Persuasive Design: Building the bond between Design and User

4 min readOct 23, 2018

As per the brief in ‘persuasive design studio’ — Consider a bad habit user wants to change or need help. After discussion I found that user facing difficulty to stay motivated to exercise regularly.

To build understanding and get a sense of the larger behavioral trends in that problem space, I counduct interviews along with primary research.

During the process I consider some key points -

Tried to understanding participants behavior during interview.
A documentation of the key points in the form of spoken statements.
Tried to distinguish between drives and blocks, feelings and beliefs.
Tried to find common blocks and drives.
Find out how to persuade people to do exercise.

From interviews I found common drive and blocks -

After interviews I understood that, their are many ways (service, system, applications)to do exercise but they are not persuasive enough to make people exercise. User found existing solution boring, expensive and useless. hence in my proposed idea I tried to filled the gaps in the existing system.

System :

This will be in the apartment space.

Will be the place for doing physical and mental exercise.

For the people who prefer gym.

Sign up challenge:

Seducing users- showing all feature of system at first place to user excite user to try it atleast onetime.

Benefits over features- Giving exciting offer

Personalization:

User ID card containing data help user to monitor exercise and set up a target goal.

Every day user have to scan the card before using gym. It will store all detail about exercise. User can see it and improve. Points will be added according to performance of user in gym.

Tunneling:

Guiding users through a process or experience provides opportunities to persuade along the way. The tunnel provides opportunity to expose users to information and activities and ultimately to persuasion. I tried to use in my proposed model (give them extra information about what is happening in bangalore related to health and who are going to it)

Display board infont of a gate. To persuade people join gym and perform best exercise.

Reinforce behavior with ‘Rewards’

To strike a perfect balance between anxiety and boredom, i add use of incentives and rewards. Used rewards to encourage users to continue behavior, that you want them doing ( free spa after 3 month if perform well, discount/ free trek, coupon on festival).

When to give reward:

Points- to go to next level

Level- completion of level

Status- display progress on display board

Power- make a gym(yoga and exercise) instructor after completing training or levels

Meet- collective meet what you are feeling about good habit

Social Proof:

Display sucess stories of user socially will help user to do exercise regularly. this will be the part of extrinsic motivation.

Monitering:

Progess will show on display board to give user a sense of monitering. so that user can see their impovement and get intrensic motivation to continue exercise.

Appropriate Challenges

I try to use it here. (giving levels in their exercise) here I tried to make a flow not so hard directly focus on step by step progress progress. Because If a challenge is too hard, the user is going to feel stress and anxiety. If the challenge is too easy, the user is going to feel bored. Both boredom and anxiety tend to lead to disengagement from the activity that was previously rewarding.

Ongoing engagement challenge:

One biggest gap I found is ‘ engagement’ People get the idea of what is meant by exercise and how to do it, but they’re not finding engagging.For that, I thought of habits, communities, and regular flow will help to build intrinsic motivation and ongoing engagement.

Here I tried to use amy joy kim player journey

Newbie- first 15 days free

Regular- different levels in exercise

Enthusiastic- make them trainer

Here I tried to use intrinsic and well as extrinsic motivation

Conclusion:

In persuasive design, while designing as designer we need to think beyond usability. Building persuasive user experiences is like a process of creating bond betwen the user and the design, which allow user to get involved in it and enjoy their journey. In proposed solution I tried to consider intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of user so that user will engage in whole process.