Placebo-buttons in everyday life and in web design

About half a year ago, bright yellow touch buttons appeared with signs of activation (when you press the button, the red light located directly above it lights up, the same light comes on the button located on the opposite side) under the signs of the pedestrian crossing. The logical conclusion that these buttons somehow control the traffic light did not receive sufficient practical confirmation. Those rare cases, when the green light came on after pressing, were more likely a coincidence than the result of a streamlined control system operation.

A quick search on the Internet suggested that the buttons should control traffic lights, but still do not perform their functions for one reason or another. In the comments on one of the forums there was a link to a BBC article that described similar experiences in other countries. It followed from the article that either these buttons should work at night, or they are a ploy called button-placebo.

The idea behind the placebo buttons is to use a person’s desire to constantly control all aspects of his life. In the context of a traffic light, it looks like this:

- Approaching the traffic lights, on which the red light is on, the person subconsciously is not sure that the green light will ever come on. Due to this uncertainty, the waiting time seems to him infinitely long and probably meaningless, which motivates him to disregard the rules of the road and switch to a red light;
')
- If a control element is located at a traffic light, then after it is activated, a pedestrian acquires an inner certainty that someone knows about waiting for a green signal and will surely turn it on. It is absolutely not important that in fact, there is no relationship between pressing a button and the work of a traffic light.

As it turned out , everything comes to the point that

In many offices and small rooms, the thermostat is not connected to anything at all. Tenants, engineers and climate control experts install empty thermostats to keep people from spending the company's money on a constant temperature setting. According to an article from 2003 in the Wall Street Journal, climate control experts suspect that about 90% of thermostats in offices are fakes.

It turned out that the Placebo effect is well used in web design.

The meaning of the article is that some sites use controls and designs that create the appearance that the user controls the result. The true goal of such elements is to create a positive user experience and increase user loyalty to a specific site.

Here are some examples from the article:

Refresh button

Most modern sites update the information provided without additional efforts from the user. A vivid example is VKontakte, Facebook, Twitter, in which event notifications come as they arrive. Nevertheless, most of those who found the need to refresh the page still continue to press F5, when it seems to them that the waiting time for the desired notification was somewhat delayed. The transfer of this idea, but already in the form of 100% placebo, is observed in the field of mobile applications. The developers specifically add functionality that “enables” the application to be updated, or design elements that indicate that the information is being “updated”.



Why is this done? Your application provides all the new information as it is received, but how to convey it to the user, who can understand absolutely nothing about the capabilities of modern applications and begins to worry that the Internet has disappeared, the application does not work, the phone is dumb, and so on. The placebo update removes all these fears, telling the user that we checked everything, but no new information has actually arrived, no events have occurred.

Personalization

The use of this technique was noted for Netflix and Quora. After registering, Quora offers a choice of topics to personalize your subscription. The mechanism really works, not only will you receive information about articles that relate to your chosen subject, the list of subscription topics is automatically sorted according to the subject you have chosen earlier. But a little later, Quora uses cunning, which to some extent even contradicts some basic UX standards. After selecting all the topics and clicking on the confirmation button, you can contemplate for a few moments the information that your personal profile is being set up with the download scale.



Let's be frank: the implementation of this algorithm should not take even seconds of time. But at the same time it seems that a lot of powerful algorithms work for you and only for you. The user with delight looks at the download indicator, which is hated by him in most cases and imbued with the power of modern technologies, which are working for its benefit.

Conclusion:

- Proper use of the Placebo effect allows you to artificially create a positive user experience without changing the functionality of your site (application);

- You need to make sure that your user is under the control of the interface, which prevents the occurrence of negative experiences based on fear and misunderstanding of the situation.

The article was prepared on the materials:
blog.usabilla.com
www.bbc.com
youarenotsosmart.ru