Persuasive Design
Seven design practices to influence people’s behaviour through products or life in general.
Imagine you want to buy a pair of ear-buds. But you don’t know which one to choose from- one with excellent reviews or one with no reviews?
You’ll surely go with ear-buds that has excellent reviews, right? Why is it so?.
That is because if you hear about the same product from several different sources, you tend to attribute more positive views to it than to a product you’re unfamiliar with. In other words, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it breeds reassurance. People rely on social proof more when they’re unsure what to do. This is an example of Persuasive Design.
Persuasive Design aims at creating products and experiences that influence people to take the desired action. This is achieved by using various techniques like psychological principles, social norms and emotional triggers. It is important to understand what motivates people. This requires taking into account factors such as their values, beliefs, and goals.
UX designers play a crucial role here as they persuade people to take action by designing attention-seeking buttons, removing distractions and streamlining processes besides making an effortless experience for users from browsing to buying.
Below are seven techniques used in persuasive design
Buyer’s Remorse- In interface design, cognitive dissonance occurs when designers try to persuade people to do something different from their current process. One such form of cognitive dissonance is called the ‘buyer’s remorse’, in which the buyer feels that an item isn’t somehow worth what they have paid for.
E-commerce websites don’t want customers to return items, so they do their best to prevent buyer’s remorse. If a place can give customers reasons and evidence to bolster their satisfaction with the product, they’ll be less likely to return it.
For this, sites show positive reviews and images of famous people using the product, their testimonials, reviews, and lifestyle images that help customers visualise themselves using the very product. This type of information is also displayed in the post-purchase pages like the support and accessory pages which in turn helps returning customers feel that they did the right thing when they purchased this product.
Using self-image — Every person who uses an iPhone is capable of changing the signature file ‘Sent from iPhone’. So even a decade after the first iPhone was released, why do we still see this text?
Users seem reluctant to change as this sentence says a lot about their status and it’s not just a mere advertisement. The designer found a way to let users show their status as owners of a shiny, desirable gadget. How we take ourselves and our self-image are simple targets of persuasive design. We aspire to become richer or more popular, and many companies promise to help us reach there. By emphasising on differences in status, designers create desire and then show how that desire can be met using their products.
Commitment- There are some depressing statistics about new year’s resolutions.
29% of people fail after one week
36% after one month
46% after six months. (Data from Discover Happy Habits)
Changing long-term bad habits, improving health, and inculcating new habits are hard to do. But then, how do fitness companies help us succeed?
They know that the social element, regular meetings where we weigh in and share our progress with others, are significant drivers for successful weight loss. The key here is the shared commitment to reach our goal. By meeting other people and sharing our encouraging goals with others in a similar position, it becomes easier for us to stick to our plans. Such a public confession of our goal makes us obliged to follow them through. Allowing users to share this metric as a website widget enables them to gather more public commitment and advertise their services. If the site wants to give users more motivation to share, it can combine public commitment with an affiliated program.
Breakage- Have you received a gift card and then not used it at all??
Congrats, you’ve just become a part of a billion-dollar industry called Breakage. Breakage is a term used to describe revenue gained by retailers through unredeemed gift cards or other prepaid services that are never claimed. It is a mega business for retailers who offer gift cards.
But why are customers throwing money away?
Sometimes it is hard to redeem gift cards, and as the amount of perceived hassle outweighs the value of the card, we eventually give up.
Suppose a product requires people to make many choices, say to configure a vehicle they’re buying or choose specific sets of kitchen cabinets they’re quite likely to start suffering from decision fatigue. After a while, they’ll become incapable of making more decisions and start looking for default options.
Of course, we as customers are less likely to pay full attention because of decision fatigue. But, if the default options that the software offers happen to be more profitable to us, we may not notice them in the digital environment. Therefore, it’s preferred that rather than asking someone to register upfront, they can instead save their information when they complete a checkout process. This default setting has just saved us time and made our decision making process easier.
Loss of aversion- Fear of losing what we already have is our loss of aversion, which is twice as powerful as our desire to benefit from a potential gain. Of course, one can tap into people’s loss of aversion when designers create persuasive designs.
One way to do this is to start people’s membership with a certain level of service included, free of charge. Fear of losing this free level of service means they’ll pay more to keep it than they would have paid to obtain it in the first place. Once people start using a service, they also create data and artefacts like photos, documents, contacts, and so on that are tied to the service. Anytime customers attempt to cancel their membership, designers can reinforce just what they’ll lose. Facebook does this when people try to close their account, pulling names from the person’s own friends list and suggesting that those individuals would be sad to see the person leave. It is a simple yet compelling way to introduce loss aversion.
Hard decisions after investment- At any one time, around 9% of Netflix’s viewers are trial users on a free one-month introductory offer. That seems like an awful lot of free movie viewing until you consider that over 90% of those trial users become paying subscribers after their free month is up.
Subscription companies that offer free trials seem to outperform those that don’t. Because free trials are a way to get potential customers using the service without having to answer all of their concerns up front. Companies are getting customers to invest in the service before deciding whether to pay for it. And the more investment customers make, the more likely they’ll continue using it later. For instance, by adding content, setting preferences, configuring favourites or wishlists, or any other activity that increases both the value to the individual and the friction of moving that content or those settings to a different service.
Let people feel important- Imagine an online pet store sends several small hand-painted pet portraits to customers every month. Sometimes they’re sent to customers who’ve called in with questions about their pets and revealed something about their lives. Sometimes they’re a form of condolence for customers who’ve canceled their orders because their pets have died. Sometimes it appears such gifts are sent out at random. These portraits pretty much create customers for life. People love their pets. Being given pet pictures makes customers feel important. And sharing these photos on social media is an excellent form of authentic publicity. Anything designers give away free to customers says “ you’re so important to us” will have the same effect. This could be one month’s free membership, free shipping, or other low-cost items that still are a pleasant surprise to customers.
Alternatively, designers can create an exclusive reward that only specific individuals will get. Making customers feel important is a great way to use them as a branding tool. Some companies reframe market strategies that they’d typically have to pay people to participate in as “your opinion is important to us.” Others promote specific customers to being brand ambassadors or other titles that make the individuals feel essential and commit them to promoting the company’s message further.
Persuasive design is a slippery slope. It tends to harness glitches in the way our brains work, where we stop behaving rationally and instead let our emotions take control. So, in order to work with persuasive design techniques, we first have to accept that logical, rational arguments aren’t likely to work. Then subsequently to persuade people to do something, we’ll have to focus on how to put people into the right emotional state and work with them.
In conclusion, it can clearly be said that Persuasive design has roots in several disciplines and as designers, we get to make use of all this research to craft more effective designs that guide people more successfully towards the goals we’ve set.
