The Importance of Framing in the User Experience
It was the first week of school back from the long (but too short) summer break and my daughter’s’ first grade teachers were coming over for a brief home visit. We wanted to make a good first impression so we decided to share some Canadian chocolate treats with them. My wife asked me whether she should serve them on our everyday dishware or in the box that they came in. The question should be a trivial one to answer under most circumstances. But these were NOT most circumstances. How do we want to frame our first encounter with these very important people in our child’s life? What sort of impression do we want to leave on them? If we leave them with the wrong one then how will that impact our daughter’s success in school, or, how the teachers perceive us as parents?
As in everyday situations like trying to make good first impressions with important people, framing is how you present a situation, or in the case of user research, a question or problem in order to achieve a goal or get at some kind of truth. This article focuses on why framing is so important and should not be neglected within the user experience.
Improper framing leads to inaccurate and unreliable data. If you were to ask the same question in a different way you may get a different answer. If you were to ask a study participant “How much do you like product X?” Rather than “How do you feel about product X?” you are bound to get two different responses. Study subjects who receive the first question are more likely to give you a less accurate picture than those who answer the second version of this question. The word “like” in the first question implies that there is a certain level of initial liking that the participant has for the product. Maybe they don’t like it at all. This will inevitably yield an over or underestimate of the true opinion. The subjects who answered the first question are likely to be victims of what psychologists call framing effects. Framing effects are when people’s’ feelings and judgments are heavily influenced by the way information is presented to them. Because framing can lead to skewed data, researchers need to be careful with their wording of interview questions. The word “feel” in the second question is a more balanced one that suggests the user has an opinion about the product, but doesn’t pre-suppose that they like it, even if it’s a little bit. By framing the question appropriately, you will get a more accurate picture of the user’s feeling toward a product. Framing questions the right way improves data accuracy and reliability.
Improper framing can cause us to make bad decisions. How information is presented can directly impact a critical decision. A daily decision made by dieters is ‘Can I eat this food without going over my daily calories?’ The way nutritional content is framed on food labels can be the determining factor for eating or not eating the food in question. See the picture below for an example.
This is a bag of plantain chips. If I was trying to be conscious of my calories, I would glance at this label- reading no further- and see that it says 140 calories. Knowing that there are only 140 calories in the whole bag I would gobble down the whole bag. The decision to scarf down the whole bag is contingent upon this tiny frame of information. Every time thereafter when I wanted to grab a safe snack diet I’d go for the plantains. Huge mistake.
On closer inspection, there is a concept on the bag label called the serving size. The serving size is another (albeit confusing) frame used by food manufacturers to communicate to customers how much is really in the bag. The food label indicates there are about 20 chips in a serving, and 4 servings per bag. If you do the math, it means 1 serving = 140 calories = 20 chips; 4 servings x 140 calories per serving = 560 calories. That is equivalent to almost 1–½ McChicken sandwiches from McDonald’s (and I haven’t even eaten lunch yet!).
Framing the information in a complex way that confuses consumers makes rational decision-making practically impossible. It forces us to make hasty and oftentimes, bad decisions. Behavioral economist and author Richard Thaler, author of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness once said that “framing works because people tend to be somewhat mindless, passive decision makers.” Information, whether on a food label or in a digital user experience, needs to be framed in such a way so that people can make smarter choices more easily, especially when they are too lazy to figure it out for themselves. It should be made easier to process and match their mental models. The labeling should do the cognitive work for the consumer. The bag should say: 560 calories per bag. So much for a safe and mindless snack like plantain chips. Instead I think I’ll stick with my 80 calorie bag of pistachios.
Framing can be used to manipulate a situation in order to achieve a desired effect. Framing can help shape outcomes. As a parent I am always subconsciously using framing as a way to get my (secretly) competitive five year old daughter to eat a healthy breakfast. Somehow telling her that the egg she is reluctant to eat is full of healthy fats and lots of protein doesn’t quite cut it. The benefit of a protein rich breakfast needs to be reframed in terms that will appeal to her, that speak her language — It is brain food that will make you smarter, might work. You’ll be able to beat your classmates at chess. Even better.
In user research studies, especially when constrained by a lab environment for usability and concept studies, I often create a fictional but realistic scenario for a participant. A usability study I conducted a few years ago involving an HR portal had this scenario:
Imagine you are a logging into your HR portal from your laptop and you need to update your checking account information. After you have updated your information go ahead and return to your online American history research by looking up the 16th president of the United States.
This scenario was meant to frame a particular question that my product stakeholders had about whether or not users would hit the save button while moving from one task to another. The situation was artificially constructed to mimic a secondary task directly after a primary one of updating their pay information. This frame was extremely useful because it allowed the product teams to understand end user expectations for saving out pay-related transactions.
Framing defines boundaries. It establishes focus. Framing deliberately establishes a boundary between what is and is not relevant within a particular situation. When forming research questions framing them in the context that supports the research goals is extremely important. Stuff that is not relevant should be dismissed as out of scope. Anything else is fair game. During many of the research studies that my team conducts in our lab we use a stimulus, like a prototype to help frame the context for our research. Without a frame to understand the problem space participant responses will be fuzzy, vague and difficult to analyze. Framing allows you to achieve the right amount of specificity to satisfy your research goals.
A former colleague of mine conducted a study in order to understand the auditing needs for portfolio administrators. His product stakeholders wanted him to frame the study in the context of whether or not they would use the particular audit report that the product team was working on. Participants said that they did not want the specific report that he was showing them. The researcher took this to mean that they had no auditing needs. Establishing the frame in this manner skewed his data tremendously. Had he re-framed the question in terms of whether or not portfolio administrators would ever have a need to look back at usage behavior in the system regardless of what it looked like, he would have had a different set of responses from participants. It turns out when the question was asked like this in a different study, participants indicated they did have a need for such information. Framing the questions in the right manner can make or break your results and ultimately, any decisions made by the product team.
The next time you are analyzing a problem or question, take a step back and ask yourself if the question was asked differently, would it yield a different answer? Will the question give you the answer you want — a balanced and unbiased response, or, will it give you skewed results? With the right frame your increased confidence in your findings will reflect in a product informed by sound user research practices.
