The pace of change is increasing with disruption driven by relentless technological advancement. It requires organisations to deliver real products and services quickly, as well as respond to issues as they arise throughout projects. This requires an agile consultancy and delivery approach engineered to embrace change, powered by a combination of strategy, technology and multidisciplinary consultancy, such as digital psychology. Therefore, we are presenting this whitepaper to help you understand why and how digital psychology can help you glean insight into user behaviours and intent, create more relevant content and user experiences to reach the right audiences, and keep up with the changing digital landscape.

1. A rather handy
white paper from
Inside the
consumers’
mind

2. Inside the
consumers’ mind
A rather handy
white paper from
Dr. Deborah Ko
Behavioural Psychologist
Sophie Chen
Marketing Manager

3. The pace of change is increasing
with disruption driven by
relentless technological
advancement. It requires
organisations to deliver real
products and services quickly, as
well as respond to issues as they
arise throughout projects.
This requires an agile
consultancy and delivery
approach engineered to
embrace change, powered
by a combination of strategy,
technology and multidisciplinary
consultancy, such as digital
psychology.
Therefore, we are presenting
this whitepaper to help you
understand why and how digital
psychology can help you glean
insight into user behaviours
and intent, create more relevant
content and user experiences to
reach the right audiences, and
keep up with the changing digital
landscape.

4. page 6 page 7
Why digital
psychology and
what does it
mean for your
digital strategy?
Are you racking your brain trying
to figure out what your target
audiences want and how to engage
them in this fast-changing digital
landscape?
The elements of psychology might
just be your cure.

5. page 8 page 9
What
is digital
psychology
?
Psychology aims to understand human beliefs,
motivations, and behaviours, creating products and
services that speak to consumers on a deeper level.
Digital psychology brings together digital disciplines
and the behavioural sciences to introduce a more
sophisticated toolkit to help you glean insight into
user behaviours and intent, create a more meaningful
engagement with your target audiences, and make a
fundamental impact on your business.
Get Started
How does
digital
psychology
influence your
consumer’s
journey?

6. page 10 page 11
Making the right decisions easy
for your audience1
Traditionally, companies said that it’s all
about the customer, and therefore give them
everything they want. In reality, this can
make it difficult to identify which products
the customer really wants, and can create
problems for managing the business.
Glen Williams
Management Consultancy Expert, Bain & Company
“
Have you ever experienced difficulty in choosing a shampoo because of too
many options? Your target audience might be facing the same choice.
A Bain & Company study suggested
that reducing complexity and narrowing
choice can boost revenues by 5-40%
and cut costs by 10-35%. When Procter
& Gamble reduced Head and Shoulder
shampoos from 26 to 15 types, it saw
an increase in sales by 10%.
People like choices and digital is all
about choice. However, you give them
too many and psychological research
shows this leads to frustration and
difficult choices often lead to no decision
at all. Provide just what is needed
and make the choice clear and your
audience will love you for it.
Is choice the same across markets?
Compared to Western countries, word-
of-mouth recommendations from friends
and family, as well as peer reviews are
two of the most important influencers of
purchasing in Asia, particularly in China,
as there is a general distrust of brand
messages.
Social e-commerce in China is also
heavily driven by strong organic word-of-
mouth recommendations. Meilishuo.
com, a social network similar to
Pinterest that lets users share their
purchases, helps Chinese consumers
make buying decisions on fashion
products by providing expert reviews
and friend recommendations. The social
network has recently partnered with
WeChat to increase sales by allowing
people to share their recommendations
and purchases to their friends through
the messaging app.
In Asia, listen to what the masses are
choosing and help them be part of the
decision making process to get your
product noticed.
According to one of the gurus of sales psychology, Robert Cialdini, social
proof is the strongest of the factors influencing our purchasing behaviour.
This is why people trust customer reviews by peers completely unknown
to them over any marketing messaging – Tom Voirol, Global Head of User
Engagement, Reading Room
Photo credit: Sten Dueland

7. page 12 page 13
Set time limits. In a rush,
people are more likely to
postpone their decisions.
Limit the amount of viable options.
Reduce the number or grouping
to under 7 and make sure there
are clear winners (when there are
nothing but good options people
don’t know what to choose).
Give pointers on how
to choose. Expert
recommendations and
social reviews help give
people confidence in the
choices they make.
Focus on reducing regret.
Because people often worry
about making the right decision,
remind them of the benefits
or the problems their choice
solves.
How to simplify your audience’s
decision making process and make
sure they choose you?
Make
choices
easy
Indicate normative and relational
cues to help increase behaviour
change. Show how many
people recommend the product/
service and highlight celebrity
endorsements.
Involve family and friends input and
encourage word-of-mouth. Focus
on key social media channels to
directly interact with consumers and
allow for social networks to share
your products or services to each
other.
Rethink
the Asian
consumers

