Introducing the Persuasive Design Model (video)

In this conference talk, James Archer explains the Persuasive Design Model and how to use it to shape user perception and behavior.

YouTube Transcript (auto-generated):

when I was in college I was a communications major I don't know how I'd have been designed by those

communications major and one of my professors once said that all communication is persuasive now at the

time I was working as a technical writer so immediately my hand shoots up and I'm like wait a minute that's not true all

communities is not persuasive because I write really boring documentation for really boring software's for supply

chain software and I'm like an a s400 green screen there's no way that's persuasive writing and he started asking

some questions and sure enough he got me to understand that even that was persuasive writing and why did the

company even have documentation well to help the user so I was a company helping the users well to add value to the

products and make people more comfortable buying it they use the materials for training which is an add-on I can sell to make more money why

did we make the documentation consistent and standardized well so it looks more professional and reflects better on the company and so even the technical

documentation I was doing turned out to be persuasive content so you know as a 20 year old that was like a difficult

reality to accept that oh man I'm like part of the marketing engine of the world I don't want to be that I want to be like the cool independent guy but no

it turns out he was right all communication is persuasive and so you know essentially what what we're doing

here all of us as web professionals in some way or another we're involved in that communication process whether we're

building applications that communicate back and forth with users whether we are building marketing websites that are

trying to sell a product we are all part of that communication process and so for us to do to be good at our job we have

to learn to be persuasive sometimes that may take incest but that's just the reality of it very well known designer

Milton Glaser once had a set of questions for his students called the road to Hell and it was basically a set

of questions of you know would you do this would you do that what would you be willing to do as a designer you know the

questions started off pretty simply with things like when you design a package to look bigger on the shelf maybe's supermarkets kind of a

competitive place it's not you know it's not super deceptive but you know we kind of play around with a little bit make it

look a little more prominent and try and bring some more attention and the questions go on to things like would you

create a commercial that made a boring film seem like a light heart okay now it's starting to hurt a little

bit because I've gone to those movies that were totally different than the trailer that I watched that stings um if

you shake your fist and you're like how could they do that why would they do that well somewhere along the line was a designer or an ad exec or a copywriter

trying to do their job trying to persuade someone we all draw that line

in a little bit different place questions go into things like would you promote a diet product that you knew

didn't work I wouldn't I would have trouble taking on that project but there

are other people that do obviously to someone's designing those days would you design an ad for a product whose

frequent use could result in the user's death I wouldn't some people would some people don't see

the problem and he said that every class he did he had students that they would go all the way they would be able to

answer all the questions yeah I would do that now it's not many of them fortunately and I you know I think most

of us in this room would agree we draw that line a little bit earlier somewhere in the process but we have to we have to think through those things we have to

wrestle with that when you're designing things and whether or not your job title is designer you are involved in the

process of designing things when you're designing things that's kind of a superpower you know you are shaping and

persuading people to do certain things you were you're modifying their actions you're modifying their perceptions that's a superpower you got to use that

with responsibility so along that that road to hell of thinking through like

what how far we willing to go what are we willing to do where's the line between persuasion and deception you know obviously we're not the first group

of people to discuss these issues pretty much every major design organization marketing organization sales

organization they all have ethical guidelines or what they consider okay and whatnot and there really is you know

there is ethical persuasion that is a thing it is legitimate to help your client or yourself get your voice out

into the marketplace say your piece defend what you do extol its virtues and try to convince people that the your

thing is the best option it's part of the the marketplace of ideas other people are also vying for that and may

the best man win but as part of that ethical persuasion all these organizations kind of come up with their

code of ethics and now basically boil down to the same principles you know do no harm don't tell outright lies at least

don't cheater steel protect privacy respect the audience promote public good avoid conflicts of interests and do your

job well and do your job well is an interesting one because to do that you have to be persuasive and you know as

you know a young kind of anti-establishment generation you know a lot of us tend to be at the mindset of

you know well I just want to put my stuff out there and people can decide if they like it or not well to do your job

to really kind of to to give proper service to the the product that you're trying to promote or that you've created

or to give it its fair shot in the marketplace you have to promote it you have to you have to be a little more

convincing than that you can't just put something out there and hope it takes off so doing your job well is an

interesting aspect of that code of ethics if someone has hired you to design or build something you can't just say here's the thing and put it on the

