How Persuasive Design is Not a Process with Anders Toxboe
Anders Toxboe is a writer, blogger, developer, and designer. He manages Digital Development for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation and cares deeply about building engaging user experiences, which he blogs about on UI-Patterns.com.
Previously, he managed Digital Development for Bonnier Publications and before that worked as a developer at the same place.
To learn more about persuasive patterns, visit his blog at UI-Patterns.com, buy his Persuasive Pattern card deck, or take his video course on building persuasive products.
So, let’s start at the beginning. We met in Copenhagen in 2010 for “Persuasive”, the scientific symposium for persuasive technology.
What is the current state of our field of persuasive technology/design? Do you think much has changed since we’ve met in 2010?
When we met in Copenhagen back in 2010, applying psychology to web design was a brand new thing. For many, including myself, it was seen as a silver bullet that miraculously would help us build products that users loved. I was rather naive.
Gamification of web design and other short-sighted and mostly performance and reward based approaches was the talk of the town back in 2010. At the outset, using external rewards and punishments seemed like a more effective way to motivate individuals into acceptable behaviors as opposed to providing longer lasting learning challenges.
I believe the danger of relying too much on extrinsic motivators to encourage certain behavior, is the ease in which they can be administered. Awarding points, giving grades, rising on leaderboards are all performance goals. The danger of relying too much on performance goals, is that once a reward is given, the motivation to continue learning is gone. After that, the user may prioritize the reward as the ultimate objective rather than the process of continued learning.
I’ve spent the last 6 years trying to learn how to best apply psychology to web design. From that experience, I have found much more success in applying persuasive design patterns to facilitate or support existing user motivations rather than trying to push users to do something that is more helpful to me as a business than it is to the user himself.
I have found that when users are forgotten in the equation; when we’re focusing more on business goals than on user goals, any persuasive efforts will at most be short-lived. This tendency seems to show itself when designers think they know best. When we design for users rather than with users, we tend to end up applying simplistic and deterministic approaches trying to constrain or trick users into certain behavior — for instance by denying them complexity and variety.
Instead we should learn from the context of users and their understanding of the world by embracing the complexities of the world they live in.
As a business, we might want to design for behavior change or wish to persuade our users. However, denying the context and intrinsic motivations of the user will lead us nowhere. We need to embrace the broader picture and start designing full experiences rather than individual and independent persuasion paths.
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A good friend of mine, Andrew Chak, wrote Submit Now! in 2002, that amongst others deals with a persuasive design process and persuasive persona’s. That’s something I don’t hear much about anymore.
Is there such a thing as an ideal persuasive design process? (Agile Persuasion has a nice ring to it BTW ;)
I really don’t see persuasive design as a process. It is a set of ideas and insights that will help enlighten your thinking. Persuasive design will aid you in making informed best guesses as to why and how users are behaving.
As designers, we can use those insights to suggest features and create hypotheses to validate and test. There are no ultimate thruths. There is a sound possibility that what works in one context might not work in another. This is why you need to test whatever ideas persuasive design might suggest, rigorously.
At the start of a project, you try to grasp its entirety. As work gets broken down into sprints, it can be easy to see the backlog as a massive pile of “work to be done”. This is a typical trap of agile development. When you start to see your development as work to be done, you quickly get a focus on “What” and “When” to build — rather than “Why”. Too much focus on what and when to build without asking why, creates tunnel vision.
Agile is great for helping teams focus on executing incremental change, but it can also blind you. Relying on agile alone, in my experience, too often neglects the overall goals and visions. In agile, success is often measured in feature completions rather than business improvements. For agile to be effective in accommodating broader innovation, it needs to be combined with methods that question the assumption of the status quo.
I’ve personally found the Lean Startup approach particular helpful as a process to support persuasive design.
Test your prototypes or final product with your users. Use A/B tests, landing pages, feature stubs, handheld Wizard of Oz features, clickable prototypes, guerilla user tests, and user interviews to validate your assumptions.
Persuasive design is great, but it’s not a process.
In a sense using cards in brainstorming sessions could be considered a process ;) it resembles the way we worked at Booking.com. Some time ago I wrote an article on the importance to look at customer journeys in detail and plotting micro persuasion moments.
The insights of the persuasive pattern cardset can be used for new business concepts, as well as for details of website design and anything in between. I would say that are very different problems with a different level of solution to them.
What are the kind of problems you see fit best with this approach?
