Nathalie Nahai: Dlaczego klikamy

0:00 Woj Kwasi You're listening to episode 18 where we chat with the boss of behaviors, the shogun of strategy, web psychologist Nathalie Nahai. Hi, humans and robots! Welcome to WojCast! My name is Woj, founder of Kwasi. Thanks for joining me today. I interview digital marketing and branding superstars to find out what it means to have empathy in digital. What is digital empathy anyway? Let's find out together. And as always, I'm accompanied by my friend and associate, potentially superior artificial intelligence, Bobby Bot. What's new in the world of AI, Bobby?

0:39 Bobby Bot I'm gonna turn the tables this time, Woj. What's happening in the world of human intelligence today?

0:44 Woj Kwasi Human intelligence?

0:45 Bobby Bot Brilliant to see it at work in the flesh. You know, you've been working to put empathy into me from the outside in. But what if we have it all wrong? What if my examination of you is the key? Seeing how you put things together. Essentially, that's what marketers do, right? Trying to understand human behavior like an army of web psychologists.

1:01 Woj Kwasi Did you know that is a thing Bobby Bot? But I just made it up. No, it's real. And I know one. I can link you into a chat we had. Web psychology is an important consideration for any brand choosing to participate online. So I discussed what makes people click with none other but the web psychologist herself, Nathalie Nahai, while I was at MozCon.

1:03 Bobby Bot Thought I just made it up.

1:24 Woj Kwasi Nathalie is the author of the absolutely fascinating book Webs of Influence, the Psychology of Online Persuasion, where we learn how to know who we're targeting, to communicate persuasively and to sell with integrity. Three very important elements every digital marketer should embrace. I highly recommend it. She's also the host of a podcast series The Good, the Bad and the Dirty, Secret Psychology of Persuasion. where she chats with fellow authors, doctors, psychologists, digital marketers and other interesting people. When she's not writing books and doing interviews, Nathalie can be found traveling the world, speaking at various conferences and assisting large organizations were fundamentally understanding human behavior and applying her principles to get better bang for their bucks. From a young age, Nathalie was drawn to psychology and decrypting the minds of human beings.

2:21 We have something in common.

2:22 Nathalie Nahai Honestly, I think it started when I was really young. I got bullied for 10 years at school, which I fucking hated. Oh, my ladshaft.

2:29 Woj Kwasi Sure.

2:29 Nathalie Nahai Okay, sorry, sorry, guys. And so I think when you're, I think most people have some kind of bad experiences growing up, but people are mean and you have to start navigating those waters. And I think that's where I started understanding if you could try and unpick why people are doing things, then maybe you've got a better chance of survival. So I think that's where actually it

2:31 Woj Kwasi Hallelujah.

2:47 Nathalie Nahai Then I accidentally ended up doing psychology as one of my x-ray levels. Mm-hmm. And I loved it so much that instead of going directly to art school, which is what I was gonna do, my mum suggested go and do a BSC in psych because you could apply it with your art or with your music to anything you like because the arts industries are very difficult and you won't make much money. So I did, and that's kind of the starting point of the

3:11 Woj Kwasi From a playground to universal. Eventually, Nathalie's curiosity and ability to learn quickly drew her into web and digital strategies.

3:20 Nathalie Nahai Well after I finished my psych degree I'd be doing quite a lot of music both here and in the US. I was recording in Atlanta, Georgia and um I kind of went I needed to start getting websites and of course this was several years ago, so back then it w there weren't that many great websites and I thought well I can either pay some guy at the time it was like two grand, now it's like upwards of ten or whatever it is.

3:34 Woj Kwasi Hmm.

3:39 Nathalie Nahai So I can either pay this guy a couple of grand every year to design the site or I could just spend a couple of hundred quid and learn how to code and design a site myself. So I went and learned, you know, the basic HTML, CSS, and then started learning Flash and then HTML5 came along and I thought, right, it's a sinking ship, I'll just quit while I'm in it. Um so that's how I ended up in design was just and then the music wasn't going so well just because There was mate I was already twenty six years old, there weren't that many female musicians and also at that age music industry, which is run by guys predominantly called plug and folk was not a big thing. So it was just it was just so many things that were just a big no really. Um so then because I'd been doing the design stuff on the side and people were starting to ask me to do their sites instead of seeing what I'd done for myself, I accidentally ended up being a freelance web designer for a while.