table and people can get it if they like it you need to do it well so while it

was doing some of the background research for this I came across some interesting stories that made me bring up the question is it is it ever

acceptable to lie to the user when is it okay to lie to your users just outright

lie and my initial reaction is never you should never do that that's always been

some of you might have heard that been wrought Senior Center in Dusseldorf Germany that there was an episode of

radio lab about this recently and they had a problem with their elderly

patients who had Alzheimer's dementia kind of getting agitated forgetting

where they were wanting to go home or where they thought was home and leaving now usually the nurses nurses they'll

catch them at the front desk people will catch them but every once in a while some wily fellow sneak out and he'll

manage to get on a bus and next thing you know he's traveling across Dusseldorf and they find him you know at

his childhood home or you know the house where he lived before he went into the the Senior Center and someone else is

living there now and then he's freaking out or they find him in the middle of the forest and they have to call the police and the police have to go scour

the city and try and find this guy who has dementia and Kent doesn't know where he is or where he's going so to solve

the problem they built a bus stop right in front of the Senior Center it's not a real bus stop no bus goes there but it

sure looks like a real bus stop and so these patients could walk out and they're agitated in there whatever I

hate this place I'm out of here sit down at the bus stop and certainly wait for the bus five or ten minutes

later one of the nurses comes out talks to them usually the agitations kind of calmed down they're sort of forgotten

what they were doing invite him in for a cup of tea bring him back in and everything's kind of back to normal they

lie to the patient's to help them and to protect them and to help them not make what would be a very bad and dangerous

decision there's also something called the the one ESS the first electronic

switching system number one electronic switching system this was the first computerized telephone system used by Bell and it was as everything was in the

60s buggy you know computers were not a super reliable platform at the time so it made mistakes so you know it would

try and dial a number and somehow it managed to dial the wrong number and they could detect that you could tell when it made a mistake and it did you

know they started by doing the thing the phone companies do which is you play an error message I'm sorry you know this

this number could not be connected you know please try again something like that and the problem is a it creates a

kind of a public relations problem for the company because it looks like their software is failing all the time and be it frustrates the users so what the

engineers did was they just went ahead and connected it they knew was the wrong number just went ahead and connected it

so what happens user picks out someone else the answer usually like oh sorry wrong number hang up try again you're not frustrated

you sort of take the responsibility for the wrong number onto yourself you just assume you push the wrong number dialed

something wrong pick it up try again now on one hand that may be deceptive the

the company knew they knew there was a problem but they didn't state it instead they connected and and went through with

the mistake but it actually relieved the stress and frustration on the user compared to getting an error message and

hanging up and dialing again so it's an interesting thing sometimes maybe they're there occasions where make sense

to do that usually not so don't you don't use that as a justification to

then you know take that to the opposite extreme but there are definitely some interesting things to consider there for example you can think of placebo buttons

so you have a form the form auto-saves but the user doesn't feel like it's saved until they hit the Save button

sometimes we put a save button on there it doesn't do anything he'd save tells you it saved it was saved anyway

but sometimes it helps the user alright enough an ethics lesson let's jump in

and talk about how we actually persuade people to do things so the persuasive design model has three basic steps none

of these will come across as as particularly revolutionary to you it's all pretty much common sense but people

somehow get it wrong all the time anyway so we're gonna we're gonna cover them and it's all it's all basic human nature so this all should sound familiar as we

as we talk through it the first step is to motivate the user and and remind them

of what it is they want to do second step is to simplify the experience for the user and then the third step is to

invite them to do the thing that you want them to do now motivation and simplification have an interesting

relationship if you have a highly motivated user even if your experience

is bad you can still a lot of the time get them through the process because they're highly motivated they'll push

through the pain and actually do the thing you want them to do likewise if you have a very simple easy

straightforward no pain kind of process even if the users are not very motivated they might just go ahead and do it

anyway but if you can get them motivated and simplify the process for them when

you issue that invitation you're up in this territory and you get a much higher rate of conversion you get much higher

rate of people accepting the thing that you're proposing that they did so the

first step is to motivate the user what does that mean well if you've ever taken a psychology class you know there are

lots of different theories on human motivation and you probably familiar with you know Maslow's hierarchy of needs and some of the other ones that

