One hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. “Just the things to quench my thirst,” quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: “I am sure they are sour.

It is easy to despise what you cannot get.
—The Fox and the Grapes (Aesop’s Fables)

The above story is an example of cognitive dissonance. In this case the desire for the grapes and the inability to fulfill that desire causes conflict in the fox. By concluding the grapes must be sour anyway, the fox alleviates the dissonance and merrily goes on his way.

This simple principle impacts design and marketing and it’s important to understand what it is and how people alleviate cognitive dissonance when confronted with it.

Psychology and sociology impact both design and marketing.

What is Cognitive Dissonance?

Cognitive dissonance is a state of mental discomfort that occurs when a person’s attitudes, thoughts, ideas or beliefs conflict. For example you may believe it’s important to diet in order to lose weight yet have the desire to order cheesecake for dessert. Eating the cheesecake would conflict with your attitude about dieting, which causes discomfort that needs to be resolved.

The theory of cognitive dissonances suggests that people are motivated to reduce dissonance by either changing or rationalizing attitudes and beliefs. It makes predictions for how and what we will decide to do as well as how we’ll feel about our decisions after.

It is not a perfect and has its strengths and weaknesses.

Ho Do People Alleviate Cognitive Dissonance?

There are 3 ways in which we alleviate cognitive dissonance.

• Reducing the importance of dissonant cognitions
• Adding consonant cognitions
• Removing or changing dissonant cognitions

Let’s stick with our cheesecake wanting dieter as an example of cognitive dissonance. Reducing the importance of the dissonance might involve only taking a bite or two. Adding consonant cognitions could be telling yourself you’ll spend an extra few minutes exercising tomorrow. Changing the dissonant cognition could simply be not eating the cheesecake at all removing the dissonance entirely.

The incentives associated with a situation influence which of the above methods we’re more likely to choose in order to alleviate the dissonance.

When incentives are small people tend to reduce the conflict by changing beliefs. When the incentives increase people are more likely to hold onto their beliefs and reduce the conflict by justifying that the compensation weighs more than the dissonant feelings.

Any incentive beyond a small one therefore reduces the probability that the person will change previously held attitudes.

The Implications of Cognitive Dissonance in Design and Marketing

The key in understanding how all this applies to design and marketing is to understand that when faced with cognitive dissonance, people are going to do something to reduce the conflict they feel. The restaurant serving cheesecake might offer a low fat cheesecake (is there such a thing?) or highlight the natural ingredients used in order to lessen the guilt of the dieter.

Design

One thing we can do as designers is to lessen the dissonance visitors and customers feel. Creating designs that are in harmony, that stay away from conflicting messages, reduces dissonance.

If you make claims that your products are easy to use, but your site is complex and hard to find things, your visitors may reduce dissonance by changing their initial belief that your products are easy to use. Every inconsistency in your design, your copy, your marketing will increase dissonance.

You might have heard that it’s a good idea to limit navigation to about 6 or 7 links. Too many choices leads to increased dissonance. The desire to make a decision conflicts with the difficulty to choose from all the possible options. The easiest way to alleviate the conflict might be to not make a decision at all and leave.

Cognitive dissonance also implies that initial impressions and branding count. If someone makes a quick decision about your business based on the look of your site you may not be able to change their minds later. Once the belief is held it becomes easier to discredit new information than to change the initial belief.

The above is why building a positive brand is so important. Once people hold beliefs about your company the easiest way for them to reduce the dissonance they feel from conflicting messages is to discard the conflicting message. However you can’t rely on this always happening as after enough conflicting messages the easiest way to reduce the conflict is to alter the initial beliefs about your brand.

You can even take advantage of cognitive dissonance to create more interesting presentations and power point slides or create interesting bonsai.

Marketing

One way you might use cognitive dissonance is to get people to invest significant time, energy, and participation with something in order to create dissonance then provide a simple and immediate way for them to relieve this dissonance.

Remember the AOL CDs that came in the mail offering a free trial? In order to get that free trial you had to fill out forms to create an account. There was a good deal of effort in getting that free trial. When the trial period was ready to expire that effort created cognitive dissonance (time already invested vs. spending money), which was easily reduced, by telling yourself it was worth signing up for a subscription.