3:53 Woj Kwasi ship on

4:12 Nathalie Nahai No, but there's so many things that were just a big No. No.

4:25 Woj Kwasi In isolation, web design and psychology are very different disciplines, but they make so much sense when combined. Nathalie really had to understand the behaviour of people traversing around her sites from a search engine point of view and from a personal point of view.

4:41 Nathalie Nahai Well that's it. And I think especially now that we're seeing technology catching up with with how we behave naturally, if you look at things like the kinds of algorithms that that Google are bringing out and how you can no longer trick the system with heavily loading keywords into the page, it's taking a much more naturalistic approach. So imitating human behaviour. So of course if you're moving technology into this way, especially with things like the internet of things, wearable tech.

4:58 Woj Kwasi In the

5:05 Nathalie Nahai we're moving closer and closer towards creating just an additional depth to our existing offline reality, which is so much more seamless that if you want to get to that point, which is already now what's happening, then you have to understand psychology because that's it's human users at this point until we create AI. And so that's kind of the context for all of it, it's the key that unlocks everything. We're making Yes.

5:21 Bobby Bot Yes. If that's the case, then you'll need bot psychologists to study their unique behavior patterns. Why do robots learn the encyclopedia backwards with new consumer trends? We're also drawn to understanding ourselves.

5:36 Woj Kwasi I've never studied psychology formally but I know a lot of things around the edges from reading bits here and there. My parents split while I was growing up, so I think I was a natural psychologist for it because I had to learn at a very young age how to deal with things. I find it intriguing blending these two disciplines.

5:54 Nathalie Nahai So at the moment, most of what I do is speaking and training, so it's teaching basically. I think a lot of different conferences and at big companies. And then the training side, which is kind of the consultant side, is usually with marketing teams and e-commerce teams, teaching them how to apply the web psychology stuff within whatever specific projects they're doing. Because web psychology is not just about the design of websites, it's to do with any kind of app, or it could be any online environment. Also, the design of projects.

6:16 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Any kind of touch point really, but the consumer but makes the whole experience.

6:21 Nathalie Nahai Yeah, and she mixed the whole experience. Exactly. And it depends on which way you want to go with it. So then, also, I mean, I do do auditing type stuff and help people to redesign sites from the

6:31 Woj Kwasi Now. That's what we do here at Kwasi as well. We work with web development companies and we guide them in the right direction because they'll often design a site without any background information other than what's been supplied by the client or based on their past experiences. So we audit from a user and search engine point of view and we also look at click tracking to see how people are navigating around the site. For example, on one site we found that people were only clicking two buttons on the homepage. Then, when we crawled and examined the site, we found that most of the content was nestled 6 levels deep. So we took those internal page elements, which got used quite regularly, and moved them to the front page, which had an impact. Also, involving the designers in that process was important. It's an educated approach, rather than a, we did an upgrade where we just gave you flashy bells and whistles.

7:24 Nathalie Nahai Well often you just don't need all of that, you just need to make things more coherent so that everything's pulling towards the goals that we want to achieve.

7:30 Woj Kwasi Nathalie put together a book called Webs of Influence that put all of her skills to the test in order to leave a lasting contribution to a wellspring of information in digital marketing.

7:41 Nathalie Nahai So from start to finish about a year and a half, most of it was I started quite slowly. So when I was at uni I always used to research for you know projects like printing stuff out, highlight I sort of took that long approach over the summer of 2011 and then I got to about January 2012 and I thought oh shit I really need to start putting my finger out and just writing a book. So when I started writing from Feb till about

7:57 Woj Kwasi I really need it.

8:03 Nathalie Nahai Well, it was four months in, so February, March May, the end of the end of May. I was writing four to six hours a day, four days a week for four months solid. Like I just head down and the goal was fifty thousand words. I got to eighty eight thousand and then had to cut back. Um And then there was an extra two weeks of design time on, you know, we commissioned the covers. They did a shocking job of the covers, and the inside stuff was just awful. So I designed everything: the infographics, the page design, the front cover, the back cover, the site, the video that goes along with the. Yeah, so it was just a long prototype.

