A powerful hack you can use to circumvent the noise of the market and exponentially increase your user engagement.

Overview

The problem with modern UX is that everybody is trying to get to their users. Look at me! Look at this offer! Click this button! Do this thing!

But does any of it actually work? I would be willing to assert probably not.

Today, I’m going to teach you a powerful hack you can use to circumvent the noise of the market and exponentially increase your user engagement.

You’ve got 50 milliseconds

Whenever a user encounters your product you have between 50–150 MILLISECONDS to make a good first impression.

50 milliseconds. That’s less than 1/10th of a second.

You think your prospective user cares about all the work and the deliverables that you made? The countless hours you poured into the backside of your service offering? They will, but not yet.

All your user cares about, in this second, is:

→ “Does this presentation adhere to my expectations of quality?”

This is why 5-second testing is so vital to understanding your users’ immediate impressions of your product, service, and/or offering.

You have 50 milliseconds, and you need to make them count. This is where visual design comes into UX, and makes it ABUNDANTLY clear why you need it.

How to make them count: expectation hijacking

This seems obvious but gets lost in translation very quickly between design and engineering, so I will be as blunt as possible here:

• You want to take your users’ expectations of presentation and ABSOLUTELY BLOW THEM OUT OF THE WATER.

(If you want to see the caliber that I’m talking about, look no further than the site above.)

You want your presentation to be so crisp, so clean, so salient, so accessible, and so over-the-top that your users can’t help but keep looking at it.

Before your users ever visit your app, site, etc. they already have an expectation of what it’s going to act like due to Jakob’s Law.

What you want to do is adhere strictly to how must sites OPERATE, but differentiate DEEPLY using visual design, animation, and information hierarchy.

You want to hijack a users’ expectations of your total product or service offering, but purposefully exceeding their initial expectations and ratcheting their dopamine levels up.

This sets the tone for the rest of their experience, builds a more positive association with your product or service via the Halo Effect, and you can use this technique to garner higher levels of engagement from aesthetics alone.

By the way, this technique works across industries, and across product/service types. If the aesthetics are well-done, and the presentation is superb, most people will value that product or service much more highly than an equivalent product or service that is presented in a more blase fashion.

Why the hell this matters

I know what you’re thinking: “yeah, no duh people like stuff that looks nice, what’s your point.” My point is that people like that Dribble-stuff because it satisfies the two requirements of dopamine transmission:

1. It’s novel
2. It’s aesthetic

This applies to products, people, plants, animals, buildings, and more. In fact, the Greeks and Romans were so enamored with aesthetics, that they coined the term “aisthetikos” to describe the entire perceptual phenomenon.

All of this is to say that hijacking expectations within the first 50 milliseconds of a user’s journey and blowing them out of the water using hard-hitting visual design is a recipe to keep them coming back, engaging, and converting.

Still don’t believe me? Have a look here:

→ Yeah, it’s a total b*tch for engineering to implement.

→ Yeah, it’s costly in terms of development.

Yeah, it can make the design work a LOT harder, but yeah, people’s brains are BATHED in dopamine the second they are given novel, aesthetic presentation.

If your product doesn’t offer a superior experience, you can bet that at some point you will be beaten out by a competitor’s product/presentation that does.

Design for the future so you can make money in the present.

Nick Lawrence Design
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