Usability has become a commodity. Innovative user experience designers are moving forward to persuasive design, where the art of seduction is central. This brand new work-field borrows from psychology and biology. In this presentation you will find parallels, current best practices and some speculation on what's next?
I gave this presentation at Emerce Conversion, april 2011. http://www.emerce.nl/conversion ----- Fabrique is a multidisciplinary agency with offices in Delft and Amsterdam. In 1992, 3 young guns started Fabrique, which has since grown into an agency with more than 85 enthusiastic artists, engineers and storytellers. These Fabrique-rs work with pleasure and passion on a wide range of assignments for consumer brands, service-sector companies, the government, education, the entertainment industry and cultural institutions.
These birds look like this because it gives them a competative advantage. This is what persuasive design is all about: surviving in a competitive surrounding. Surviving is not just about media and channels. it is about affecting behaviour.
… and thats exactly what Robert Fabricant was talking about at Interaction’09. We can be effective only though the behavior of ou customers.
BJ Fogg has thought about that Increasing the chance to WIN: Increase user ability, Improve motivation, improve triggers We have been working on usability for years. It has become a commodity. Persuasive design helps us with the other two.
Persuasive design is much like flirting. You want something from someone. And when you are flirting, it is all about three factors:
With persuasive design, it is just like that. How do you behave? What do you do? How do you look? What visual cues do you use? How do you communicate? What do you communicate?
We are happy to see more frameworks helping us making these choices. For behavior, Mental Notes by Stephen Anderson is an important tool For appearance, we have created inSight, together with the Technical University of Delft. For communication, there are a lot of great blogs and articles, but no true frameworks…yet! A good place to start is to google “persuasive copy”.
Stephen did tons of research to come to this set of 52 cards. They are primarily of psychological nature. And although he might not say it like this himself, I see a definite DARK SIDE to the behavioral side of persuasive design…
Here you see the most important mechanisms featured in the card deck. They are loosely grouped into categories like persuasion · attention · comprehension · memory But I also see greed, pride and laziness. And that is where the dark side lurks.
Meet Shoedazzle if you haven’t already. They are masters of persuasive Design.
Customers can make personal collages to express their lifesyle
Celebrities provide social proof
Emails provide scacity and limited time offers
Of course they feature a montly personalized top 5. But aren’t you extra curious which shows AMOST made it to your top 5?
Recognition over recal improves entering of personal preference. Click stuff instead of describing your favorite styles.
Reward based interaction
Do I have to explain this one? :-)
97% of people can’t be wrong!
Turning an experience of scarcity into a scary one. Too much of a good thing?
Design by Fabrique
Design by Fabrique
By asking people for a password only AFTER they have entered their personal data, we tap into Loss Aversion. You are given the opportunity to save your work. This improved percentage of people that made a profile, AND it improved conversion of the total checkout flow.
The natural habitat of the Mental Notes cards is the brainstorm session Take a card, associate, sketch. Do force fits: can I solve X with Y? Our creative process greatly benefits from this tool. I can recommend them to anyone with similar challenges.
inSights, a framework that we created together with TU Delft, works on the visual perceptual level. How can we persuade our users subconciously with the aid of visual design?
Insights has 64 very practical guidelines. Here you see the most important ones. It has underlying dimensions such as: Saliency Guiding Fluency Magnetism
The biggest one here is not the cheapest one or the most popular one. And there arent three choices here but 5. Can you spot the other two? This has got nothing to do with usability.
Converging lines lead the eye You just have to look.
Yes, arrows lead the eye.
Color is still very complex. Based on background, task, et cetera. We found out that green works best for indicating entrance. Orange works best for eliciting action.
This form has no rhythm, no chunking. A good rhythm gives the fluency that makes it much easier and seemingly faster.
A better example from our work.
The human stare is very powerful. So powerful in fact that it might disctract from calls to actions. In the case of the jimmy banner, it worked very well. It yielded 16M dollar, 500.000 donations. Another magnetic effect: animation. Use sparingly ;-)
The natural habitat of inSights is the designers’ desk. Here we see Bram and Stan doing design work, based on inSights. The TU Delft research shows that designs for Ecommerce and communicative sites that were made with inSight are more effective 73% of the time
With persuasive design going full throttle on behavioral, perceptual and communicative levels, you can create designs from hell. Use with caution!
Because we are increasingly complicating the profession of design. We can’t help to start wondering…
In the past 15 years we have seen the rise of many different design types or approaches. This has led to progressive segregation of diciplines. More and more specialists are stepping up to the plate. it is likely that this evolution of our profession will continue. But is it a viable direction?
Those birds of paradise, the beaty of nature. It isn’t designed. And there are more and more tools that help us in making design decisions, up to the point that we won’t be designing at all anymore. Google’s shades of blue case is a perfect example of replacing design by experiment.
Will it be a matter of choosing the right pill?
Let’s hope not. Maybe we will end up with something like “Intelligent Design” ;-)
Thanks for viewing this presentation on SlideShare!