8:24 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

8:32 Nathalie Nahai Video that goes along with that. Yeah, so it was a long process.

8:35 Woj Kwasi Her hands-on approach paid off. A lot of marketing books you get are just text with black and white diagrams. Nathalie has a level of engagement going on where as a reader, you get to witness how she is living her book and practicing what she is preaching.

8:49 Nathalie Nahai No need to preach to the choir. Amen.

8:51 Woj Kwasi Another description.

8:52 Nathalie Nahai When they came back to me with initial design, I love the editors there, they did an amazing job on the content, but coming back to the designer, it's like you guys have not read the fricking book. Like if you do this, you'll undermine the entire thesis of the book. Let me design it, implement everything that that I've been talking about.

9:00 Woj Kwasi Like these.

9:08 Nathalie Nahai But also I think people you know, there's really fun ways to learn and you've got to write something which is going to be exciting and captivating and provocative and fun and I think hopefully it's it's done that. I would like to think that it's done that.

9:19 Bobby Bot I want to learn about psychological tests. Recently I came across something called the Hick's Law, which looks at choice. It's basically saying that when people have too much choice, they tend not to choose anything. There was a test with jam displays that showed that more choice leads to less actual selection. I'm interested in applying some other real-world psychological tests that I can run on Woj from time to time. No jam necessary. Maybe peanut butter or manuka honey.

9:42 Nathalie Nahai Well, one thing that I really like because you can apply it to anything, whether you're selling something on a sales page or you're chatting someone up for a date, is reducing ambiguity so as to make someone feel more comfortable. So if you're meeting a lovely lass or guy or whomever at a bar and you're approaching them to chat with them, one of the best things you can do psychologically Is to frame the conversation, say, look, I'm in a bit of a rush, I've only got three minutes, I wondered if, and then you insert whatever kind of chat up line you want to say. And the reason that that works, same things on sign-up forms, you know, Hootsuite, I think, do this. Registration only takes 60 seconds. If you reduce people's ambiguity and their fear, then they're much more open to having that dialogue with you. So that's one of my favorite techniques, it's reducing ambiguity. Another one is based on Gestalt principles, the idea that we don't like.

10:22 Woj Kwasi That's where I think

10:29 Nathalie Nahai Lack of completion. So if you see, say it's an e-commerce site and you're seeing a range of products and the screen shows only the top of the products at the bottom of the page, so you can just see that there's something extra, it will encourage you to scroll down. So things like that, really simple principles that you can employ, whether it's online or in print or whatever it might be.

10:50 Bobby Bot Note to self, rush Woj with impossible Rush Woj with impossible. timetables and always provide extra hidden options.

10:55 Woj Kwasi Okay, interesting. Perhaps wearable tech and devices like Google Glass will assist with capturing data for online neuromarketing tests.

11:03 Nathalie Nahai I think it is interesting why I go. I think the the danger that we always face that we haven't yet surmounted is I don't know if that's the word, siloization, but like segmentation of these different tools. So you might say, okay, well, let's go with eye tracking. Fine. Eye tracking, great tool. It will tell you exactly where people's focus detection is. It doesn't tell you anything about your brain's

11:25 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm. Things like smells. Not that that applies to the ghost in the machine or the ghost in the shell. Awesome movie.

11:31 Nathalie Nahai Or even like in you know, if I'm looking at you as we're talking right now, there's stuff that's going on in my peripheral vision that my frame will be taking in without necessarily being consciously aware. And all of those things, whether that's online, on the side of the page, they all have an effect on our state of mind, decision making processes, etc. So I think wearable tech, all of that stuff. Will provide us ways to measure certain quantifiable things about behavior like eye movements or galvanic skin response, etc. But I think the really big break will come when there is a holistic way that employs a whole range of these tools over in combination within a much broader, deeper psychological context or understanding of behavior, which is more qualitative as well as quantitative. And I think when you've got that kind of fully specced out holistic system, the excitement and also the terror that we either we either use it for extraordinary good or we're all fucked. My friend will be taking in without. Yeah, so

11:41 Woj Kwasi And all of Measure. That's a combination. So we're going to have to be very fearful of articles that come out and draw conclusions based on a single device.

