Designing for Persuasion — A UX Strategy

Recently one of my friends recommended me this wonderful book — “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness”. The book illustrates examples where small changes (in Design/ System/Process) lead to larger and better behavior changes. As a Designer, It turned my interest towards Persuasive Technology.

This article is a brief introduction to ‘whats’ and ‘hows’ of Persuasion, which is based on this book Nudge and Principles of Social Psychology.

UX is all about solving the pain points of users but it certainly can be used to persuade them too. Often the goal of persuasion is to achieve a certain business goal. It does it by reaching a Win-Win situation.

Nudge Theory and Choice Architecture

Nudge theory proposes positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions as ways to influence the behavior and decision-making of groups or individuals.

To make such positive reinforcement, Nudge Theory introduces a new term — Choice Architecture.

Choice architecture is the design of different ways in which choices can be presented to consumers, and it influences their decision-making of selecting a choice. Choice Architect can be anyone who design these ways.

Let’s explore how Designers wear the hat of Choice Architect-

Elements of Good Choice Architecture -

The right incentive, how these incentives are mapped in the context, what feedback — system gives to users, and how easy or tough is it to think about the given information, are among the important elements of good choice architecture.

Strong and Weak incentives -

Strong incentives create a strong emotional association. Typically real and instant money can be considered as the strongest incentive. Weak incentives can be defined by comparison.

I am considering the incentives in Google Pay as a moderate incentive because people are already anticipating it to be ‘Better Luck Next Time!’…