Persuasion Architectures: Nudging People to do the Right Thing
with Rob Van Tol, Uservision
23rdNov '10
About the event
Microsoft Scotland, Waverley Gate, 2-4 Waterloo Place, Edinburgh
From Clunk-Click to Smoking Kills, the government has been trying to get us to do the right think for a long time, and spending vast amounts of money on advertisers in the process. Most of this was based on a view of people as rational decision makers: If you don’t eat your five-a-day you’ll die sooner, and it would be irrational to do that, so obviously you will … obviously.
But in the last few years the new science of Behavioural Economics has been spawning new methods to get people to do the right thing without changing your mind. Choice Architecture, Persuasion Architecture, MINDSPACE, Emotional Design, Design with Intent et. al. all seek to influence what users do, without changing their minds.
The likes of architects and supermarkets have been doing this sort of thing for a long time: the wide spacing of aisles at the front of the supermarket is designed to slow your walking pace down – the slower you walk, the more you’ll buy. And of course, those aisles are full of fresh produce, because supermarkets are centres of freshness and greenery.
Now these techniques are starting to be applied to the web, and Rob van Tol will take you through some of these methods. Rob is a senior user experience consultant with User Vision with 19 years experience in the UCD world, from user interface designer to information architect, user experience designer and website manager. Rob is also a practicing therapist, and so is particularly interested in these attempts to psychologically manipulate people.
You should come out of the session with an appreciation of what these methods are trying to do differently, where best to apply it, how they mesh with the UCD process, what are some of the ethical questions involved, some practical examples of sites that are trying to do this, and an unexpected appetite for more broccoli.
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More about the speaker(s)
Rob has 17 years experience in User Centred Design (UCD) and User Experience (UX) design in different sizes of organisations and business sectors. Before joining User Vision, Rob worked with the development teams of software companies developing bespoke applications for the supermarket industry. He worked on improving the user interface of very large distributed systems, using both desktop and hand-held mobile devices.
Most recently, Rob was engaged in the public sector, as the manager of a local government website, managing the development of the site and mentoring the diverse organisation into being comfortable delivering its services across the web.
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