12:30 Nathalie Nahai We like silver bullets. Silver bullets are only good for one thing, and that's kind of like shooting idiots. So just don't get sniped by thewolves! Oh, vampires also bad enough.

12:32 Woj Kwasi Yeah. So yes. But oh or American werewolves in London.

12:41 Bobby Bot Special effects and guy who did thriller.

12:43 Woj Kwasi Can you dig it?

12:45 Bobby Bot Yeah.

12:48 Woj Kwasi From all of Nathalie's research, if she had to set up shop anywhere in the world, the low-hanging fruit would seem like an ideal place to do business, where society is the most vulnerable to being sold to.

13:00 Nathalie Nahai I don't know, I don't I've never thought that. I don't know. I think possibly the societies that have a shorter history of being online, so places possibly like China for instance, which still has a way to go or developing countries, India, possibly Africa. But to be honest, I think for me persuasion is a tool for good and it's it's only supposed to be used if if it's for mutual benefit. So like on principle even if I could make a huge amount of money doing that I wouldn't.

13:27 Bobby Bot I believe that it can be used for altruistic good, like in terms of third world countries. It should be possible to use psychology and online tools to benefit others, not just gambling websites.

13:36 Nathalie Nahai There's a great company based in London called Visual DNA and They've found some really interesting stuff with looking at psychometric data. So personality profiling people in countries in which it's very difficult for people to get lines of credit. So, for instance, in Africa, in certain regions, they found that people have to pay in cash, they don't have any kind of credit history, so if they need to buy a credit card, sign up for credit card, they can't because their credit rating is so bad. So, they found, we're moving into weird space here, but they found that.

14:03 Woj Kwasi Right.

14:08 Nathalie Nahai You can really very accurately predict if someone would be a good candidate for credit lines, i.e., they'll pay it, they won't end up in debt, they'll use it responsibly, and become long-term customers just by looking at their personality traits once they're into adulthood. So, there is the potential for girls who don't have lines of credit, can get loans to set up businesses, to buy a house, whatever, without. That history just because you're looking at the psychometric profiling. However, it doesn't take a genius to look at the flip side as well which is and then look at human rights and so one has to be extraordinarily careful with these things.

14:21 Woj Kwasi Right. Exactly. Exactly. Nathalie's research also puts her in a position to discover unique trends in global user behaviour.

14:47 Nathalie Nahai Well there's one that I like about Germany, which is that in Germany if you're going into e-commerce you have to give free shipping and you have to pay for people sending you loads of stuff back because otherwise they won't buy from you. In Brazil a lot of it's cash on demand uh cash on demand, cash on delivery, sorry. So they'll order something online The infrastructure is such that you'll have a delivery person come to your door, you inspect the goods and then you pay. Just as like one line off by thing. Um also in individualistic societies there are much greater gender differences in terms of um things like trust, self-representation online, how much data you'd like to give in terms of your personal information. So those are three off the top of my head.

15:22 Woj Kwasi She also knows some actions that stop customers from buying.

15:26 Bobby Bot Like taking the prize out of a cereal box. Sure fire.

15:30 Nathalie Nahai Example: I'll give you the top one. Research has found that when we're paying for something, it activates a lot of the same areas of the brain that activate when we're in physical pain. So it's painful to pay to part with money. Now, If you are considering like the small number of people who come through your funnel, who'll get to the conversion page, who are actually going to pay you for something, you're already talking about someone who's in some kind of level of pain, or so research suggests, right? So the last thing you want to do is add to that psychological pain by creating something that's difficult for them to complete. And what you often find is that the people, one of the first places I would test, people create these long forms, they don't test them with their users, and you end up with Way too many mandatory fields that really they don't need. So you're making the process too long. It's also punitive because the red asterisks in the cultures that usually use them have a negative association. You have all these warnings that pop up if you do something wrong. Also, the postcode boxes are often two postcode sections instead of one, and people get frustrated. So you're basically punishing them at the checkout. And according to the peak end rule, we tend to remember entire experiences based on the best peaks.

