Growth design is applied psychology. These ten principles from behavioural science show up in almost every funnel, onboarding flow, and pricing page you will ever work on.
1. Hick's Law. More options means slower decisions. Cut choices at every critical step, especially checkout and signup.
2. Von Restorff Effect. The element that looks different gets remembered. Make exactly one thing on the screen stand out: the action you want.
3. Banner Blindness. Repeated formats become invisible regardless of content. Rotate creative formats before performance decays.
4. Anchoring Bias. The first number a user sees becomes the reference point. Pricing pages live and die on what gets anchored first.
5. Loss Aversion. Avoiding a loss motivates more than an equal gain. "Don't lose your progress" outperforms "keep your progress".
6. Goal Gradient Effect. Motivation rises as the finish line approaches. Progress bars work, and pre-filling the first step works even better.
7. IKEA Effect. People overvalue what they helped build. Let users customise early and they will stay longer.
8. Peak-End Rule. People judge an experience by its most intense moment and its ending. Design the peak deliberately and never end a flow on friction.
9. Zeigarnik Effect. Unfinished tasks nag at the mind. An incomplete profile meter pulls users back better than any notification.
10. Aesthetic-Usability Effect. Beautiful interfaces are perceived as easier to use. Polish is not vanity, it buys patience and trust.
Every one of these can be used to help users or to trap them. The same principle that simplifies a checkout can hide a cancellation button. Growth designers who manipulate burn the brand for a quarterly bump. Use psychology to remove friction from things users already want to do. That is the standard we hold residents to at Nofolios.
