Moving users from ‘Can do’ to ‘Will do’ with Persuasive Design A good product design can cause a paradigm shift in user experience. Designers need to study a user’s emotions while interacting with a product’s interface. This kind of design is not for mere usability; it goes beyond. It is not just functional; it evokes emotions, motivates, engages, and creates “joy of use”. For example, out of 10 sites that help you make an airline booking, all 10 can be said to fulfill the usability criterion (they have all the necessary functionality to let you make the booking successfully), but only one or two make the experience pleasurable. The ones with a persuasive design strategy will try to generate and sustain good feelings, maybe even put a smile on the user’s face, and bring delight as they buy tickets. Users will choose these sites over others and praise them to others. Users have been persuaded to move from a ‘can do’ situation to a ‘will do’ choice. With persuasive design, focus on function in design is NOT enough. Design needs to evoke and utilize emotions. The basis of persuasive design is putting user needs in an hierarchy and addressing them with appropriate design tools, one of which is gamification. The key goal of gamification is persuasion, by adding game elements like challenges, leaderboards, points. Gamification and Game Mechanics Using game theories in areas not otherwise associated with games is often referred to as gamification. It uses people’s natural desire for competition, achievement, feedback, and status to make tasks meaningful in any context. In the most simple form it rewards people for completing tasks and encourages competition by displaying the achievements. It uses mechanics like Points, Levels, Challenges, Virtual Goods, and Leaderboards to fulfill human desires like getting rewards, achieving some status, self expression, competing, and so on, while using the product. You can design a gamification strategy by selecting a mix of the mechanics and the corresponding desires. For example let us look at how Linkedin uses various game mechanics that fulfill desires and also leads to task completion. It displays all statistics graphically to enhance the impact. The key goal of Linkedin is to collect as much information from users about themselves via profiles and make the network stronger and wider with more connections. Some examples of game elements to achieve this in Linkedin are: Case Study: Gamifying a Productivity Tracking tool (perceived as Spyware by employees) into a Work Behaviour Evaluation & Modification tool We applied the principles of gamification to one of our Enterprise products that needed a perception makeover. The Brief The product, an innovative, patent-pending software is an analytics & productivity audit tool designed to measure employees’ work output. It gives managers a clear record of productivity of employees (time spent in office v/s time spent on real work). The client wanted to promote this tool as an enabler to boost productivity at work and help people self monitor their progress, rather than as an application used by the organization to spy on its employees. The requirements were: Convert the management-centric tool to a people-centric approach Make it a personal evaluation for employees, than a mere […]
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