are out there there none of them quite work the way I wish they did I always

find like little glitches with him at least applying to these kinds of problems so I've kind of broken them out a little differently that's similar to

most again nothing revolutionary here is just a convenient model for for looking at them but the five basic human

motivators are security pleasure affiliation aspiration and identity so

that's kind of the structure I use in my head to figure out what are we what are we doing here what are we doing with this interface how are we approaching it

how are we communicating those things and the goal isn't necessarily to create motivation in people the goal is just to

remind them of the the motivations that they already have people are already motivated they already want all of those things they're already pursuing them you

don't have to create that all you have to do is kind of remind them of what it was that they were trying to do anyway it's kind of like going to the gym right

you know you you go and you get a check-up the doctors like you you really got a you really gotta start working out

and you know for two months you're all about it going to the gym and then all

of a sudden that Saturday comes you're like really just kind of want to sleep in today and then you start to forget

you forget what the doctor told you you forget your health is in jeopardy you forget your motivations and you just go back to the way you were doing things

before and you know there's a thing that discipline is just remembering what you want well human beings the reason that

we're not always good at discipline we're not always good at remembering what we want to do sometimes we need those reminders we need you know

personal trainers who remind us all the time this is why you're doing this this is what you're you know this is your motivation for doing this so let's jump

into these a little bit kind of explore some of them so with security I kind of knew if I went to ADT I was gonna find a

security motivation message while you're out don't let them in ATT less use it kind of the fear-based version of that

but security doesn't have to be that literal not necessarily about like home security

it can really be about a sense of just getting things under control you know that anxiety of what's going on

I don't know what's gonna happen next things feel like they're out of control in fact SolarCity just their their main

motivation message get control over energy costs you know that's it that's it's basically implying energy costs are

out of control here's how you can get them back into control so it's appealing to that that motivation for for security

a career builder if you're looking for a job you probably freaked out a little bit they made the image a little hard to

read but it says find the right job right now so those are the two things you want to do if you're out of the job

right you want to get a job ideally the right job and you want it fast so it's appealing to that sense of security you

can have a job the right job right now if you use career building that's the that's the underlying premise square

start selling today any business owner knows that the thing you're most panicked about is not selling today so

selling today I was really great and harvest for example let's get to work spend less time tracking and more time

doing I literally had a conversation two days ago I have a friend who sold her stake in a company and is now doing

consulting and so she's building up this consulting practice she's never done services before so she she called me and

she says how the heck do you track time I feel like I'm spending all my time managing time and managing invoices and

dealing with the administrator stuff I don't have any time left to actually do the work that and I have these deadlines coming up she's feeling that that

security panic though so that that motivations coming through and I'm literally told her you go use harvest because I don't solve most of those

those problems so there's some legitimacy to their claim it actually is great service for doing that so that's

security the next one is pleasure this one's pretty straightforward it's not super hard to know that people enjoy

pleasure any any chocolate brand go to any you know chocolate and marketing materials and you're gonna find pleasure

decadence indulgent sensual all those kind of words all about physically

pleasing things food brands generally do this a lot sometimes they don't even have to talk about it

Burger King is introducing a new line of grilled hot dogs all they have to say is introducing grilled dogs and have big

picture of hot dogs and I know I know Burger King's grows I know how does it rise but looking at that picture I want

to eat them a lot even and it could be psychological pleasure as well so you

know Disneyland feel the force like never before you know that's kind of an interesting angle on it but that's still

like I want to feel the force that sounds good awesome so either lots of ways to do that but

it's basically appealing to that motivation for a pleasure affiliation is

another very strong one again softball went to meetup.com I knew they'd have an affiliation oriented message meetups are

neighbors getting together to learn something do something and share something that sounds great right we all want neighbors we want that that sense

of community but you can find it in other places as well you go to Under Armour we run we are runners alone

together we fight so they're kind of establishing a tribe and this is a cool tribe you want to be part of this tribe

you want to join other people like you so by Under Armor

tinder obviously affiliation motivation they actually have a whole like video

sequence that goes on in their their website that tells the story of kind of going through this this courtship

process but again all driving very directly at that sense of affiliation which is which is obvious for tinder

less obvious for Airbnb so Airbnb their campaign is live there that's the difference between Airbnb and like a