The same can be said of free software downloads. In order to test the product to decide if you want it, you must spend some time and energy learning to use it. When the choice comes to buy all that time and energy makes it easier to justify a purchase.

People tend to view themselves in a positive light. Pointing out the disconnect between their self image and the reality of their situation creates dissonance. Advertising does this all the time. The product is the quick and easy solution to alleviate the dissonance the ad creates.

One way people might try to avoid cognitive dissonance is to lessen the risk of making a bad purchase. Conflict is caused in buying a product we’re later dissatisfied with. Offering warranties and guarantees reduces the possibility of this future conflict.

The Ben Franklin Effect

A story Ben Franklin relates in one of his books is of a political adversary Franklin wanted to win over. He asked his adversary if he could borrow a book, a small favor that was easily granted.

A few days later Franklin returned the book with a note of thanks.

This caused a conflict in the adversary. On the one had he disliked Franklin. On the other hand he had just done him a favor. Franklin’s opponent resolved the conflict by changing his earlier feelings about disliking Franklin.

As Franklin later stated

“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another.”

The above is one tactic for persuasion that comes out of cognitive dissonance psychology.

If you’ve ever had someone come to your front door trying to sell you something, you’ve likely seen the above in practice. Have you ever noticed how many of those people are carrying clipboards? The clipboard is actually a prop and you’ll always be asked to hold it for a moment. By doing this small favor you are then more likely to grant a larger favor, which is buying what the person is selling.

By the way if someone comes to your door and tries to get you to hold their clipboard, don’t take it. The person will usually not make any effort to take it back thereby presenting you with the option of continuing to hold it increasing the length of your conversation or dropping it on the ground which would increase the cognitive dissonance you would likely feel at being rude.

Summary

Understanding how people psychologically react to conflicting ideas is important when creating a new design or crafting a marketing message. When people feel cognitive dissonance it makes them uncomfortable which increases their motivation to reduce that discomfort.

They might reduce the tension by lessening it’s importance, adding new beliefs that help ease the conflict, or changing their initial thoughts.

When incentives are motivating the conflict resolution people will usually change beliefs if the incentive are small and hold onto existing beliefs and justify the conflict when the incentive is large.

As designers we want to reduce cognitive dissonance visually. As marketers we might make use of this dissonance in order to persuade and influence people. However we also need to recognize that some of the ways in which people reduce conflict will be counter to our goals.

Pay attention to the cognitive dissonance that occurs in your life. What caused it? Which of the three methods for resolution did you use to alleviate the conflict? How have people and companies tried to create dissonance for you and did they offer an immediate solution to lessen that dissonance?

As a designer do you hold onto bad ideas and rationalize away good ones to reduce dissonance?

Asking yourself the above and similar questions will likely result in some enlightening observation about yourself and how companies market to you.

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However, to revive the notebook, some designer has come up with a fusion of the high tech approach we call notebooks and the more analog entity. It’s called “Recycled Keyboard Notebook” and it is sure to speak to all geeks and designers. The cover of the notebook is covered with recycled keys from old qwerty keyboards and make up a nice and inspiring pattern.

It inhabits 62 keyboard keys, sports 68 lined pages and measures 7×5 inches. If you are a geek there is no reason why you shouldn’t be drooling right now. Well, I am happy to tell you that being a geek today is both cool and environmentally friendly. The keys are entirely recycled and you can buy this piece of geek-must-have accessory for just under $17. It’s more than a bargain and I am sure you will have more than one head turned when bringing it up to create your schemes for taking over the world.

If you are thinking about joining the group of people that are already making the cool look cooler then head over to Perpetual Kid and get yourself one. It’s a sure investment towards inspiration.

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Users of social media share a lot more than just their opinions. Those who enter the social media domain leave behind a lot of clues about who they are and how they think via information found in social bookmarks, comments, engagement, influence, friends, followers, downloads, favorites, views, votes and links. From all of these user actions, you can measure what’s important, what ideas are gaining ground and who, or what, is having the biggest impact on your, or your client’s brand. – Social Media is measurable (Radian 6)

Radian 6 is a tool that will allow your teams to measure and manage your social media campaigns. Check out these videos on how they can help you!

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Preview of the Radian 6 Console – A sneak peek at the new Radian6 Engagement Console, a fluid desktop application that helps companies scale and coordinate their social media outreach and engagement throughout the enterprise. Available in April 2010.

