Brian Massey is jetting in all the way from the US of A to join us tomorrow for Psych, but before he treats us to his talk on getting past the bouncers in our brains, we’ve got a blog post fresh from his own blog.
If Psychology is the practice of understanding a person through their actions and behaviours, isn’t website optimisation pretty much the same thing?
The folks who invited me to speak at the Chinwag Psych Conference in London think so. Here’s why.
What a person says they are feeling and thinking doesn’t let a psychologist know what is going on in their subconscious. It’s the subconscious that drives our behaviours more than our rational, conscious minds.
A Conversion Scientist can ask a web audience what they expect from a website and why they did or did not buy. The answers will be rationalisations, and often will contradict the actual actions of these visitors.
We have to read between the lines, watching their online behaviour. Our analytics database is like our couch.
In the end, both the psychologist and the Conversion Scientist must speculate as to why people behave the way they do.
The psychologist may recommend additional therapy. They may prescribe medication. If they are good, they will monitor the patients to see how the treatment worked.
After seven years of website optimisation, I may need medication.
The Conversion Scientist may prescribe building trust, stronger language, more social proof, better images and more. And we always measure the effectiveness of these “treatments.”
So, if you’re in London on May 15, you should come and see an amazing lineup of psychologist-marketers. Nathalie Nahai, Craig Sullivan, André Morys, and Bart Schutz round out my list of favorites.
Photo (cc) Life Mental Health on Flickr.
