Persuasion Triggers in Web Design
David Travis
How do you make decisions? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably
answer that you pride yourself on weighing the pros and cons of a situation
carefully and then make a decision based on logic. You know that other
people have weak personalities and are easily swayed by their emotions,
but this rarely happens to you.
You’ve just experienced the fundamental attribution error — the tendency
to believe that other people’s behavior is due to their personality (“Josh is
late because he’s a disorganized person”) whereas our behavior is due to
external circumstances (“I’m late because the directions were useless”).
Cognitive biases like these play a significant role in the way we make
decisions so it’s not surprising that people are now examining these biases
to see how to exploit them in the design of websites. I’m going to use the
term ‘persuasion architects’ to describe designers who knowingly use these
techniques to influence the behavior of users. (Many skilled designers
already use some of these psychological techniques intuitively — but they
wouldn’t be able to articulate why they have made a particular design
choice. The difference between these designers and persuasion architects is
that persuasion architects use these techniques intentionally).
There are 7 main weapons of influence in the persuasion architect’s arsenal:
- Reciprocation
- Commitment
- Social Proof