How Persuasive Design is Not a Process with Anders Toxboe
By: Arjan Haring
Tags: Persuasive Design, Conversion Optimization, Design, Behavior Change, UX

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.

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