16:34 The lowest peaks and the thing at the end. So if this is the worst peak and it's at the end, then you're really screwing your customers over.

16:09 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm. Warnings. Spaces.

16:41 Nathalie Nahai You've almost got them. You've almost got them and then you're kind of going, we're going to land you in a world of pain. So a quick and easy way to do it, test your form length, see if you can reduce the form so that you're stripping out all the unnecessary stuff. And also, instead of creating a negative association, I know this sounds like a really simple hack, but researchers in the Netherlands have found this helpful. When they fill in a form correctly, like a field, like your name. She called. Just people like the green tick in Western cultures green and tick are associated yeah and it's just a nice little hat

17:06 Woj Kwasi Associated. Yeah, and it's just a nice. You talk about a checkbox affirmation.

17:11 Nathalie Nahai That's right, yeah. Precisely, positive affirmation. Um and that can that can be one way to alleviate that particular issue. Um Just as an example, a bunch of the oysters, but um yeah.

17:21 Woj Kwasi Nathalie knows how important it is to communicate persuasively. It's something that people should be looking at first before they start building a website.

17:31 Bobby Bot Do not ask go, do not collect common sense. I would say yeah.

17:34 Nathalie Nahai Before you get to building a website or any of that stuff, what are your values as a brand of one or a brand of a company, whatever it might be? What's the core value or core values that you need to espouse? How will you transmit that throughout or infuse that throughout all of your messages, all of your content? And then understanding how best to.

17:34 Bobby Bot Yep.

17:53 Nathalie Nahai Kind of adapt that to both the people that you're trying to reach and the channel through which you're reaching them. So the people, it would be things like mirroring their linguistic styles, the clothing if you're doing videos, gestures, all that sort of thing. So all the subconscious cues that we look to. And then the channels, I'm not going to talk to you too much about that, but formal on LinkedIn, short characters or concise on Twitter.

18:16 Woj Kwasi In a TED talk by Simon Sinek, he attributed Apple's success to what he described as the why-how what.

18:22 Simon Sinek Strategy. Why, how, what? This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren't. Let me define the terms really quickly. Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do 100%. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiating value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations. know why they do what they do. And by why I don't mean to make a profit. That's a result. It's always a result. By why I mean what's your purpose, what's your cause, what's your belief. Why does your organization exist?

19:04 Woj Kwasi From a psychological point of view, Nathalie can explain why this little thing, called why, works.

19:10 Bobby Bot A crazy little thing called why? Because they're drawn to people.

19:14 Nathalie Nahai Who are like-minded to us to a great extent, unless we're very hydropamine, in which case we risk taking it novelty seeking or kind of go away from that, but we like that which is similar. So if you have a very strong why and you can say this is why we're doing it, then those people with whom that message resonates will naturally congregate around you and there'll be a much deeper connection, typically speaking. And then of course you're creating a a common cause that people can kind of rally behind. It's more meaningful. Also it creates more relational customer relationships as opposed to transactional ones which tend to be based on Yeah. For me. Yeah, exactly. is reciprocity.

19:47 Woj Kwasi Reciprocity is important online. You have to overcome online communication barriers that make it hard to evoke emotions. Rand Fishkin does this really well.

19:47 Bobby Bot Okay.

19:57 Nathalie Nahai But one thing recently that I've heard said that I hadn't considered actually, which I thought was Very insightful was one uncle who was at Lithium, fascinating guy, extraordinarily smart and actually quite compassionate in terms of his speaking style. He was talking about using reciprocity to help your customers to help you. So often we always talk about serving the customer. What can we do for you? What can we help you with? And what you'll find is that in relationships, like if you're in a relationship and the other person's always doing stuff.

20:24 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

20:24 Nathalie Nahai you feel kind of off, like it feels imbalanced. Now I'm not saying that the customer brand relationship should be the same as an intimate relationship, but if you enable people to reciprocally help you out, you create more of a sense of a bond. And I think that's something that could be really done or used well to not only help you research your customers what they want, but create a more emotionally intimate connection with the people that you want to reach.

20:26 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Nathalie usually has the five fun questions at the end of her podcast. So now, It's Bobby Bot's turn to use his human psychology algo to fire off something that brings Nathalie joy. I love these.

21:02 Bobby Bot I love these.

21:03 Nathalie Nahai Yeah.

21:03 Bobby Bot or risk. Ooh, depends on what kind of risk, but generally risk. Priorities or

21:07 Nathalie Nahai Oh oh god. As a psychologist I sus Vulnerabilities are the areas for growth, but priorities is systematic. I would priorities.

21:16 Woj Kwasi Mm priorities

21:18 Bobby Bot Native or data driven.

21:20 Nathalie Nahai Praise.

21:20 Woj Kwasi Crazy. I was gonna say, or a combination of both. It would be a combination of moderated would be good.

21:23 Nathalie Nahai It would be a combination. But it allows them all to choose. If they could meet, that would be perfect. Like my dad's a physicist, my mum's a psychologist, so and then they meet and then there was me. And I think there's a kind of

21:28 Woj Kwasi Yes.

21:33 Nathalie Nahai And I think this

21:33 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

21:35 Nathalie Nahai Sorry, guys, bit of an odd conversation. But I think the combination of the two is always good. Yes. When the answer and data make, you get a good data.

21:41 Woj Kwasi Yes.

21:41 Bobby Bot Mm-hmm. Excellent answers. I think I have made sufficient strides with this specimen Woj. I'd like to sit down with psychologists on a more regular basis. I think they are as obsessed with human intent as I am, especially when. when it comes to what you buy.

21:56 Woj Kwasi So we might have a budding web psychologist on our hands. Really enjoyed catching up with Nathalie and I love how she investigates her mind and you know how we can build better websites by seeing what's ticking and understanding people. You can Actually, catch the second edition of Webs of Influence, the Psychology of Online Persuasion, which has been translated into five languages now. So it's available in English, South Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Polish. Nathalie's also launching a brand new podcast called Seeking the Self podcast. So it's all about finding out how we lose ourselves in the modern world. So in the times of great flux, uncertainty, and disconnectedness. The question of who we are and how we relate to ourselves and others takes on a new urgency and meaning. So she's joined on the show with Dr. Aaron Balick, who's a BBC Radio One's resident psychotherapist and an award-winning producer and the award-winning producer.

22:54 Hannah Walker Brown. So you can find out all about that podcast at seeking the selfpodcast.com. Be sure to follow Nathalie on social media. We'll have links in her show notes as well as some of our favorite work that she's produced and all the things we've mentioned today. All the things we've mentioned during this episode. And remember, please share this episode if you enjoyed it. It helps us get the word out there. Share it with your friends, networks, colleagues, bots, and associates. And as usual, it's Bobby's turn to ask me a few questions which piqued his curiosity during the episode. What do you got for me, Bobby?

23:29 Bobby Bot This session is on the clock Woj, security or risk.

23:32 Woj Kwasi risk. It used to be security but it's now risk.

23:36 Bobby Bot priorities or vulnerabilities.

23:39 Woj Kwasi vulnerabilities.

23:40 Bobby Bot creative or data.

23:41 Woj Kwasi It's gotta be both, it's gotta be a hybrid. But I'm gonna have to lean towards creative. I still like for shiny objects.

23:47 Bobby Bot I don't think the regular quota of questions will suffice this time around, Woj. We need to really excavate your entire psychic makeup. This could take some time.

23:55 Woj Kwasi Well as long as there will be comfy couches, better of course. Great. So it all started when I was 12. Interesting.

23:57 Bobby Bot Letter of course. Interesting. Wait, wait, wait. Let me start the clock, light a pipe, and polish my spectacles.

24:08 Woj Kwasi You're that one. There we have it. Thanks again, WojCasters. That's all the time we have for today. Tune in next week for episode 19 to check out my interview with Wil Reynolds.

24:08 Bobby Bot balance.

24:18 Wil Reynolds But I think that we have to have an empathy for the fact that when we're telling people to change a website, we're telling somebody that what you did isn't right. Yeah. For some reason. We have to be careful about that and the way we phrase that and the way we do that because it is somebody's work. Yeah.

24:31 Woj Kwasi And in the meantime, remember, look after each other online because empathy is organic and you can't automate empathy.