January marked the Boston Usability Professional Association’s (UPA) monthly meeting hosted by Fidelity, with speaker Colleen Roller.  The evening began with the Boston chapter’s president Chris Hass boasting about the popularity of the Boston chapter.  Boston has 1,000 members (myself included), whereas the UPA international has 2,000 (way to go Beantown).

About halfway through the event, I realized I was sitting next to Steve Krug, author of best selling Don’t Make Me Think.  I felt like I was sitting next to a celebrity since that book has been one of my personal favorites for a very long time.  Besides rubbing elbows with Krug, Colleen gave an amazing presentation.  It peaked my interest because it touched upon a lot of the concepts in the book I am currently reading, Neuro Web Design.  Colleen’s talk was about designing to persuade and how to get people to make certain decisions.  She went into how the brain actually works – the old, mid, and new.  She also discussed how our subconscious affects decision making, whether we realize it or not.  One example Roller gives is to think of the middle two numbers of your social security number.  If you were asked how much an item costs, there would be a direct association with that number in your head.

She also addressed some other ways the mind plays tricks on people including loss aversion, contrasting items of various price points to promote sales, the use of rating and testimonials as appealing to human’s social nature, and the use of priming.