Three Reasons Why Persuasive Design Isn’t Enough to Influence Change

By Colleen Jones

Published: September 6, 2010

Persuasive design is designing to change people’s behavior, or actions. This design movement fascinates me, and I’m jump-up-and-down thrilled to see it get more attention lately. Forbes recently ran an article about Jon Kolko, creative frontman at Frog Design, and his perspective on persuasive design. Kolko noted:

“Good design is design that changes behavior for the better. I think it needs to take into account the context of the environment, of the human condition, the culture, and then attempt to make the things you do—make us do them better, make us do better things. It encourages us to change the way that we live.”
—Jon Kolko [1]

While there is a lot to like about using design to improve our behavior and our world, achieving that is a tall order. If persuasive design is going to work on a large scale—and I want it to work—it needs to be complete. Here are three reasons why persuasive design is not enough to make all of its good intentions come to life.

1. Persuasive Design Doesn’t Address What We Think

Persuasive design focuses on people’s actions, or behavior, not their attitudes, or what they think. Why? The relationship between action and attitude is hard to measure. Despite that, most people—even academics—assume there is some relationship between what we think and what we do. In fact, there is a long-standing theory in persuasion circles called the theory of reasoned action. The evidence supporting it is considerable. [2] But, it will likely remain a theory, because it is difficult to prove entirely.

To me, the connection between what we think and what we do is like gravity. It is a long-held theory. As a theory, it makes sense and has supporting evidence. However, the exact nature of this complex relationship might be impossible to prove once and for all.   

Here is my challenge. Although gravity is a theory, we still respect it. We plan for it. We don’t jump out of an airplane without a parachute because gravity is only a theory. A parachute like that shown in Figure 1 lets people defy gravity.

Figure 1—Gravity—a theory we respect

Persuasive design does not take attitude into account much in its planning, even though attitude is powerful. One famous example of attitude affecting action is the scientific taste test between the soft drinks Coke and Pepsi. (I mean the scientific one, not the tests for commercials.) When the taste test was blind, people chose Pepsi. When the taste test was not blind, people chose Coke. In other words, people’s attitude toward Coke was so strong, it drove people to choose Coke over their actual taste preference. [3] Brain scans showed that taste tests in which brands were visible actually triggered different brain activity than the blind taste tests did. That’s potent. Can we really afford to ignore it?

2. Persuasive Design Leaves Out Content

In my experience, content affects both what people think and what they do. Figure 2 shows a few examples.

Figure 2—A sampling of content types that affect attitude and action

When we include content in our planning for persuasive design, we gain greater opportunity to influence. Let’s look at an example from the health industry. CNN recently featured an exciting self-help treatment Kaiser Permanente launched to help people recover from an eating disorder. [4] Central to this treatment is content—a guide on how to overcome binge eating—and occasional coaching. As CNN described:

“Half the participants were assigned to treatment as usual. They received notifications about available nutritional services, medical treatments, healthy eating, and weight management programs.

“The other half were assigned to a self-guided program for 12 weeks, detailed in a book called Overcoming Binge Eating … and met individually with a health educator for eight sessions. Under the program, binge eaters kept food diaries and wrote what triggered their behaviors.”

Researchers found statistically significant results in favor of the self-help treatment. After a year, 63% of the patients in the self-help treatment had recovered from binge eating—compared to only 28% of the patients in the healthy eating program. The right content and coaching changed these people’s eating behavior. Are we letting content be all it can be in our persuasive designs?

3. Persuasive Design Gets (Mis)Applied As Optimization

To this point, I’ve discussed some lofty ideas for improving the effectiveness of persuasive design. Now, let’s look at how people currently apply persuasive design.

To make a sale or get a lead, many Web sites use persuasion like a pushy salesperson, aiming high-pressure ploys at people as if they’re stupid targets. One trick I love to hate is a countdown timer on a sign-up form. Every tick of the timer tries to rush me into signing up. Such tricks act like prods to push people along. But do they get results?

Let’s look at one important type of results—conversion rates. Conversions occur when users take an action you want them to take, such as when they sign up for a service or make a purchase. The Fireclick index

measures global conversion rates. This index has hovered around 2–4%  since 2003. That means, most of the time, people don’t convert. These results are disappointing.

How can we improve our conversation rates? Ever since multivariate testing tools came on the scene—such as Google Website Optimizer in 2006—the industry producing them has encouraged us to rely heavily on testing design optimizations as the answer. We’re told to optimize our text, buttons, and pictures until conversion rates rise. But, we’ve had years to experiment. If testing and tweaking optimizations worked so well, wouldn’t the global conversion rates have improved by now?

Now, allow me to clarify. I’m not saying conversion rates are unimportant. And I’m not telling you to stop optimizing and testing your landing pages. I simply mean that this focus on tactical design isn’t enough to bring big results. I also doubt that focusing only on tactics is what proponents of persuasive design intend. However, if we say persuasive design addresses only behavior, we shouldn’t be surprised to see practitioners focus on optimizing conversions, the most coveted online behaviors.

