The existence of a product revolves around its users and the interaction they commit toward resolving a problem space. A medium facilitates the transition from an undesired state to a desired state in the form of a product and its usage. It influences user behavior around that product through design interventions. In an increasingly connected world with more explicit interdependencies, an omnichannel approach is developing to change users’ behavior, leveraged through persuasive design in Product Design. Digital Product Design is an area of design practice that focuses on influencing human behavior through a product or service’s characteristics. The clarity around the usage and awareness of persuasion in design is still an evolving process.
Historical Footprint
Persuasion has been studied since 400BC. Aristotle was a leading thinker on rhetoric or the art of determining how to persuade in any given situation. Its definition has emerged throughout time with its influence in multiple domains of marketing, behavioral economics, and information technology (IT).
Today, the formal study of persuasion continues through research in social psychology. Some interpretations of the domain are highlighted. For example, interactive information technology designed to change users’ attitudes or behavior is known as “persuasive technology”. Traditionally, persuasion has meant “human communication designed to influence the autonomous judgments and actions of others”. More recently, the concept of persuasive systems has emerged, defined as “computerized software or information systems designed to reinforce, change, or shape attitudes or behaviors, or both, without using coercion or deception”.
Wordplay around information is strategic communication, designed to influence the independent judgments and actions of others. These approaches contribute to our understanding of persuasion, but each has limitations. There is no single set of principles that provides a comprehensive explanation of what motivates people and causes them to adopt a particular attitude or behavior in each setup.
Context: Understanding Persuasion and Related Domains
Theoretical Background
The term ‘Persuasive Technology’ emerged in the 1970s-80s with a few computing systems designed to promote health and boost workplace productivity. Fogg’s book (Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do) laid the groundwork for captology (study of computers as persuasion tools). Fogg classifies the foundation of Persuasion Technology around the functional triad of tools, media, and users, emphasizing persuasion in different ways depending on their functional role. He talks about the significance of macro and micro persuasion — to identify and explain a product’s persuasive intent — and gives examples from the web, video games, and other applications. The functional triad examines various perspectives and theories of persuasion, highlighting the capability of computers to motivate and persuade.
An overlap between the persuasive tools is apparent in their conceptual and theoretical structures. According to Fogg’s Functional Triad and Persuasive Systems Design, a baseline of similar tools can be analyzed in the proposed products, separated into contents of various software functionalities. Three main steps in the development of a persuasive system are noted:
(1) The development process– a thorough understanding of the fundamental issues behind persuasive systems is essential,
(2) Context analysis– a detailed analysis of the context, identifying the intent, events, and strategies is critical, and
(3) Evaluation– the actual system quality may be designed, or the features of an existing system may be evaluated, ideally based on a person’s personality type.
Halko and Kientz report success in using the relationship between personality and Persuasive Technology in the context of health-promoting mobile applications. Personality and persuasion, e.g., in the “Big Five Persuasive Inventory” for the personality domain, question the perceived persuasive outcomes, increasing the likelihood of success. The persuasion literature revolves around three factors: motivation, ability, and triggers; each of which has subcomponents. According to the Fogg Behavior Model 3 (FBM), for a person to perform a target behavior, they must
(1) be sufficiently motivated,
(2) can perform the behavior, and
(3) be triggered to perform the behavior.
These three factors must co-occur to achieve the behavior change. The psychological model identifies a way of thinking about persuasive behavior change. It must be noted that here “persuasion” refers to attempts to influence people’s behaviors, not their attitudes.
Latent Multidisciplinary Explorations of Persuasion Across Domains
The use of design to influence human behavior is becoming a more relevant issue in design studies and in the wider public consciousness. In theory, most literature overlaps around validating persuasion tools used on everyday product examples. A few areas deal with validating persuasion across large data sets using aspects of Behavior Change Support Systems (BCSS). Many systems are directed at helping people lead a healthier lifestyle. Its capacity to expand its reach has been discussed. According to early user research, connecting a BCSS to an environmental trigger is promising for greater reach.
Future avenues for research on triggers in the environment and the design of dynamic interventions are proposed. Others suggest a critical, speculative scenario to provoke ethical values and politics around persuasive concepts. The importance of ethical and sociocultural considerations in design conceptualization is highlighted. Self-shaping and commitment around user motivation are also discussed as categories and tools useful to researchers and designers of persuasive systems. Though all these studies, tools, and theories around persuasion are readily available, they typically remain underutilized or even unknown at times in the design community. Explicit usage of persuasion tools in the design process may lead to more sustainable or green behaviors.