8. page 14 page 15
People forget that not only does every word
count, how it’s said is just as important.
Talk to anyone who’s misunderstood a
text message. It’s all in the framing. It gets
people’s thoughts in the right mind set. Good
framing allows people to read what you need
them to read between the lines.
Dr. Deborah Ko
Behavioural Psychologist, Reading Room
“
It’s all in how
you say it.2
Are you less likely to continue using
your credit card when you are told
the benefits of using credits over
cash or the cost of using cash over
credits?
Same message, drastically different
outcomes. A study found that most
people were more sensitive to the
costs rather than the benefits of
credit cards, nearly doubling their
credit card usage after reading about
costs.
This pattern is also particularly
strong in collectivist cultures, such
as East Asia, where in another
study, consumers were more likely
to purchase floss when reading
about costs than their American
counterparts.
Do your audiences know what
the costs are of not using your
products or services?
Rethink your copywriting when
you draft a brand message or
product information:
Capitalise on the ‘fear of
missing out’. Especially
in Asia where they have a
specific term for this (kiasu),
the motivation to avoid regret
drives many decisions.
Focus on the reduction of
negative outcomes. When
focusing on costs, always
provide a solution.
Choose words that you
want your consumers to
focus on (should your beef
be 98% lean or 2% fat?).
Find the sweet spot of scary.
People pay attention to cost,
but if costs are too high, this
fear is debilitating and oddly
enough people are less likely
to pay attention. Aim for
concerned rather than
petrified.
Photo credit: Sten Dueland

9. page 16 page 17
What’s your audiences’
true colour?3
85% of shoppers say that colour is a significant factor in their purchasing decisions.
Although colour tends to have more universal meanings, like blue for cold and red for
warmth, it can vary greatly when it’s associated with different cultures, such as white
meaning death in Asian cultures but purity in Western cultures.
A product in red packaging might be sold more in Asian markets than in Western
markets, as red in Asian cultures brings luck or prosperity but could signify caution in
Western cultures.
Pay attention to the colour
palette in your design in terms of
the emotional reaction you want
to evoke.
Look at cultural differences
in colour symbolism if you are
designing for a global audience to
aid in attitude change.
Let colour work for you. When
you need people to pay attention,
consider bolder colours like red; if
you need individuals to feel calm,
consider cooler colours like blue.
Cracking the
colour codes
to create
emotional
appeal:
While globalisation is
having a real effect on
colour interpretation,
localised knowledge of
cultural colour idioms is
absolutely paramount in
creating an experience that
feels instinctively more
intimate. On the web there
are certain conventions that
might not have prevailed
in cultures that were
previously not exposed to
these archetypes. When
assessing the discrepancy
between these cultural and
global definitions, it’s our
job to shape interfaces that
feel naturally intuitive to the
intended user and are easy
to use.
Ferdi Wieling
Creative Director, Reading Room
“
Photo credit: Mark Sebastian and Pink Sherbet

10. page 18 page 19
People make assumptions about things
within milliseconds - 100 milliseconds to
be exact. You, your website, your brand
has been judged in less than a second.
What is TL;DR (too long; didn’t read)? It’s
the Internet’s way of saying, ‘In less than
a second I know that this is not worth my
time.’ People worry about the content and
the buttons and don’t realise that they didn’t
even get their foot in the door because of a
messy or confusing layout.
Dr. Deborah Ko
Behavioural Psychologist, Reading Room
“
If it looks complicated,
then I’m not interested.4
How many people will make extra effort
to find information from a website with
tiny fonts, ugly design and banners
floating around? 52% of consumers
said they didn’t return to the website
because they didn’t like its aesthetics.
A joint study done by the University
of Basel and Google found that when
websites are visually complex, users
usually give a lower rating.
However web layout differs between Western and Asian designs, with Western
design adopting a more minimalistic approach and Asian design featuring more
hyperlinks and buttons. This is partly due to cultural differences in developing trust
and confidence. Many Asian users prefer websites with overloaded information
rather than too little.
Stay on the website
Believe in the content
Have more positive feelings
towards the website (and the
company)
Pay attention to and remember
what they have seen
Change their behaviour –
individuals are more likely to
perceive behaviours encouraged
by the website to be easy to do,
and are more likely to do them
When a website is easy to read and navigate, audiences are more likely to:

