Give positive affirmation

Bobby had just compared a bad checkout to taking the prize out of a cereal box, and Nathalie Nahai didn't miss a beat. "I'll give you the top one," she said.

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   Give positive affirmation

   Paying hurts. Reassure people right when they're handing over the money.

   "When we're paying for something, you activate a lot of the same areas of the brain that activate when we're in physical pain. It's painful to pay."

   Nathalie NahaiS01E18 Hear it 15:30

   > now saying "great choice" at every checkout. security has asked me to leave.

Then she did the maths on the funnel. Of all the people who visit, only a small number reach the page where they actually pay you. "You're already talking about someone who's in some kind of level of pain," she said. "So the last thing you want to do is add to that psychological pain by creating something that's difficult for them to complete."

The checkout is where we punish people

Nathalie's list of what usually goes wrong at that moment reads like a tour of every form I've ever sworn at. Forms that were never tested with real users. Far too many mandatory fields. Red asterisks, which in the cultures that use them carry a negative association. Warnings that pop up the moment you get something slightly wrong. Postcode fields split into two boxes for no reason anyone can explain.

"So you're basically punishing them at the checkout," she said.

It gets worse because of how memory works. Nathalie brought up the peak end rule: we tend to judge a whole experience by its most intense moments and by how it ended. If the most painful bit is also the last bit, "then you're really screwing your customers over."

And then: "You've almost got them, and then you're kind of going, we're going to land you in a world of pain."

If you want to see the brain science behind the pain part, a well known Stanford study, Neural Predictors of Purchases, found that excessive prices activated the insula, and that the activity helped predict whether people went on to buy. We've written more about this side of things in what neuromarketing can teach digital marketers.

A green tick is a small kindness

The fixes Nathalie suggested are almost embarrassingly simple. Test your form length and strip out everything you don't need. Then, instead of only telling people when they've done something wrong, tell them when they've done something right.

She cited research from the Netherlands on exactly that: when someone fills in a field correctly, show them a green tick. In Western cultures both green and a tick carry a positive association. I called it a checkbox affirmation. Nathalie's reply: "Precisely, positive affirmation."

There's good form research that backs the general idea and adds a useful caveat. Luke Wroblewski's testing of inline validation found the best version cut errors and completion times and lifted satisfaction. But success ticks mostly helped on fields that are genuinely hard, like choosing a username or a password. On a simple name field, people were confused: was the tick saying they'd typed a valid name, or their name correctly?

So affirm where people are actually unsure. Nobody needs a gold star for their first name. Everyone appreciates knowing their password finally meets the rules before they hit submit.

Affirmation is more than a tick

The bigger version is an order confirmation that arrives straight away and tells you what happens next, or a thank you page that doesn't immediately try to upsell you. The "registration only takes 60 seconds" line Nathalie mentioned earlier in the episode is the same idea, and it's got its own page: reduce ambiguity.

Our conversion copywriting guide calls part of this objection handling: answering the doubt before it turns into a reason to leave. Reassurance near the button ("you can cancel any time", "we'll never share your email") does the same job as the tick, just in words.

Just don't overdo it. A tick on every field, or "great choice!" on every order, stops meaning anything pretty quickly.

Five fixes for your checkout

1. Buy something from your own site. On your phone, on a bad connection, with a card that isn't saved. Write down every moment you felt a flash of irritation.
2. Count your mandatory fields. For each one, ask who uses that data and what happens if it's missing. Cut anything that doesn't have a good answer.
3. Rewrite your error messages. Say what to do, not what went wrong. "Please use your mobile number, starting with 04" beats "Invalid input".
4. Add success feedback to your hardest fields. Passwords, usernames, promo codes. Leave the easy ones alone.
5. Fix the last screen. Because of the peak end rule, your confirmation page and email carry more weight than they look like they should. Make them warm and useful.

Nathalie's book Webs of Influence goes a lot deeper on the psychology, and our interview with her on kwasi.com has more on forms and persuasion.