Awareness and access to such tools should benefit the design process by putting greater emphasis on users’ personalities, motivations, and triggers for behavior change through designs. Currently, the lack of a dedicated toolkit or framework to support the use of persuasion in design means such information and support remain ad hoc and fragmented. While different models of persuasion exist for specific objectives, their mapping and integration within a unified design process are lacking.
10 Persuasive Tecnology Tools
Here we determine the dominant elements in understanding Product design in collaboration of Persuasive Tecnology Tools. As Designers we must think of a product beyond its Physicality and its overall lifecycle.
10 persuasion tool/strategies are explained. The numbering is independent of any priority. Designers have the flexibility to choose multiple tools based on their design problem which is best to justify their context.
- Reduction Technology
Highly Complex Behavioral Problem General Public’s active Involvement in Public Affair is targeted through this tool. Some considerations around ethical boundaries need to be considered while using it.
Online Portal
An online system that makes it simpler for people in the United States to share their views with their elected leaders enabling active involvement in Public Affair. The leading product in “cyberadvocacy,” the “CapWiz” system takes the complexity out of sharing your views, to empower, activate, educate, and mobilize constituencies to influence policymakers and the media to achieve public affairs objectives.
2. Tunnelling Technology
Under Ethical Concerns
- 1. A retirement software program could lead users through the various steps of analyzing their financial situation, setting financial goals, and taking action to meet these goals.
2. 2. A health site could lead users through a series of questions designed to identify poor health habits and take steps to improve them.
Violating Ethical Concerns
- Software programs include product registration as part of the installation procedure.
- At some point the program asks you to enter your personal information — your name, company, and other contact information which sometimes becomes unavoidable.
Important: Freedom to exit the tunnel at any time without causing any damage to their system.
3. Tailoring Technology: Hyper Personalization
Tailored Information
Enter their zip code, the site lists names of the polluting institutions in their area, gives data on chemicals being released, and outlines the possible health consequences.
A map that enables you to see the location of pollution sources relative to where you live, work, or attend school. A company located next to my running path emits almost 10,000 pounds of dichlorofluoromethane each year; this chemical is a suspected cardiovascular toxicant. Such tailored information can influence people to change.
4. Suggestion Technology
Speed Monitoring Awareness and Radar Trailer (SMART)
Space — School zones and neighborhoods where drivers tend to exceed the posted speed limit.
Change — Drivers reevaluate their driving behavior
Implicit Persuasion
Motivation — A fear of getting a speeding ticket or a sense of duty to drive safely.
5. Self-Monitoring Technology
Usage of like multiple times in a structure.
They targeted a behavior that they themselves had problems with using the word “like” too often (“I went to class and it was, like, so crowded” and “I was, like, ‘Wow, I can’t find a place to sit.’”).
Solution — “like,” the phone would give a signal, making them aware of it. The signal could be a vibration or a faint audio signal that only the speaker could hear triggering reduced in usage of the word.
6. Surveillance Technology
Aspects of Social Psychology
Conformity is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group, norms or being like-minded.
Compliance is behavioral conformity in order to achieve rewards or avoid punishments.
Compliance is a response — When an individual changes his or her behavior in response to an explicit or implicit request made by another person.
Sensor technology is located in various places: on the employee’s ID badge, in the restroom ceiling, and at the sink.
It identifies each employee who enters the restroom. After the employee uses the toilet facilities, it verifies that the employee stands at the sink for 30 seconds.
7. Conditioning Technology
As you pedal at a rate closer to the target speed, the image on the TV becomes clearer. If you slow down too much or stop pedaling, the TV picture becomes fuzzy, almost worthless. The students hypothesized that receiving a clearer picture would reinforce and produce the desired behavior change — exerting more effort on the exercise bike.
Effective repertoire of “digital rewards.”
8. Simulation Technology
The Tectrix VR Bike: Pedaling to Explore a Virtual Environment
9. Cognitive Dissonance
Resolving cognitive dissonance can often lead to positive changes. It doesn’t always involve making sweeping changes. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of changing your perspective on something or developing new patterns of thinking.
10. Social Cues
Conclusion
Even though much more work is needed in this area, the proposed tools serve as a necessary initial step in developing a unified ethical usage of the product design processes in the context of persuasive technology. More importantly, visible behavior change through persuasion takes time and are implicit but have a gradual vast impact. Similar examples need to be categorized to better understand the effectiveness of the proposed persuasive tools in design practice.
Reference
[PDF] Persuasive Systems Design: Key Issues, Process Model, and System Features | Semantic Scholar
BehaviorModelp09v8f-withNameandCnote (demenzemedicinagenerale.net)
~ by Banani Das - Experience Designer
