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Designing for how much users care
Why you need to think before you “educate” users,
It’s that classic scenario — you’re being briefed on a project and someone says “we need to educate users about..” and you just know it’s going to be something like home insurance premiums, car payments or utility bills.
Whether it’s something you want users to buy, or a behaviour you want to change, the first thing you need to establish as a team is whether your users actually care about the topic, and therefore what right you have to talk to them.
Do the users care? Do they want to be “educated”?
9 times out of 10 the answer is “no”
This article is the science of why, and how you can talk to people about things they do or do not care about, but still effect behaviour change.
How much brain space do they have?
There’s a thing called Need for Cognition (NFC) which basically means how much users care about a topic — how much they want to know, how much brain capacity your audience is prepared to dedicate to a specific thing, topic or task.
For example — if you support a sports club, you are going to have high NFC towards anything that involves that…
