What is persuasive design and the attention economy
Are you in control of where your attention goes when you’re online? Discover what persuasive design is and how it is influencing your digital behaviour.
A lab where you are the guinea pig
Imagine a lab where the sole intention is to understand how human psychology works, and then take that understanding to design and build tech to exploit it. A lab where humans are the guinea pigs and learning how to make digital products addictive is the goal.
If that sounds far fetched, then you will be surprised to learn that the Persuasive Design Lab is (or was) very real. It was also successful at producing a generation of product designers who understood exactly how to use behavioural psychology to get and keep human attention. These designers have gone on to be instrumental in building so many of the sites and apps that feature heavily in our daily life, such as Facebook and Google.
The Persuasive Design Lab has since been rebranded as the Behavioural Design Lab to make it more palatable, but the legacy remains and many of the apps, sites and digital products you use are built off the back of the research done in this lab. So, if you have ever spent more time online than you wanted, and are keen to make some changes to your digital habits, understanding persuasive design is a good place to start.
The attention economy
As the saying goes, if it’s free, you are the product. This is the core principle of the attention economy, a term coined by Nobel Laureate, Herbert A. Simon. The basic premise is that you pay for free products and services with your attention, attention that is sold to advertisers. It’s a very effective business model, Facebook made $86M in 2020 and you didn’t pay them a penny, instead your clicks, impressions, preferences and habits were sold.
Your attention is valuable to advertisers because it is finite, and the internet has a seemingly endless supply of content to try and capture it. Persuasive design techniques are a convenient — often unethical — way that tech companies get you to use their product over another.
So, attention is valuable, and as per the book, Design for the Mind, persuasive design is essentially the act of moving users from low attention to high attention.
Understanding what persuasive design is and how it is used to influence you is the key to being in control of your attention.
What is persuasive design
Persuasive design is the practice of understanding and exploiting behavioural psychology to persuade users to engage in a desired behaviour. This “desired behaviour” can be that of the business or the user, depending on how ethically persuasive design is integrated in the development of digital products.
Persuasive design techniques focus on basic traits of human psychology. For example, the desire to be safe, to be praised, to conform, to be part of a social group, to be seen as a leader, to fit in, the list goes on.
Whilst persuasive design can mean building digital products that are used more often and for longer than a person might otherwise choose, it isn’t to say that persuasive design is “bad” in itself. It can encourage you to do something beneficial like learn a language, remember a doctor’s appointment or meditate more frequently.
Dark patterns vs. persuasive design
As we’ve said, persuasive design is not necessarily bad. It can be used for the benefit of the user. Dark patterns, on the other hand, are always bad. They are design techniques that intentionally make the user’s experience worse for the purpose of meeting a business goal. E.g. making the “close” button on a pop-up video hard to see to make the user watch more than they want so that the company earns more advertising revenue. You can see some examples (and report instances) of dark patterns here.
Persuasive design is not always bad or harmful, but it can be much harder to spot than dark patterns are and therefore much more pernicious and influential.
Let’s explore persuasive design in more detail by looking at some examples.
Persuasive design examples
Interaction Design Foundation
The CTA (call to action) on the Interaction Design Foundation homepage preys on the human desire to be successful. “Advance my career now” is an emotive directive that doesn’t tell the user where the button will take them, but rather focuses on their instinct for success, recognition and purpose.
The Guardian
This banner appears when you visit The Guardian’s website. Here, the design focuses on using shame to prompt an action, in this case the action is paying for content. The user can see details about their specific site usage along with an emotive paragraph of text about why the user should consider paying their way. Guilt is a powerful motivator, something The Guardian designers are keenly aware of here.
Booking.com
Booking.com is notorious for using every weapon in the persuasive design arsenal to get people to book accommodation with them. Highlighting scarcity (or perceived scarcity) is a common tactic in persuasive design. In this example, users see lots of signals that if they don’t book this room soon, they’re going to miss out. You’re also told that this accommodation has been booked twice recently, an extension of scarcity but also exploiting the human instinct to fit in and be part of the crowd.
Change.org
Change.org use persuasive design techniques to encourage sharing of their petitions. Once you have signed a petition, they use several cues to make it look like you need to complete more actions for your signature to be registered, which is not the case. The CTA’s also make it look like your only options to proceed are to donate or share, when in fact you don’t have to do either.
Awareness is the key to taking back control of your attention
Persuasive design may have started in a university lab in California decades ago, but as we can see from the examples it is now a fundamental part of how digital products and services are designed and built. If you use the internet, you are exposed to it and your behaviour online is very likely shaped by it.
It’s important to remember that just because something is persuasive in its design, doesn’t mean it’s bad, it may mean that a user gets what they need quicker and more efficiently than they might have otherwise. The risk, however, is that users are not aware of the techniques being employed to get their attention and convert that attention into an action. This can lead to making decisions against their best interest, spending more time online that they might like or addictive behaviour.
Being aware of what persuasive design is and noticing it as you use apps and websites is key to controlling where and how you spend your valuable attention online. Use a critical eye next time you’re using a digital product; why are you making the choices you are? What is influencing your behaviour? Are you making an informed choice? The more you do it, the more reflexive it becomes and the more control you regain.