hotel you're not just going somewhere you're living there it's like you're one of the natives you know experience a

place like you live there and of course very affiliation oriented photos going on behind it so again it's that sense of

you know I'm cool because I'm like the the I'm like the locals I'm one of them I'm not just a tourist cuz nobody wants

to be the uncool tourist so that's how Airbnb is using the affiliation motivation to to drive their messaging

and Zillow Zillow you know you take a look for real estate prices which is

relatively abstract and boring but when you turn it into find your way home and they remind you that you're trying to

you know you're not just trying to find a property you're trying to build a home that that may keep you on the website 10

more minutes after instead of just giving up it might you know it might make you contact someone when you

weren't wouldn't have contacted him otherwise because you're like I'm about to give up build a home I got to do this

if you power through just that a little bit more which then makes them extra millions of dollars aspiration is

another one the desire to get harder better stronger faster Emirates Airlines

you've arrived from the you've arrived the moment you board so if you fly Emirates then that means you're a big

shot which if I flew Edwards I kind of feel like a big shot so there's some validity to that but it could be simpler than

that it doesn't necessarily have to be you know money aspiration or anything you know Salesforce Accenture moves

faster with Salesforce lightning well Accenture is being well-known respected consulting firm if I'm a small

firm I want to be more like Accenture it says they move faster than means faster than they used to means by implication

faster than I'm going so I want to be better and so I aspire to be more like Accenture so they kind of play on that

Coursera take the world's best courses online not just courses not just online courses the world

best courses and then they list you know some of the world's best schools underneath just to reinforce the point

up work we're will great work take you you know they're making you think like what if all my stuff was awesome how

would you know how would my business be doing where could I go with that Lowe's Lowe's has a fantastic tagline

never stop improving so you know that ties into that that do-it-yourself mentality you know it's kind of a play

between make yourself better and make your you know your home better how much doing home improvement work and you know

a lot of times as as you know we're fairly analytical people in this room typically so we might look at something like that is just being marketing fluff

it's not marketing fluff there's a reason all these websites have these messages on there they're reminding you of your motivation when you come to

Lowe's and you have to buy a hammer or something you poke around you look around maybe you're not seeing anything

that you like but I can't stop improving I've got to get this hammer I've got to build this shed I got to do this and you

stick around on this night ten more minutes and maybe you buy a hammer where you wouldn't buy a hammer otherwise so it has direct correlations to revenue

and conversion rates and things like that and then there's identity just the

idea of finding out who we are defining who we are expressing who we are

uber does this so they're their tagline on their website get their your day belongs to you it's not goober is mostly

cheaper than a taxi it's uber your day belongs to you and and they they

actually do some clever kind of interplay here because it's not quite clear if they're talking about the drivers or the passengers cuz they need

both that's that's a really really overly happy looking Ober driver but you

know one of the benefits of you know being an uber driver your day belongs to you so they have kind of a dual implication thing without specifically

calling out drivers in fact that they need drivers they're making that sale also Pandora free personalized radio the

place the music you love it's a little bit redundant that's what personalized radio is right but they you know they want to drive the point home so

specifically about the things that you want your identity and your likes monster different different from career

builder so where career builder had kind of the security play monster says get found for employees so if you want to

find a job it doesn't say find a job it says get they'll come to you because you are the Magnificent unicorn and that's how you

see yourself and they will come to you Etsy whoever you are finding what you're into volunteer volunteer master they

play it pretty heavily because you might have to with a volunteer driven organization we bring good people and

good causes together are you good person find a cause that lights you out get in touch with a non-profit that needs you

what do you care about so again these are all tied back to identity do I see myself as this kind of person or not and

if I do then that kind of leg we're just gonna remind me okay you know I am this kind of person I got a I got to do these

things now the thing about motivation is you got to know when to stop talking

sometimes sometimes you know you can overplay that a little bit you can you know if they're already again this is

about you need them highly motivated and then you need to make a simple experience if they come to you highly motivated you don't need to sit there

and keep talking about it just step out of the way and let them get right to the process Expedia for example not a whole

lot of marketing message on here you go to Expedia there tom there's the forum they know you want to travel they know you're looking for a flight here's the

forum just jump right into it now in most cases that's not you most of the

situations that you guys are in are not ones where you have super highly motivated users ready to go and you just

need to get out of the way and give them access to the thing the it's much more common that the mistake is made on the

sense of under motivating users you know as as again as a relatively analytical

group of people we tend to think we just put the product out there logical people will use it well people are not very

logical and they forget what they're trying to do all the time and they get distracted and all that there are all kinds of reasons why they won't do something and they need that extra nudge

they need that reminder of what it is they're trying to accomplish so step one motivate step to simplify how do you

make the experience easier and take away the roadblocks take away the obstacles take away the friction that then

prevents them from doing the thing that they are motivated to do I don't know if you guys have ever watched curling

curling is an awesome weird sport I love watching curling the they take a huge rock with a handle on it and they slide

it across the ice and then a bunch of other people sweep the ice with a broom together get the get the rock where it needs to

go and I kind of think of designers as the sweepers you know there's a there's

a big rock it needs to get to a certain place and we have to like clear paths to reduce the friction clear it out so the

rock of slides and it gets right where you want it that's kind of what we do as as designers so there's a there's kind

of a hierarchy of user experience that helps a lot with simplifying the process and kind of clearing things out so that

people can do things the first step is functionality it just the thing has to do or have the things that people are

looking for that's that's pretty basic I don't need to dive too much into that the second tier is intuitiveness so when

a user comes to it they need to know and be able to figure out what the next step is they shouldn't have to read

instructions they shouldn't have to you know sit and search around and try and figure it out it should just be intuitive you know as web professionals

we actually have a very high annoyance threshold we sometimes don't feel like we do I'm sure we all get agitated from

time to time and don't necessarily feel like we are the people who are hard to to annoy but in art you know in our

daily life this is this is us as web professionals so you know if you're if

you're writing code and and you put a semicolon in the wrong place and you have to spend 45 minutes

tracking down a single semicolon and then and then you see it and you're like that you the fact that you can then go

back and keep coding instead of giving that course up for the rest of your life shows that you have a high tolerance for

annoyance unfortunately what that does is it makes us different from users users typically have a low annoyance

threshold if they spend two minutes and they can't find the semicolon they're done with that thing for life that's

that's you know we we self select the people who make it in the web professionals are people who can power

through difficult stuff and most we forget sometimes that most people are not in that category of people so you

know even something is simple for example as the hamburger menu on Spotify

so Spotify recently redesigned they got rid of the hamburger menu this is the hamburger menu up and the top left so

one of the most universal design conventions used in mobile right now and it totally doesn't work so when they

redesign they switch them the navigation options that were behind the hamburger menu to a tab bar down at the

bottom this should be common sense this should be common sense if you take things that people need and want and you

hide them under something that doesn't look at all like what they need or want nobody will find it everyone in this

room knows what a hamburger menu is and still you guys will actually click on it less than if you have the thing right in

front of you that's basic UX everyone knows that like any UX person knows those principles if you don't take

important things and hide them behind something else however as an industry we so wanted the hamburger to work that we

just like adopted it overnight instantly everyone adopted it everything used the hamburger menu take all the big nasty

desktop navigation crammed it under their sexy little bars in the corner easy design solution right now that all

the the the anecdotal evidence and test results and a/b testing and stuff comes in people are fighting out it totally

doesn't work and that should have been obvious from the beginning because it's not intuitive if you want to see your playlists or you let's say you want to

you want to use the radio feature so you look around the site for something that says radio you don't see anything you

give up you don't go oh I should I should go click on the three bars on the top corner there's nothing intuitive

about that it's totally counterintuitive so by making it intuitive they significantly increase their many clicks

and there are lots and lots of stories like this so intuitive and functionality

intuitiveness a lot of times that's as far as people get in user experience aside I think I made a functional I made

it intuitive I'm done right there's a lot more than that efficiency is the is the next one so not

only is it intuitive but you need to make an efficient process just so that people don't get you know kind of exhausted halfway through and give up

there's a lot of fatigue that sets in when you have to keep clicking keep looking and keep doing things there was

a study done that shows that a one-second page load delay can result in

as much as 11 percent fewer views 16% less customer satisfaction and 7 percent

fewer conversions and even if those sound like tolerable numbers if you feel like you can absorb that impact you have

to remember you're the delay on your site might not be one second it might be too seconds might be three seconds might be

four seconds how much have you lost if you have a foot if you're four seconds slower than a competing sight and we

don't we don't think about it consciously this is also that happens at an unconscious level when a user's on the site but they hit the button has

taken to do something else and people really do that almost all the statistics done about user load time show that

people will abandon things if they take a second or two too long in addition

each additional each additional step or click each additional page you have to load you can lose according to the

studies anywhere between thirty and sixty percent but anecdotally I've seen sites where they lose 90 to 95 percent

of the user traffic with each additional step that has to be done so the numbers can even extend much higher than that

Bob Prohaska wrote an article recently called efficient UX isn't always the best UX and so you have to be careful

when you're thinking through efficiency because they can get a little weird he listed two sites that he really likes he's an avid biker one of them was bike

tires direct comm which is relatively efficient in the sense that they kind of get all the stuff up there you know here

are all the things he has another site that he likes salsa much simpler leaner

site it doesn't necessarily have everything up front the way you might expect but this psychologically is

actually easier to process it's easier to understand so so cognitively it's

more efficient so efficiency doesn't just mean crammed everything up and crammed everything together into this

dense user interface it can also mean simplify and streamline things mmm-hmm

on the Obama campaign site this was their their donate for him the original is on the left and had all the steps in

one form so you could just do it all in one shot it's all right there technically that might be considered the more efficient one

they changed it over to one where all it asks is how much would you like to donate today and then has the buttons

for the amount you click on an amount and then it takes you to the rest of the the form to fill it out so one advantage

of that is you kind of get a you know a yes pattern going so you've already said you'll donate an amount so when they get

to the forum you kind of you're already in motion there but it also cognitively is more efficient even though it's an

additional step so again all of these rules can and sometimes are

be broken because in this context splitting something up into multiple

clicks actually made more sense and convert it higher so again yet copy you know we heard in one of the recent times

context is everything there are no Universal rules and design none every rule can be broken just make sure you

know what you're doing before you break it the next step in the hierarchy of

user experience is comfort so that can be physical comfort like being readable being usable font sizes are big enough

buttons are clickable you can click them with your fingers on the phone so there's that kind of ergonomic comfort

there's also psychological comfort which is the the part that's it more often overlooked so you've probably seen on any form you're filling out it asks you

for addressed you what the heck is addressed to I you know I still sometimes wonder what address to is and

but historically that's always been phrased as address to so on forms because that's what people have always

seen design issues add in address 1 address 2 and they never really stop to explain what is addressed to you on

Amazon because they understand things like psychological comfort they explain what addressed to you is and exactly

what kinds of things you should be putting in there and that's a that's a great opportunity to provide comfort in

to subconscious waste most people don't if you ask them if they're uncomfortable about address to you they would say no but if you know there are little delays

and Amazon measures the crap out of this stuff so if they put that in there you know they tested it and they you know they a be tested with or without

and this one works better they people buy more stuff because they explained what address two is it's little things

like that is thinking through and having empathy for the user and understanding where might those tensions be even if

they can't express them themselves nobody said to them hey what is the dress - supposed to be but they figured out that that could the attention point

experimented with it crazy egg for example switch from a money-back guarantee model to a free trial model so

instead of sign up with your credit card and you get a free trial and if you don't like it you can get reimbursed to

a free trial where you sign up you don't need the credit card and you can you know just roll ahead safely use a

psychological comfort there they got 116 percent boost in signups safe soft

product called market dialer and they they tested aversion in their form that had the price rate on it people don't

like to sign up for things when they don't know how much it's gonna cost of putting the price on it gave them a hundred percent jump in the leads that

were generated that's pretty substantial just by putting the price on there TurboTax similarly hi Michael welcome

back to TurboTax so we've saved all your info and we're ready to pick up right where we left off I mean even the button says pick up right where I left off

so again psychological comfort it makes you feel like everything is okay when you use TurboTax Amazon again you know

if Amazon does things you know they tested it but they put they put lots of reviews it's a very review driven site

the interesting thing about Amazon reviews is even the even the bad reviews don't necessarily matter you know if you

look at this and and you know Christine T says okay but not what I was hoping for I don't particularly like the

illustrations what my son likes to read it I'm thinking well Christine has a stick up her butt so I'm just gonna skip

that one everyone else says its five-star so I'm gonna go for it so like we even if the reviews aren't bad just

having the reviews gives a psychological comfort harvest again is another great example of this these are just a few of

the little bits of the interface that give context and comfort and help you understand where you are in the in the

application what you're looking at and and they they do a lot to kind of reassure you so you understand the

context for what you're doing so that's comfort and then the final one

is delight you know once you've worked through those other things you can start to introduce elements of delight which is

just those nice kind of human quirks and and you know things that make it fun to use an application or or a website

MailChimp is well-known for this so for example if you if you put in a user name that's already taken that says maybe

it's your evil twin spooky Trello you know just something as simple as the

placeholder text lando calrissian now that might not be your brand you might not have a brand that could be fun

and wacky and quirky you know that's that's maybe in fact a little bit overplayed these days because everyone does that but you can you there lots of

ways you can create delight and kind of scale it back this is the slack homepage for example and they just have this nice

feature where they you know they put some stuff on there and they animated a little bit it's

nothing particularly crazy or wacky there but instead of just putting the text there they added some elements of

delight that makes you pay a lot more attention to it and focus on those words a lot more and you can even create

delight just by making something well and helping people kind of progress with it so on the you know as the challenges

that someone faces increase their skills and abilities should increase as well if

they don't they kind of get to a state where they have anxiety like my problems are growing faster than my capacity to

deal with them but if your skill grows and you have all these capabilities before you need them you kind of get to

a stage of boredom so there's benefit to revealing functionality as a user goes through

something and as they as they get the basics down then they learn there's a new feature right around the time they realized that they wanted that feature

and then they can kind of achieve this state of flow where you going right up the middle and the your capacity to do

things within a tool increases with your desire to do things within that tool I use a tool called wonder list to kind of

keep track of the many many many to-do lists I have these are not separate to-do lists those are just folders of

to-do lists but the the great thing about this is that it's fast it's lean

it's efficient it gets out of my way and I could just go to chunko chunko chunko my tasks I use this all day every day

and and it has additional features but it doesn't push a month you know I don't

come into an overwhelming interface you come into the interface itself it's very simple and straightforward but then as you realize I really I wish I could

share this list with someone well there's a sharing feature or I wish I could sort by this well there is a sort future they're not shoved in my face but

they're there as I need them so I kind of get into that that's a to flow and grow with it so that's the hierarchy of

user experience and then the third step so first step motivate second set

simplify third step is to invite so SolarCity for example you know the the

motivate you they simplify it and then they invite you to do something so this one is see if you qualify enter your zip

code and you kind of have to go through a courtship process you know you don't jump right to the final sale your first

call to action isn't you should buy this car or whatever it is that you're trying to do sometimes you have to walk through a few

additional steps sometimes it's take this survey sometimes it is you know sign up for this download but you always

want to make sure that there is a next step there should always be a next action that you're working toward rather than just saying hey here's some stuff

you can kind of think of it like a like a you know those people who aren't really good at text conversations it's

that friend new texting says hey hey

what's up nothing what are you doing nothing so don't be yeah as you're

trying to promote don't be that guy don't just say hey here's some stuff drive towards some things give them a

next step ask a question do a next thing and there are a lot of things that you can do you know if you have trouble

thinking of them you know sir you start looking at content marketing you can look at you know conversion rate

optimization and a lot of options there there are a lot of things that you can do for a next step it doesn't just have to be by the product however you don't

want to do all these all at once you want to keep it simple at any given point you shouldn't be asking for more than two maybe three things the idea is

that you you have the main one that you want people to do but if they skip over that yeah there's kind of like a follow up on

it you can catch them that way also and you want to experiment you want to test different scenarios and how to see what

works best see how people move through the process some things will work something that worked for me might

totally fail for you and vice versa it's all based on the individual context for your project again there are no

universal rules but it basically boils down to don't be afraid to ask for the same you know if you're pitching someone

you want to ask them to buy the thing if you're trying to get a job you want to ask for the job you know don't just say

hey I do this and wait for people to buy it you got it you got to ask for it so that's why you want to have those invitations in those calls to actions so

that is the persuasive design model I want to walk you quickly through an example I'm actually just found this

yesterday so this is Rhys which is an HR platform and actually I was I was taking

a look at MailChimp and the I had had exactly 1500 subscribers on my list and then while I was looking at it I

went back in the number 1501 I was like ah my RAM number got messed up but the person who signed up was from Rhys and

so I went and checked it out as it was Rhys dot XYZ and I was like ah that's kind of a cool domain I'll go check it

out and it turned out they actually were a pretty good example of the things that we're talking about so whoever designed

this site did a really good job not you know again it's not necessarily about aesthetics but about how they

communicated the this persuasive design so let's break this down real quick HR software is dead if you're an HR

director that's appealing to your sense of security like oh man everything that we're doing is a lie what do I do now

Rises the world's first people and culture platform so people in culture identity if you're an HR person you you

don't want to be like the boring HR person you want to be the culture you know human oriented one and then

affiliation people in culture that's baked right in and then they have kind of this breakdown here you know in the

past of his old human resources and it's hard to see there but they just have like Social Security numbers stats and

stuff back there and there's grim-looking HR person but over here happy this is great this is the this is

the future so you got the pleasure aspect you got the aspiration aspect I want to work in a company like that I want to work in a place where people are

happy so they motivated then we simplify well their whole message is this graphic with two sites that's human and

resources and this is the new way people in culture they also say it's the world's first which simplifies by kind

of reducing the the anxiety of you know what are their credentials what makes this special what makes this difference and then up at the top it says we've

released our first book well that it establishes expertise that establishes that there's longevity into the future

obviously because they're planning to release other books so they have motivation simplification and then they

invite they say download the book or they say you know put in your name and email address to see the the actual

application and they also have a little contact thing down in the bottom so just within that top frame they've covered

all five motivations drastically simplified and they managed to get at least three calls to action and

therefore for the invitation process so that was just when I happened to see last night and decided I stick it in here because it's a it's a good example

of the things we're talking about thank you I'm James Archer this has been designing for intense

and I'm happy to answer any questions that you guys might have oh man such a good question that that is

such an insightful question yes so the question is thank you for the reminder the question is how do you balance

progressive disclosure so revealing things slowly over time well when we were talking about how you get into a

flow state versus hiding things that people actually need and there's a there's a balance there most of it has

to do with information center so you can hide things as long as people can figure out where to get them the hamburger menu

is the worst way it's three lines it doesn't tell anyone crap about anything so there's no way to do it there's some

evidence that shows if you put the word menu there you'll get like a 3% uptick in in results but even that that's

pretty junky those are bad results because when you think you know how do i how do I find my playlists how do I find

radio you don't think menu you think words like radio and playlist so you scan and whatever smells like the thing

that you need you go after that so most of the internet question has to do with information sent you want to make sure that things are put in places

that people can sniff them out other questions

great great question so the question is how do you balance creating comfort as part of the simplifying the UX

experience against something like the security motivation for example where you're strategically making people uncomfortable so I think in that case

when we talk about comfort we're talking about comfort in the user experience and comfort moving forward we're looking for

friction obstacles roadblocks so for example if you go to the ADT site they want to make you feel uncomfortable like

someone is literally while you're looking at the screen climbing in the back window of your house but they want

to clear the path for what you do next so there's a clear call to action there's a clear button there's a clear

next step so it's kind of splitting those things out but that's it that's a great question sometimes you do want to introduce strategic discomfort it's easy

to overplay that but strategically you may do that in some cases to get people into motion and then you want to clear

the path in front of them thank you it was it another question in the back

right that's it that's a that's a great insight is you know kind of what's that

that relationship between efficiency and in you know intuitiveness because sometimes to make something more

intuitive you want to hold their hand through the process I think some of that may come down to that sense of flow so there are applications where you you

make it very simple and try to hold their hand in the first stages of the project but then you need to get out of the way something I've seen a lot of

problem with is people can't get out of the hand-holding stage and so you know when I use it the first time it's great

if they walk me through the process but the seventh time I use it or the 150 a--the time I use it I want that thing to happen in like a

half second and I can't sit there and wait for the animations to load wait for the funny messages and all that I wanted

to move fast and so sometimes that the the way you address that interplay is by you know changing the interface a little

bit so that more experienced users have a leaner interface or you know focuses more on efficiency where for the new

ones maybe it's focusing more on into it intuitive to us all right we're out of

time but I am very available to you guys if you have any questions or comments or concerns feel free to grab me anytime

happy to talk thank you