11. page 20 page 21
Click Open
Stay
and
engage
Make things easy
to find. Know what
your audience
is looking for
and make the
information
search intuitive
Keep the menus
organised and
consistent
Use words that
are easy to
understand
Increase page
loading speed
Focus on clarity and
usability to induce
behavioural change
Think about the ease
of pronouncing words
when producing content
or thinking about brand
names
Make sure that visuals
are in line with user
expectations
Be aware of the
necessity for information
up front in Asian websites
and the expectation for
more information
Have you noticed
any change?5
We’ve all fallen for magicians’ sleight of hand or missed goofs from movie editing.
We don’t realise changes because we are not paying attention to them, known as
change blindness.
When it comes to mobile design, individuals are not good at detecting
notifications or changes when they are focused on another task on their
mobile phones. Researchers found that over 30% of notifications were
unnoticed when users were playing a mobile video game. Also more icons
on the screen lead to less detection of any icon changes on mobile screens.
What gets noticed in different cultures? A study done with Japanese and
American participants shows that Asians (who have been shown to look at
images more holistically than those from Western cultures) were better at
detecting changes in the background than American participants.

12. page 22 page 23
Your changes and improvements want to
be noticed. Let them:
Don’t expect the most
laid-out design to be
understood by users;
real user testing is
paramount.
Small changes
may not be noticed
unless individuals are
motivated to look for
them.
Reduce the amount
of information on a
screen to prevent
information overload.
People will ignore
things that they think
are unimportant
even if they are eye-
catching, such as
irrelevant banner ads.
Focus on designing
clear changes (such
as movement, different
shapes, making sure
nothing else on the
screen can change at the
same time).
Produce changes or
notify of changes in the
area where the user is
doing their primary tasks
(although this may be
less important in Asian
cultures).
Utilise sound or
vibration notifications
to prompt users that
there is a change even
if they don’t visually
notice it on mobile
devices.
Don’t make anything
look like a banner ad as
individuals are trained
to automatically ignore
them (this also goes for
pop-up boxes).

13. Provide solid
research methodologies
and data insights
Psychology can improve the quality of research methods and
process, more importantly, helping better interpret and analyse
data to glean insight into user behaviours and intent.
Provide more analytical capabilities from qualitative data, such as
predictive analytics, factor analysis, and statistical analyses on big data.
Construct research questions that target project and client objectives,
and provide analysis for justification of participant/interviewer pool and
best practices on interview standardisation.
Create in-depth audience segmentation insights based on personas’
internal motivators and drives to identify audiences’ behaviours and
interests online and how to spot them.
page 25
Where
to apply
psychology
in your digital
strategy?

14. page 26 page 27
Create effective content strategy
Effective communication requires good content that
taps into multiple consumer motivations and emotions,
and is consequently valuable to consumers.
Infusing elements of psychology will ensure that your content
strategy is as widely accessible while remaining as deeply
engaging as possible. The basics involve creating content that
is of interest to target audiences who see it, in the hopes that
they will share it and at best link to it.
The rise of content marketing
and content strategy means that
marketers need to stop thinking like
salespeople and start thinking like
authors and publishers. They are
now media owners.
Tom Voirol
Global Head of User Engagement, Reading Room
“
Design rich user experience
At the heart of user experience are users’ perceptions
and evaluations, where psychology can add in greater
depth to support and guide design and technology to
better connect with target audiences.
• Create rich personas based on established
psychological processes and behavioural tendencies.
• Provide structure and scientific methodology and
statistical analysis for user-testing of products.
• Provide feedback on usability on an emotional and
motivational level backed by psychological research.
• Support technical and visual designs and information
architecture through resources of different types of
psychology, such as cyber psychology and social
psychology.

15. page 28 page 29
Language has the ability to affect
audiences’ attitudes or perceptions
on things. So, knowing how to
phrase things is important.
Focus on both the unconscious
and conscious mind. Identify
the images that resonate well
with your audience, the types
of colours that evoke the right
emotional reactions, and the
type of language that aids in
comprehension and attention in
your specific audience.
About us
Reading Room is at the leading edge of consultancy innovation with a
unique approach in applying the principles of agile into the landscape of
consultancy as well as delivery, enabling brands to take full advantage of
the opportunities created by the fast-changing internet, and get to market
faster and successfully.
Our approach – Agile Iterative Discovery (RRAID) – is engineered to
embrace change, and aims to deliver real products fast and adopt
iteration throughout. We use a multi-skilled team of experts rather than
one dimensional consultancy and it is highly collaborative by its nature
throughout projects.
At Reading Room, we practise digital psychology as part of our specialist
consulting services to provide a more sophisticated toolkit that will help
guide our clients through the next evolution of digital technology. If you
have any questions regarding the topics in this whitepaper or like to know
more about how your business can benefit from digital psychology, we
would love to hear from you.

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Contact us
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Australia
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info.australia@readingroom.com
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Australia
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Australia
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Australia
+61 3 9010 5481
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088444
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