182. Using Biosensors to Unpack Human Behavior, with iMotions’ Jessica Wilson

The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics

How often does your business run tests?

Testing is so important. You don’t need to do fancy stuff every time and there are so many types of testing. If you don’t take the time to test, you can’t know what is working and there is a good chance you are wasting time on stuff that isn’t going to help you reach your goals.

Today, I am so excited to introduce you to Dr. Jessica Wilson, technical director at iMotions who got her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Northwestern University. As you will hear in the episode, she and I have been working together on a project for quite some time now and I am very excited to have results to share with you now. This episode will talk about that study we did together for The Brainy Business as well as some of the other awesome work iMotions is doing.

Show Notes:

• [00:40] Today, I am so excited to introduce you to Dr. Jessica Wilson, technical director at iMotions who got her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Northwestern University.
• [03:31] Jessica shares more about who she is and what she does. Her background is in research and neuroscience.
• [03:58] iMotions is a software company that provides a platform that can integrate and synchronize different neuroscience tools.
• [05:28] There are so many different applications; iMotions does product testing, ads testing, sensory work, and more.
• [08:23] The most basic setup includes eye-tracking, facial expression analysis, and skin conductance. Those three work really well together and they are also very easy to get started with.
• [10:23] These tools are really helpful in certain ways, but at the end of the day the research question is king and it will help dictate what tools you use.
• [12:10] Jessica shares details about video testing and applying test results.
• [14:54] The data to help you make the best design decisions at the time when it counts.
• [15:16] Jessica shares a study using video testing from the University of South Florida.
• [16:52] The common theme in all these methods is that the most effective projects have a distinct research question and distinct variables.
• [19:01] For the first phase of The Brainy Business website project, we looked at where people naturally gravitated to on the website. For the second phase of the study we adopted more of a task-based approach.
• [20:47] Melina was doing a redesign of the website so she did a study with iMotions that she talked about in her book. They did two tests.
• [23:21] The first thing they had people do was just a free one-minute navigation. They wanted to see if there were things they attended to more than others, if things got ignored, or if they were scattered all over the place with their attention. Just looking at the one-minute navigation both sites did pretty well.
• [24:23] The differences started to happen when the task components were introduced.
• [26:23] There were two tasks for the study, each with its own scenario.
• [28:39] One of the best things about running a test like this is that you are really forced to narrow it down to one thing.
• [31:03] The best research looks at one or two things.
• [33:21] With the old website there was a 12% success rate of actually clicking on the pricing course and the success rate went up to 70% with the new website design.
• [35:38] For the corporate page, it was found that it was giving too much information, reducing the effectiveness.
• [36:48] Melina was able to use insights from the two tests to help with the full redesign and integrate it into other areas of the site as well.
• [38:51] You don’t have to use the whole testimonial. It can be much more impactful if you call out the little highlights that can get buried in a paragraph.
• [39:48] In the second test, the difference between the two prototypes was how they framed the testimonials.
• [41:30] People will start at the very top of web pages and you will see a lot of aggregation from the left to the right on the top and on the left side going down and slowly fading over time as people start skipping past things.
• [43:23] Across most of the different measures of eye-tracking it looked like less was more in this case. Just taking the highlights from the testimonials goes a long way in being able to direct attention to the area and people will spend more time looking there.
• [45:40] Melina will be including pictures and other information about the test on the Apply It page.
• [46:38] Once the pandemic hit, people weren’t collecting data anymore because you can’t bring people into a physical lab space. They started looking at online data collection and remote options.
• [48:03] You get research unrestricted by the bounds of geography. There are now more possibilities than ever for how we can collect this data.
• [50:07] Melina shares her closing thoughts.
• [52:37] Shop at The Brainy Business shop for that perfect brainy gear.

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More from The Brainy Business:

• 🎉🎉🎉 Buy Melina’s award-winning book, What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You on Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, and Booktopia 🎉🎉🎉

Get the Books Mentioned on (or related to) this Episode:

• Ripple, by Jez Groom and April Vellacott
• Engaged, by Amy Bucher
• Marketing to Mindstates, by Will Leach
• Designing for Behavior Change, by Stephen Wendell
• What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You, by Melina Palmer

Connect with iMotions:

• iMotions Website
• iMotions on Twitter
• iMotions on LinkedIn

Top Recommended Next Episode: What Problem Are You Solving? (episode 126)

Already Heard That One? Try These:

• Inside the Texas A&M Human Behavior Lab (episode 33)
• Social Proof (episode 87)
• The Power of Metaphors with Olson Zaltman’s Malcolm & Hannibal Brooks (episode 181)
• Cloud Army (episode 183)
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• What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You: All About Melina’s First Book (episode 147)
• What is Behavioral Baking? (episode 155)
• How Businesses Can Design for Behavior Change, with Dr. Amy Bucher (episode 164)
• Designing for Behavior Change, Interview with Dr. Steve Wendel (episode 116)
• Planning Fallacy (episode 114)
• Time Discounting (episode 51)
• Framing (episode 16)

Other Important Links:

• Human Behavior Lab Certificate Program
• Innovative neuroeconomics research at Texas A&M

Check out What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You on Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, and Booktopia