Recognition Primed Decision-making and Web Behaviour

• 27^th April 2006
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• Filed Under: Weblog, Web development
• tagged with: ux, ui, findability, rpd, online behaviour, emerging internet

After seeing Sources of Power referenced by two of my favourite books, Don't Make Me Think and Blink, and having it recommended to me by a chap at work I finally got around to reading it. In the book Gary Klein studies the decision making process exhibited by people under time pressure: firemen, tank commanders, chess players and the like. Conventional wisdom tells us that people weigh their choices and then make a rational decision based on the result. What Klein and his researchers found though is that, under pressure, people subconciously recognise patterns from their experience and use them to reach a decision without any consideration for the alternatives - there just isn't time. If that option doesn't work out then they'll jump to the next most reasonable one. This they called the RPD model - Recognition Primed Decision-making Model.

Reading the details of Klein's RPD model really reminded me of the way I use the internet. I am an impatient and impulsive user and I have also seen this behaviour exhibited by users during testing. Not all users though... From what I've seen, experienced users, in particular, tend to be impulsive.

I suspect that this is because as we use the internet we build these usage patterns into our subconcious. The more we use it the more we rely on these conventions. And, in certain circumstances anyway, we are under self-imposed time pressure. We know that there is a lot of content on the internet and often what we are looking for isn't of great value so we move on if we don't immediately find what we want. We don't commit a lot of time to any one task. As web users I believe that we often fit into the 'time pressure' category studied by Klein.

A quick look at the Eye Tracker article on The Google Effect shows the RPD process in action. We have become programmed to believe that the top few Google results will be what we are looking for and we employ the pattern recognition to dictate our actions the first time we see the results page. I, for one, will click on the top link that looks hopeful and quickly scan that page for something that signals that I am closer to my goal. If not then I will go back to the results page and start reading the results items. My behaviour switches drastically - to an comparative, evaluative model.

Support for the spread of this recognition primed behaviour on the web is the recent iProspect/Jupiter media study. In 2002 48% of users clicked on a link on the first page of their results. Today that figure has risen to 62%. More and more people are acting like experienced web users, displaying impulsive behaviour and, I think, behaving as if they were under time pressure. Our users are likely to become more and more impulsive, clicking first and reading later.

So what's the point of all this?

• Use conventions wisely. If people regognise a pattern they are likely to click without thinking.
• Front and top load everything for quick scanning.
• Use sensible link text and headings for decision making out of context.

To be honest, I don't think this is anything really new but it does add weight to the rules most of us obey already. I now think that I understand why my users behave the way they do and having this sitting in the back of my mind makes me think very carefully about the way I design my information...

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