How Framing Influences Everything

🖼 Framing is everywhere, influencing everything.

It's often accidental—which is why it's so important to proactively think about. 

For example, a sandwich that you can buy from inside a gym complex, may be perceived as being healthier than an identical one bought from a van in an industrial estate.

As a demonstration, from their descriptions alone, which of the following two products would you assume is healthier?

They're the same product, but the second is framed to draw focus away from the sugar.

It's quite literally perception manipulation.

For context, let's start with a few very literal and obvious uses of framing. How can you get somebody to associate value to your product?

This might be as simple as giving the users a direct comparison in monetary terms.

For example, Pret will ask you how many coffees you buy each week, and then dynamically show the potential savings of their subscription service.

This would be a direct comparison, but you could also quantify value in other ways.

For example, to encourage readers to share their newsletter, Hackernoon will say how much free value you've received from it.

i.e., this isn't just "an email" any more, it's "32 minutes of free material".

An email is very disposable, but 32 minutes of free reading feels more tangible.

In many ways, framing the cost of a product can be relatively simple.

• This washing machine will save you $100 every year, compared to using a launderette.

• On average, an Airbnb is $782 cheaper than booking 10 separate hotel rooms.

• Netflix has saved you $928 this year compared to buying every movie on DVD.

But with software, the user is often buying into an outcome or goal.

For example, the hiking app AllTrails frame their premium subscription in a way that demonstrates how much more likely you are to actually go outside on a walk.

Headway use a similar technique during onboarding. 

They ask the user to create a reading goal (in minutes), and then frame that desire in a more quantifiable measure of how many book summaries they'll read.

Sometimes this is retrospective.

After watching a recorded video on Loom, you'll be reminded how much time you've saved by watching it in 1.2x speed.

It might only be seconds, and so objectively means very little, but it's framing your experience on Loom, as a product that saves you time.

Loom will also often go one step further, and directly compare this to the alternative, which would be a lengthy video call or a meeting.

Loom is an interesting example, because it touches on another common use of framing: to highlight otherwise silent benefits.

How do you get credit (perceived value) from the user, when they're unknowingly getting a benefit from your product?

For example, we forget how brilliant airlines are at 95% of what they do.

All of the somewhat silent benefits (safety, convenience, price) are overshadowed by someone sitting next to you eating smelly food.

Rise, the calendar app, will quietly save you time by resolving time conflicts, protecting your focus sessions and connecting with team members.

These benefits might go unnoticed, because they're background activities, that by design don't require a big fanfare.

So what Rise do, is literally remind you of the accumulative benefits in an analytics tab.

Similarly, The Guardian must have found that readers lose track of how much value they're actually getting from the platform.

i.e., donations may be lower, because people underestimate how much they've benefitted from the service.

To combat this, they'll mention how many articles you've read in the last year.

Or take Tesla, who intentionally draw a direct comparison between the cost of charging an electric vehicle, and a petrol alternative.

Whether or not this is a fair comparison, they frame this as savings.

"Sure, you spent £419 on electricity, but you actually saved £586 on gas".

In all 3 of these examples, the services are controlling the comparisons that you draw, and the perceived trade-offs.

Often you'll want to get your users to do a thing, besides signing up.

Stoic will remind you that healthy habits require consistency, and give you some choice over when to receive notifications.

They've framed granting this permission in a way that is a clear benefit to you.

In a similar vein, if you back out of reading a book before you’ve completed your daily reading goal, Wiser reminds you how close you are to completing it.

And there are three components that make this so effective:

Or perhaps the investment is literally subscribing to a service.

HelloFresh (I wrote a whole case study on this) cleverly draw a direct comparison of their meals per serving.

This is smart, because it then creates a question that the user can answer: it's cheaper than a takeaway, but is it possible to cook a meal at home for under £1.93 per serving?

Without this line item, you'd be looking at the box total, and would be more likely to think about the cost in terms of meals.

You might also want to try influencing an action by framing external factors and circumstances.

For example, Uber Eats show you this prompt when it's raining, to encourage you to tip slightly more.

Even subtle things, like the image being a guy climbing up stairs.

Similarly, Klarna will show historical prices for an item, and then add labels like "Good time to buy".

The price that you'll pay hasn't changed, but you're now comparing it to (perhaps higher) historical values.

Hopper run with this concept, and literally give you a predicted timeline of how airline prices are likely to change.

This both frames the current price, and reminds you (with data) that prices are likely to go up over time.

So far, the examples have been fairly self-explanatory.

It's a combination of drawing comparisons, providing context, and controlling the narrative.

If you go to remove the Happy Scale app, they'll encourage you to backup your data.

Your first thought may be: "oh, that's a helpful reminder".

They're screaming: "if you delete me, remember you'll lose all of your data".

At first, it might feel like a weird design choice for Gyroscope to show your age to the millisecond level.

But as they're a health app, it might be beneficial for the user to have a sense of time passing.

Perhaps even an appreciation of their mortality—it's possibly encouraging affirmative action.