Depending on whether you’re innovating (new business concepts) or optimizing (details of a design), you need to choose appropriate measures of testing.
If your product doesn’t have real users yet, it’s hard to conduct meaningful quantitative A/B tests or create feature stubs to collect insights on your product hypothesis. However, you can still do early validation. Whether you’re validating the problem you’re trying to solve, the market, or the product, you can still listen to your users. Create landing-page tests, prototype tests, or just conduct interviews with potential real users. In the early stages, the important thing to remember is that you need to solve real problems and in order to find that problem, you need to listen to real people.
All of this has to do with your design process rather than on how you apply persuasive patterns. Persuasive patterns work on all levels — they can form a whole business concept or constitute a small design detail. As an example, consider the persuasive pattern of Scarcity. The whole concept of Groupon.com was formed around offers being available only for a limited time, whereas travel sites such as Booking.com use the principle of Scarcity thoroughly in small design details designed to nudge us to book, letting us know that a hotel has been “Booked 2 times today” or that “8 users have been looking at this hotel in the last hour”.
As you mentioned, persuasive patterns work on multiple levels, and you need to adjust your approach accordingly.
I like to say that persuasion is like a relationship. And that you need to treat persuasion like a relationship. The ultimate question then becomes: Do you want a one night stand or a lasting relationship? Your approach to engaging users should be appropriately adjusted to the relationship you have with them. Have you just met them, are you trying to get to know them, or are you building on an already long-lasting relationship?
And could you walk through an ideal project where the Persuasive Patterns were used?
There are no ideal projects, but some projects are easier to comprehend for designers than others. When I conduct workshops for companies developing enterprise business applications, they often ask me to skip through all of the “selling stuff”. They explain how they don’t face the same problems as B2C companies do. I agree. They don’t face the same problems, but the same patterns can easily help better both B2C and B2B products.
Persuasive design can both nudge and help facilitate easier decision making. Persuasive Patterns like the Status-Quo Bias, Recognition over Recall,Intentional Gaps, Limited Choice, Tunneling, Reduction, Sequencing,Completion, and Social Proof will all help reduce cognitive load in both B2C and B2B products.
I’ve seen that it tends to be harder for designers to apply persuasive design to business applications. Instead, they start with concrete UI design patterns and work their way up to their persuasive pattern counterpart:
- The Good defaults UI Pattern is supported by the Status-Quo Bias persuasive pattern
- The Progressive Disclosure UI Pattern is supported by the Limited Choice persuasive pattern
- The Wizards and Steps Left UI Patterns are supported by the Completion and Sequencing persuasive pattern
- The Forgiving Format UI Pattern is supported by the Reduction persuasive pattern
- The Fill in the Blanks UI Pattern is supported by the Intentional Gaps persuasive pattern
- The Autocomplete and Calendar Picker UI Patterns are supported by the Recognition over Recall persuasive pattern
The list goes on.
I am yet to discover a design problem where persuasive design failed to enlighten the discussion. Over the last 2 years, I’ve helped companies implement persuasive design for:
- Landing page and conversion rate optimization
- Reducing cognitive load in business applications
- Redesigning onboarding flows
- Facilitating learning through gamification-systems through badges, points, and building communities
- Helped stimulate content creation and moderation in community sites
I’ve understood that you tested the scientific insights and their translations into the cards extensively. Having scientific sound insights is one thing, but it’s another thing completely to translate those insights in business smart experiments.
How do you see the relationship science, business and design?
Together with my teams, we’ve conducted a multitude of A/B tests that have both proved the success and failure persuasive patterns. Whether they work or not completely depends on the context in which it is used and the context of the user. All the patterns in the Persuasive Patterns card deck have proven to work in various situations, but none for all situations.
The science of psychology or persuasive design will help suggest informed and qualified best guesses. Insight into psychology and UI design patterns will help spark new and useful ideas that you can then test.
If you fail to test the features and ideas that persuasive patterns can help you dream up, you might as well not use them at all. Then they will be a waste of time for your business.
However, once you’ve applied the same persuasive patterns in similar situations and seen it work, your confidence in that pattern grows. If we’ve seen a solution work hundreds of times and have the data to back it up, we just implement it. If we’re not certain enough, we conduct A/B tests and experiments to either increase our certainty or make us drop the idea.
If you want to get into Persuasive design, you can get hold of your own Persuasive Pattern card deck at the UI Patterns web shop.
