Brainy Days: Lateralization & Website Optimization

Strategy

Due to the numerous school, degree and campus landing pages, setting up the tests within GWO proved to be extremely time- and labor-intensive. The SEM agency had to create the different versions of each program page, which would be uploaded into the GWO system. Then a small bit of code had to be placed on each landing page and the confirmation page.

The SEM agency generally designs landing pages with the contact form on the right; this is because 90-95% of all people are right handed and prefer to perform activities with or on their right side (Holden, 2001). Because the majority of people are right-handed and the ride side of the body is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain (Ball, 2002), saying that the majority of people are left-brain inclined is a reasonable conclusion.

Original landing page for the Airframe degree program designed by Westwood’s SEM agency.

The agency set about creating a second version for all 56 program pages with the form on the left-hand side of the page, since the original versions had the form on the right side. After all versions were created, outfitted with testing code and uploaded into the GWO system, the experiments were officially off and running.

Airframe landing page with form on left side.

Next, the agency had to hit the books to learn more about human cognition and brain lateralization. People often refer to themselves or others as either right-brained or left-brained, but what does that really mean? Westwood’s SEM agency was determined to find out.

Most people know that left-brained individuals have a tendency to be more logical, detail-oriented and practical. Conversely, right-brained individuals are thought to be more artistic, visually-oriented and risk-taking (Bastable, 2002). But what, if anything, does this say about their choice of college degree and future career?

First, common characteristics of the two hemispheric dominances:

Source: Nurse as Teacher, S.B. Bastable, 2002

These characteristics help to define an individual’s career goals, and it can be surmised that left-brained individuals are more often interested in math and science, while right-brained people excel in literature and the Humanities; therefore, left-brains are more commonly employed as lawyers, accountants, engineers and scientists. Right-brained individuals, on the other hemisphere, are entrepreneurs, athletes, sales executives, artists, musicians and craftsmen.

Taking this knowledge into consideration, Westwood’s SEM agency associated each degree program with a dominant side of the brain. The hemisphere dominance for a few degree programs is as follows: