Persuasion design
Persuasion design complements several more traditional design categories like Information design, Information architecture, Interaction design, Instructional design, User experience design, and Usability.
Persuasion Design is used to improve marketing and sales messages by analyzing their verbal content, using established psychological research methodologies. Controlling just the message, apart from graphic and other design elements, can lead to significantly higher sales conversion rates.
Persuasion motivates users by taking advantage of persuasive tactics that will make them take action. The most persuasive web sites focus on making users feel comfortable AbOUT making decisions and helping them act on them.(Chak 2003)
When Is Information Persuasion?
The best thinkers in graphic design have long held that information and persuasion were oppositional modes of design, representing the competing cultures of graphic design and advertising. Some content is understood as information and some content is labeled as persuasion, promotion or even propaganda. In this scheme of things, information is noble.
Communication of information fits well with the Modernist ideal of objective, rational design. In this paradigm, persuasion is distasteful, associated with the worlds of advertising and marketing — emotional, subjective, manipulative, superficial. But might there be an alternative to this tidy dichotomy? Perhaps information and persuasion are not an either/or opposition. More likely they are modes of communication that overlap and interact.(McCoy 2000)
While many design theorists and practitioners stress design language as essential to providing continuity and coherence to their efforts, the design community must invest greater creativity and rigor exploiting the potential of design rhetoric. That is, designers need to explore design as a medium and methodology of persuasion as much as a discipline of aesthetic functionality. In the first and final analysis, design is about effecting change in people’s choices and behavior. People choose to use or enjoy a particular design. People change, modify or adapt their behavior in order to engage new features, new functionality and new experiences. In other words, they are persuaded — or they persuade themselves — that the design is worth their time, effort, money and/or resources.(Schrage 2000)
Supporters of persuasion design claim that the difference between mere salesmanship and a persuasion technology is the utilisation of well-researched quasi-scientific psychological (some say psychological warfare) methods to develop persuasive strategies. (Persuasive technology, Wikipedia article)
Persuasion Methods
Methods of persuasion combine psychology with careful preparation. Salespeople and other professional persuaders, are commonly trained to work within a carefully prepared conceptual framework and have a series of contingency plans which structure and clarify the customer interaction for them. To translate this framework to a website, an email, or a pamphlet, each element, graphic or verbal, must be evaluated for its persuasive value.
Even a slight exaggeration or apparent evasion in an ad, email or site element can re-frame the visitors’ experience enough to move them away from eagerness and interest – planting seeds of mistrust, suspicion, and vigilance. These undiscovered elements may quietly sabotage the marketing purpose. (Richards 2006)
Persuasive Navigation
Persuasive navigation is navigation that persuades a user to do something. That something can be anything that you want the user to do - buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, or download a game. By understanding user needs and matching them up with business goals, you can persuade users to go where you want them to go, making them happy at the same time.
Persuasive navigation is one aspect of a site built on persuasive architecture. A site built to be persuasive needs persuasive navigation but also needs persuasive copywriting, labeling, visual design, and structure. Rearchitecting a site to be persuasive is a large task and, in many cases, may not be possible. Persuasive navigation can sometimes be added in quickly and easily, however, and still have a big impact on the effectiveness of the site. (Lash 2002)
Examples
Examples of practices and technologies which use or can be used in persuasive design:
- Advertising.
- Marketing.
- Rhetoric.
- Propaganda.
- Subliminal advertising.
- Computer simulation and modeling.
- Computer and video games with deliberate presuppositions behind their scenarios.
- Targeted mailing lists and email lists.
See also
Other subjects which have some overlap or features in common with persuasion design include:
- Collaboration tools
- Psychology
- Rhetoric and oratory skills
- Personal coaching and grooming
References
- Chak, Andrew (2003). Guiding Users with Persuasive Design: An Interview with Andrew Chak, by Christine Perfetti, User Interface Engineering.
- Lash, Jeff (2002). Persuasive Navigation, Digital Web Magazine. December 17, 2002.
- McCoy, Katherine (2000). INFORMATION/PERSUASION, High Ground Design.
- Richards, Ron (2006). ResultsLab Approach
- Schrage, Michael (2000). The POWER of PERSUASION.