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In this Filmspiration installment we’re curating all the animated shorts nominated for the latest edition of the Oscar Movie Awards, starting with Logorama – this year’s winner! Let us know what you think about this edition of the Oscars, and what’s your favorite short movie.

Logorama | Directed by François Alaux (France) | 16 min

Spectacular car chases, an intense hostage crisis, wild animals rampaging through the city and even more in Logorama!

French Roast | Directed by Fabrice O. Joubert (France) | 8 min

In a fancy Parisian Café, an uptight businessman is about to pay the check when he finds out that he has lost his wallet. To buy some time he decides to order more coffee.

Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty | Directed by Nicky Phelan (Ireland) | 6 min

Granny O’Grimm, a seemingly sweet old lady, loses the plot as she tells her version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ to her terrified granddaughter.

The Lady And The Reaper | Directed by Juan Recio Gracia (Spain) | 8 min

A sweet old lady lives alone on her farm, waiting for death so that she can see her beloved husband once again. One night, she is invited to enter death’s domain, but someone will ruin it for her.

A Matter Of Loaf And Death | Directed by Nick Park (U.K.) | 30 min

Wallace & Gromit are back! They’ve started a new bread baking business, but Gromit is concerned by the news that a dozen local bakers have ‘disappeared’ this year and turns sleuth to solve the escalating murder mystery – in what quickly becomes A Matter of Loaf and Death.

Bonus: Wallace & Gromit – A Matter of Loaf & Death – How They Donut (The Making of)

A glimpse behind the scenes at Aardman as they make Wallace & Gromit – A Matter of Loaf & Death

And hey, what’s your favorite?

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This first tip may seems obvious, but the fact is that most database problems come from badly-designed table structure.
For example, I have seen people storing information such as client info and payment info in the same database column. For both the database system and developers who will have to work on it, this is not a good thing.
When creating a database, always put information on various tables, use clear naming standards and make use of primary keys.
Source: http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/ten-common-database-design-mistakes/

Know what you should optimize

If you want to optimize a specific query, it is extremely useful to be able to get an in-depth look at the result of a query. Using the EXPLAIN statement, you will get lots of useful info on the result produced by a specific query, as shown in the example below:

EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM ref_table,other_table WHERE ref_table.key_column=other_table.column;

Source: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/using-explain.html

The fastest query… Is the one you don’t send

Each time you’re sending a query to the database, you’re using a bit of your server resources. This is why, on high traffic sites, the best thing you can do in order to speed up your database is to cache queries.

There’s lots of solutions to implement a query cache on your server. Here are a few:

• AdoDB: AdoDB is a database abstraction library for PHP. It allows you to use the database system of your choice (MySQL, PostGreSQL, Interbase, and way much more) and it is designed for speed. AdoDB provides a simple, yet powerful caching system. And last but not least, AdoDB is licenced under the BSD, which means that you can use freely on your projects. A LGPL licence is also available for commercial projects.
• Memcached: Memcached is a distributed memory caching system which is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by alleviating database load.
• CSQL Cache: CSQL Cache is an open-source data caching infrastructure. Never tested it personally, but it seems to be a great tool.

Don’t select what you don’t need

A very common way to get the desired data is to use the * symbol, which will get all fields from the desired table:

SELECT * FROM wp_posts;

Instead, you should definitely select only the desired fields as shown in the example below. On a very small site with, let’s say, one visitor per minute, that wouldn’t make a difference. But on a site such as Cats Who Code, it saves a lot of work for the database.

SELECT title, excerpt, author FROM wp_posts;

Use LIMIT

It’s very common that you need to get only a specific number of records from your database. For example, a blog which is showing ten entries per page. In that case, you should definitely use the LIMIT parameter, which only selects the desired number of records.
Without LIMIT, if your table has 100,000 different records, you’ll extract them all, which is unnecessary work for your server.

SELECT title, excerpt, author FROM wp_posts LIMIT 10;

Avoid queries in loops

When using SQL along with a programming language such as PHP, it can be tempting to use SQL queries inside a loop. But doing so is like hammering your database with queries.
This example illustrates the whole “queries in loops” problem:

foreach ($display_order as $id => $ordinal) {
    $sql = "UPDATE categories SET display_order = $ordinal WHERE id = $id";
    mysql_query($sql);
}

Here is what you should do instead:

UPDATE categories
    SET display_order = CASE id
        WHEN 1 THEN 3
        WHEN 2 THEN 4
        WHEN 3 THEN 5
    END
WHERE id IN (1,2,3)

Source: http://www.karlrixon.co.uk/articles/sql/update-multiple-rows-with-different-values-and-a-single-sql-query/

Use join instead of subqueries

As a programmer, subqueries are something that you can be tempted to use and abuse. Subqueries, as show below, can be very useful:

SELECT a.id,
    (SELECT MAX(created)
    FROM posts
    WHERE author_id = a.id)
AS latest_post FROM authors a

Although subqueries are useful, they often can be replaced by a join, which is definitely faster to execute.

SELECT a.id, MAX(p.created) AS latest_post
FROM authors a
INNER JOIN posts p
    ON (a.id = p.author_id)
GROUP BY a.id

Source: http://20bits.com/articles/10-tips-for-optimizing-mysql-queries-that-dont-suck/

Be careful when using wildcards

Wildcards are very useful because they can substitute for one or more characters when searching for data in a database. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use them, but instead, you should use them with caution and not use the full wildcard when the prefix or postfix wildcard can do the same job.
In fact, doing a full wildcard search on a million records will certainly kill your database.

#Full wildcard
SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE COLUMN LIKE '%hello%';
#Postfix wildcard
SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE COLUMN LIKE  'hello%';
#Prefix wildcard
SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE COLUMN LIKE  '%hello';

Source: http://hungred.com/useful-information/ways-optimize-sql-queries/

Use UNION instead of OR

The following example use the OR statement to get the result:

SELECT * FROM a, b WHERE a.p = b.q or a.x = b.y;

The UNION statement allows you to combine the result sets of 2 or more select queries. The following example will return the same result that the above query gets, but it will be faster:

SELECT * FROM a, b WHERE a.p = b.q
UNION
SELECT * FROM a, b WHERE a.x = b.y

Source: http://www.bcarter.com/optimsql.htm

Use indexes

Database indexes are similar to those you can find in libraries: They allow the database to find the requested information faster, just like a library index will allow a reader to find what they’re looking for without loosing time.
An Index can be created on a single column or a combination of columns in a database table. A table index is a database structure that arranges the values of one or more columns in a database table in specific order.

The following query will create an index on the Model column from the Product table. The index is called idxModel:

CREATE INDEX idxModel ON Product (Model);

Source: http://www.sql-tutorial.com/sql-indexes-sql-tutorial/

Have you checked out the highly recommended Digging into WordPress book by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr?

10 sql tips to speed up your database

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Hooray for Hollywood! — the big winner this week in our roundup of the top 10 Twitter trends. From the Oscars to Alice in Wonderland (and of course, Justin Bieber), celebrity — whether be it music or film — dominated the Twitterverse.

The latest data, which comes from our friends at What the Trend, gives us a snapshot of what topics dominated Twitter. Given the topical nature of the list, hashtag memes and games have been excluded.

Tween-favorite Justin Bieber lost his spot at #1 to the Big Show — AKA the Oscars. The 82nd Academy Awards dominated Twitter on Sunday night and was the most discussed topic of the week as a whole. Don’t feel bad for Bieber though: he’s still number two on the list.

Now, who’s hot who not/Tell me who rock who sell out in the stores. Well, that would be B.I.G P-O, P-P-A, also know as the Notorious B.I.G. The legendary Brooklyn rapper, who was murdered 13 years ago this week, was #5 on this week’s list of trends. More than a decade after his tragic death, Biggie continues to be a larger than life figure.

Music continues to be a big topic of discussion on Twitter, with artists like Lady Gaga, Bieber and the Jonas Brothers all appearing on the list. We expect to see Lady Gaga next week too, given the camp-infused epic music video for “Telephone” that was released at the end of the week.

Looking forward, we predict Justin Bieber, the iPad and Twilight: Eclipse to all appear on the chart next week.

You can check past Twitter trends in our Top Twitter Topics section as well as read more about this past week’s trends on What The Trend.

Top Twitter Trends for 3/7 – 3/13

Tags: top twitter trends, twitter, What The Trend

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