Five ways mindful UX writing beats chimp brain

Our brains operate on two systems. The first centres around the limbic system.?

This part of the brain is old. It’s impulsive. It’s this part of the brain we struggle against when presented with chips, tiramisu, Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, insert your own poison.

Thousands of years ago, the drives moderated by the limbic system kept us alive. Historically (really only until about 100 years ago) sources of fat and sugar were rare.?

When we find them, the limbic brain very much wants us to eat them.?

The second system is moderated by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This is the logical, reasoning part of the brain.?

The part that can plan for the future. The part that knows that, while that salad might not look super-appetising, if we want to complete that couch to 5k we told everyone we were going to get stuck into, we’ll have to take this one for the team.?

In his bestselling book ‘The Chimp Paradox’, Professor Steve Peters refers to these systems as ‘the chimp’ and ‘the human’.?

Annoyingly, the limbic chimp brain doesn’t just get involved with food choices. Everything we do, from work to exercise to study, gets a first-pass from the limbic brain.?

Then, on a good day, ‘the human’ takes over.?

Ever sat down to study for a test and found yourself doom-scrolling through Insta? That’s the chimp taking over.?

Ever found progress at work extra slow, only to realise you’ve literally gone and made a fresh cup of tea every 20 minutes? Limbic chimp desire overriding human logic.?

When we’re making content, we have to consider our users’ attention through the prism of these two systems. We want to make useful content. Content that makes logical sense.?

But before we think about that, we have to consider the lazy chimp brain. So, our first question is:?

Is this content going to look like a lot of work?

The chimp is lazy. Not only does it drive us to compulsively eat fatty, sugary foods.?

It also wants us to take a nap, rather than work. Or to watch bizarre Colombian telenovellas when we’d planned to go for a run.?

Gambling is fun. So the content on our blog has to reflect that. At first glance.?

To reduce the likelihood that the chimp is going to redirect the user to cat videos.

Right now we’re planning a new version of the Ladbrokes news blog.

On the article page, we start by thinking about the headlines. A little research shows that most of our users come to the Ladbrokes blog via mobile.?

And we know that headlines on mobile are truncated when they run more than about 75 characters. Shorter headlines, on one line, are easier to read.?

And they look ‘lighter’ on the page. So we aim for about 65 characters. We also aim to use plain English. Consider the following line:

“One player in stratospheric form this season is Haaland, his touches-to-goals ratio puts him alone in a class of one, scoring on average 1.45 goals for every 90 minutes he’s on the field.”

That sentence is 34 words. We prefer sentences that are about 20 words, maximum 25. The sentence contains several ideas.?

Haaland’s form is impressive, his touches-to-goals rate is unique, and he scores (almost) a goal-and–a half a game. We aim for one idea per sentence.?

Our chimp-friendly rewrite:?

“Haaland is scoring 1.45 goals per match.”

Shorter is easier on the chimp brain. One idea per sentence is too. We also made the sentence active, rather than passive.?

Active sentences flow better and are easier to understand. This is probably because active sentences order concepts the way they actually occur in the world.

Eg. ‘The cat sat on the mat’ is more logical to process than ‘the mat was sat on by the cat’.?

Finally, we order the page elements so there is a clear logical progression. Headline leads to betting tip. Betting tip leads to widget to place the bet.?

The simpler and more intuitive this journey is, the less chance our users’ chimp brains will hijack the brain and send them somewhere else.?

Like here.