We love stories, recognise patterns in fractions of a second and have a set of highly developed social behaviours. In "Persuasive Design" Mike will be running through a collection of these hard-wired influence points and exploring how they can be used in the design of products, interfaces and experiences.
1. Persuasive Design
Tapping the Main Line
trampoline systems mike stenhouse donotremove.co.uk
locate and visualise expertise in large companies
2. Be attractive
1974 Canadian federal elections - more attractive cands got 2.5x more votes!
When questioned, only 14% thought it possible
Better jobs - 12-14% more money
Negligence cases staged - good looking defendants paid half the damages - $5000 vs 10000
Cognitive bias - Halo effect, in particular physical attractiveness stereotype
4. monocle.com
Dan Hill City of Sound writeup
Tailored, custom feel
Hand-chosen and appropriately designed adverts (animated Rolex clocks)
Highbrow
Striking up a rapport with users and matching their self-image
5. Be delightful
Giving mints with the bill increases tips 2%/12%/25%
special, surprise mint for 25%!
“Delighters” Matt Biddulph of Dopplr
11. delicious-monster.com
Beautiful, clever
When a Star Wars is added says 'I am your father’
When Rock Band is added sings a portion of Run to the Hills by Iron Maiden
Harry Met Sally
Best User Experience award from Apple
Don’t underestimate the value of joy and fun
12. Be likeable
“Greatest Car Salesman” Guinness Book of World Records
when questioned: liking was his key to selling 5 cars per day
“finding the salesman you like, plus the price.”
sent card saying “i like you” every month to every one of his 13,000 customers
16. “
overheardintheoffice.com/archives/007194.html
Angry sales rep: I hate how Amazon thinks it
knows me.
But beware over-familiarity - Amazon uses my full name, which only gets used when I’ve
done something wrong
NeurLingProg body language mirroring - simulate rapport
Derren Brown - NLP guy mirrored journalist and creeped him out
17. Be appropriate
not just about posing
“hippie” vs “straight” asking for a dime (70s!) 2/3rd if dressed same, less than 1/2 if diff
Good salesman will take off his tie
19. Beloved of the geek set
Viral, invite-only (social proof) growth attracted the technorati and suggested both exclusivity
(ego) and bleeding edge
Perhaps the slightly unfinished, purely functional design is the most fit for early adopters?
Could be a very clever design strategy...
21. myspace.com/smatka
Neither usable nor attractive
Almost impossible to make a really nice page.
Tone: Apparently amongst kids it’s very, very uncool to have a good looking page
Great leveller.
I think there’s an argument for bad design!
Survival of the most fit or the fit enough NOT the fittest.
23. google.com
Use your users’ language
Resonance
Card sorting
Double grouping exercises from Sense Making
Mine your search box
Mine the search engines’ search box
25. Be recommended
herd instinct - safety in numbers - evolved survival instinct
“Werther effect” (18th C: The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe)
Jonestown massacre - 1000 committed suicide
In the 2 weeks after Marilyn Monroe's death, the suicide by overdose rate jumped 12 percent.
High profile suicide -> suicide, car and plane wrecks
30. myspace.com/lilymusic
Can choose to promote it:
Friends count
Collect friends
MySpace - not social software
As a promotional tool for bands, using friends as a score is perfectly valid - social proof
But not a realistic aim of a SOCIAL network
35. “
icanhaz.com/twittertao
Here’s the cool thing about Twitter. It’s side
by side communication. Here’s a picture of
Dan & I (Ed). Say Dan twitters ‘hey, I’ve
found this amazing site, go check it out.’ Do
I question it? Do I have defenses up? No. I
go straight there.
Second type of social proof - proofed by a friend
Hate quote but illustrates well
37. facebook.com
Both types of social proof in Facebook’s Social Advertising
My friend Amy + 757 other people
38. Be generous
Every culture has some concept of it
Christmas (Roman’s Sol Invictus 200BC, Christian 200AD)
Ethnographer Marcel Mauss ‘The Gift’ 1900
Argue that no such thing as a free gift
Mauss: “magical”, “total social fact”
Baboons display it when distracting alpha male to get quality time with the lady baboons
42. blinksale.com
Freemium model
Friend who paid for last.fm subscription because he felt he owed them
Predictably irrational: people would sell basketball tickets for 14 times more than people
were willing to buy them for
Because they were considering what they would lose
$5 with insurance survey more effective that $50
43. Based on reciprocity
Give to get
You should start a conversation
You have to earn your potential users’ trust
Don’t ask for email address without offering something
50. “
encyclopedia.com/doc/1O87-egopsychology.html
Hartmann argued that gratification is gained from
the sheer exercise of one's functions, as when a
child is delighted by learning to walk or to draw,
and Rapaport identified novelty-seeking as a self-
rewarding activity.
