Fitts’s Law

We think it’s safe to say this is the main psychological effect you can use for more CRO experiments.

We discussed it before, but to give you a quick refresher, Fitts’s Law says the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and the size of the target.

In other words, the bigger and closer the target, the easier it is to hit it. And this is a very good guideline for high-converting user interfaces.

Here are some ideas you can use for your future experiments, backed by Fitts’s law:

• Make sure your call to action (CTA) is above the fold on all screens.
• Make sure your CTA is high contrast and large so it’s easy to find.
• Place your most important conversion element, like the CTA, on the left for left-to-right languages, and on the right for right-to-left languages.
• When you have multiple options, take up more space with your most desired option.
• Remove navigation elements and links that could make people trigger a different event than the desired conversion.

Just make sure you test these ideas individually and don’t take everything for granted.

The Facial Detection Effect

If you need a thorough look into this, you can check out our past newsletter here. But for a short recap…

From the time we’re two-day-old newborns, our brains are hardwired to look at faces.

For your purposes, this could be a real human face, or a face-like object. Here are a few ideas for CRO experiments you can run based on this effect:

• Use human faces to grab attention on your page.
• Arrange page elements to look somewhat like a face if you want to grab attention to the area.
• Alternatively, make sure you have no face-like elements in areas where you don’t want to grab people’s attention.
• When using a face, test gaze cueing and see if it increases conversions.

The Endowed Progress Effect

You can also call this the “never start with 0” rule.

Whether taking multiple steps through a form, or reading through a piece of content, it’s worth experimenting with visual cues that show progress starting further than zero.

For example, you might show a progress bar on your blog posts to give readers a visual cue of how far they are in your posts.

For multi-step lead forms, you should always show a progress bar. Something like this:

And if you have a loyalty program, you can give every person who opts in their first “stamp” or “points.”

With all this said, keep in mind that CRO is about experiments and statistical significance.

These psychological effects can point you in the right direction, but the outcome is something you must test for yourself.

Good luck!