To better persuade, let’s also address what people think, and let’s do it with content. What if we created quality, relevant Web site content that attracts people who already have some interest in our products, services, or causes? That would let us avoid manipulation altogether. In fact, Brian Eisenberg, a best-selling author in interactive marketing, has suggested that driving a lot of the wrong people—people who have no interest—to our Web sites is a major reason conversion rates stay so low. [5]

Beyond attracting the right people, I like how content strategist Shelly Bowen explains the possibilities for content in “The Big Picture: End-to-End Content Strategy.” [6]

“The sum of the parts is larger than the whole. Just consider content marketing, content strategy, branding … each piece might be brilliant, but still not drive results. A cohesive message and creative across all content delivery vehicles will help raise awareness and need and make you memorable and trustworthy.”—Shelly Bowen

So, What Now?

To accomplish the good intentions of persuasive design, we need to do more than design to get people to act. We need to create content that influences people’s thinking in a positive way, motivates them to act, and makes acting easier. As the UX design industry pays more attention to content, we’ll be better prepared to influence what people do and think—and have a real chance at making the world a better place, online and off.

References

[1] Laneri, Raquel. “Jon Kolko on Design That Changes Human Behavior.”

Forbes, June 15, 2010. Retrieved July 1, 2010.

[2] Hale, Jerold L., et al. “The Theory of Reasoned Action.” The Persuasion Handbook: Developments in Theory and Practice. James Price Dillard and Michael Pfau, eds. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002.

[3] McClure, Samuel, et al. “Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks.” Neuron, Volume 44, Number 2, October 14, 2004.

[4] Park Madison. “Self-Help Treatment Effective for Binge Eating, Researchers Say.”

CNN, April 1, 2010. Retrieved July 5, 2010.

[5] Eisenberg, Bryan. “The Average Conversion Rate: Is It a Myth?”

ClickZ, February 1, 2008. Retrieved August 20, 2010.

[6] Bowen, Shelly. “The Big Picture:End-to-End Content Strategy.”

Pybop, October 21, 2009. Retrieved July 24, 2010.

Topic: Columns | Content Strategy | UX Design

Comments (3)

Jkolko

wrote:

Posted on September 6, 2010 7:40 AM

Tommylouts

wrote:

Posted on September 7, 2010 12:16 AM

Jones Leen

wrote:

Posted on September 8, 2010 6:16 PM

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Interesting counter argument to using Persuasive Design. I’m reading several books on persuasion and one in sales specifically focuses on the type of personality and the types of decisions they might make. I think that is part of the nut that this article is hitting on.

All the classic UX diagrams in one post. Nice.

It targets people. It focuses on users. And Apple lets them decide how and where they’ll use its products.

This sounds simple, but in my experience very few companies think this way. Most startups write business plans that dredge up IDC data on market size, then define their target market (e.g., “Global 2000 enterprises”). Few seem to realize that there are people employed within these target markets, and these people will be the ones who actually embrace or reject one’s product.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to suggest that this is one of the primary failings of most enterprise software today: It’s built for enterprises, not for people employed by the enterprises, a theme echoed by noted developer Michael Nygard.

Not all companies screw this up. The open-source world offers a few good examples of companies that understood their target market was the individual, not the tribe/company.

Marc Fleury’s JBoss, for example, understood its target market was the developer buried within corporate IT. All JBoss’ early marketing was focused on developers, not CIOs, and its product development was focused on making developers happy. Only later did those developers return the favor by pushing JBoss into serious production, requiring the CIOs to get involved.

Along the way, JBoss took its share of criticism for this indifference to decorum and CIO concerns, including accusations that the company “astroturfed” to drum up developer support. True or not, the accusations don’t diminish JBoss’ clear success winning over developers by catering to developers.

The same is true of SpringSource, which fought off the accusation that it wasn’t “enterprise ready” by being “developer ready” from the start, and focusing relentlessly on pleasing its target market: the developer.

This is how great companies are built: they focus on individuals and build exceptional products for them, and let these individuals determine how best to make use of the technology.

Nice summary of the value of people-centered design.

But the most interesting thing Pleasants noted was that he recently heard (from his own source, apparently) that half of all users on Facebook now play social games. More impressively, 40% of total usage time on the service is spent on these games. That’s meaningful, of course, because “a huge amount the Internet is on Facebook,” Pleasants stated.

When moderator Michael Arrington asked about changes Facebook has made recently to slow the viral spread of these types of games, Pleasants acknowledged they’ve all taken a hit. But he says they’re working with Facbeook on new ways to drive growth. But he made sure to say they had to do it without spamming.

When talking about what’s next, Pleasants notes that they’ve released two new games in the past week alone. When Mike suggested that most of the games are just a combination of blindly pushing buttons, Pleasants noted that things were evolving, and that games were about to get more social.

Interesting to see where social games are going. Note that 40% are doing games, but still sharing photos and ideas socially remains the biggest piece of activity on Facebook.