applied in all of their apps (Android, Gmail, Drive, Keep, etc.). And since almost everyone knows Google, and their apps are widely used as well, some mobile app creators wisely follow Google’s design style to get more user interest.
- Apps that utilize familiar interaction — Some examples of these are endless scroll (most social sites have this), a red dot on a notification icon, swiping left or right, double-clicking/tapping a page to zoom, etc.
Copying something is not really a sin, but merely a way to let users easily cross the path from something familiar to a not-so-unknown newness.
If you know of other samples of the familiarity principle in action, feel free to let me know in below response.
Thanks for reading! Have a great first-week-of-the-new-month ahead!