Something else interesting about a permission philosophy as an experience - constant
learning - small steps
Subtle
Humans love to learn
53. “
wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/ff_halo
The ideal in gameplay, the goal every developer
aims for, is an experience that keeps players in a
“flow” state — constantly surfing the edges of their
abilities without bogging down. [...] The flow
comes from constantly discovering innovative
ways to solve these open-ended problems.
the most compelling games are the most appropriately challenging ones
Halo 3 is about learning!
55. “
sciam.com/article.cfm?id=understanding-how-our-bra
The assistant professor of cognitive science at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has demonstrated
that the shapes of letters in 100 writing systems
reflect common ones seen in nature: Take the
letter “A”—it looks like a mountain, he says. And
“Y” might remind one of a tree with branches. He
also showed that across different languages most
characters take three strokes to write out.
3 is the highest quantity a person can perceive without counting
Some societies don’t develop numbers above 3
56. “
musanim.com/miller1956/
There is a span of absolute judgement that can
distinguish about seven categories and that there
is a span of attention that will encompass about six
objects at a glance.
George Miller 1956
The Magical Number Seven
7 turnings in a set of directions
Tones to numbers
Phone number
Notes in a scale
Number of god (7 clean animals, times around Jericho)
Deadly sins
Dwarves with snowwhite
59. “
musanim.com/miller1956/
It seems that by adding more dimensions and
requiring crude, binary, yes-no judgements on
each attribute we can extend the span of absolute
judgement from seven to at least 150.
Chunking - why learning increases ability to execute complex tasks
This is why complex tasks require training
Trying to teach a friend to use a computer when she couldn’t use a mouse
60. “
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
Dunbar’s surveys of village and tribe sizes also
appeared to approximate this predicted value,
including 150 as the estimated size of a neolithic
farming village; 150 as the splitting point of
Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound
on the number of academics in a discipline’s
sub-specialization; 150 as the basic unit size of
professional armies in Roman antiquity and in
modern times since the 16th century; and
notions of appropriate company size.
Studying primates - neocortex size correlates with social group size
Applied his results to humans, based on relative neocortex size and estimated c.150 for
motivated group
The grooming required to remain connected is too much
65. “
the-deblog.com/2008/04/shafted-41-hour.html
In most elevators, at least in any built or
installed since the early nineties, the door-close
button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make
you think it works. [...] Elevator design is rooted
in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact
of the box hanging by ropes but also the
tethering of tenants to a system over which
they have no command.
Sometimes have a hack mode - combination of key presses
70. Pattern matching
Mind hacks
Reptilian, pattern matching machines
Our senses fire neurons and if the combination unlocks a memory then it’s brought forward
This is also how sleight of hand magic works - give enough cues to trigger movement
recognition
Nature - attention in stage magic
71. icanhaz.com/googleeyes
RPD leads to all sorts of interesting behavioural phenomena
Recog Primed Dec Making on the web: Google Effect
Links are coloured
Headlines are big
If they don’t deliver then switch to evaluative
Reptilian, convention response to the cues on the page first time
72. People under pressure responding to patterns in their environment
HMS Gloucester 1992 Gulf War. Friendly plane or silkworm missile? From instrument data -
indistinguishable.
Officer recognised a pattern in the flight path.
Responding to unconscious cues.
This is the basis for conventions - they’re patterns
73. flickr.com/photos/blueandwhitehoops/2294861912
Cues and experience
Cues, The Golden Retriever - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
Each train station in a large city has a unique audio melody associated with it.
Commuters learn their chime and the one for the station before theirs
74. flickr.com/photos/momorgan/1485263389
Ability to associate things together in our minds
Peg system for remembering numbers
Go back to 85BC. Mentioned by Cicero (Roman)
One blatant example of pattern matching is icons - consistent visual cue
82. Be remarkable
Design to be remarked - Seth Godin
Stories
One of the most fundamental mechanisms we have for transmitting information
32,000 years ago
Epic of Gilgamesh, Illiad and the Odyssey - Illiad 15,693 and takes 14 hours to read aloud!
Rhyming couplets to aid memory (inbuilt cues!)
83. flickr.com/photos/niwru/91591044
Dave Snowden - business anthropologist
Plumbers story
Xerox parc engineers manuals - prescriptive manuals were the least successful ever
Nurses specialising in prematurely born babies - training material composed of anecdotes
containing the cues
84. trampolinesystems.com
There’s occasional talk of UX as story-telling but they can be applied all over
Seth Godin - being remarkable - design to be remarked
trying to design for oral transmission
Story style to aid memory
Pre-constructed anecdote to help spread the word
People tend to explain the benefits in raw form but a little wrapping might help...
87. Paper
Influence by Robert Cialdini
Sources of Power by Gary Klein
Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster
Mind Hacks by Stafford and Webb
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown
Yes! by Goldstein, Martin & Cialdini
Freakonomics by Levitt & Dubner
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely