Beyond Usability: Designing Web Sites for Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust

Case Study: State Lottery Web Site Redesign and Results

Let’s look at an example. HFI was recently engaged to redesign the California state lottery Web site. Most people didn’t know the state’s lottery was created to generate extra funds to support public education. While the lottery Web site reminds people to play responsibly, its goal is to encourage them to participate in more games, more often—thereby generating more income for education. The site is also an important means of communicating this meaningful contribution to people—particularly to lottery skeptics.

While the site suffered from usability problems, more importantly, it failed to capitalize on opportunities to engage site visitors and convey the key brand values of optimism, hope, trust, and fun. HFI’s PET design research found that people play lotto because of the anticipation, excitement, and adrenaline rush it creates. Rationally, they don’t expect to hit the jackpot. People admitted they probably had better odds of being struck by lightning. But they’re still happy to buy a $1 ticket for the chance to dream about what they’d do if they won—it’s an emotional adventure.

Yet the Web site did little—from an emotional design standpoint—to leverage those feelings and create a stronger connection and engagement with lottery games. It was fundamentally an information site that made playing the lottery less fun. For instance, it simply reported winning numbers instead of replicating the emotional experience of watching the announcement of winning numbers on television.

So, HFI applied a host of classical usability techniques, plus our new PET design methodology. Once we’d discovered and defined the key user motivations, drivers, blocks, and barriers, we created innovative design elements to fulfill the aspirations of site visitors, including

• dynamic winning number results that simulate the TV experience
• winners near you
• lucky store locations
• lucky number generator games
• maps showing where the education money goes
• surveys that ask What would you do if you won?

These new elements engage visitors in ways that remove barriers and blocks and encourage deeper interaction. During the redesign, HFI’s experts were careful to ensure users could complete key tasks that are critical to the lottery’s business goals, while still making them more fun and enjoyable. Through the PET design process, HFI developed a new site prototype that

• nearly doubled task completion rates—from 47% to 93%
• 91% of users preferred to the old visual design
• generated a more positive response to all nine of the brand attributes we tested—such as reliable, friendly, and trustworthy
• reinforced the lottery’s mission of supporting education, which is important in allaying people’s doubts about where their money goes when they play

When Usability Conflicts with Persuasion

Once usability studies helped us understand how people actually use Web sites, marketers and designers started learning to think differently—and more clearly—about how they wanted people to use Web sites.

Persuasive design pushes designers to clearly define a Web site’s purpose—and its persuasion objectives. For e-commerce sites, the objectives are to inspire their customers’ trust, engage them, and persuade them to buy their products or services. For government sites, the persuasion objectives would likely be to convince citizens that the government is responsible, effective, and investing their money wisely. For non-profit organizations, the objectives would be to engage customers and get them to support their causes with donations and through word-of-mouth and political support. Only after identifying such persuasion objectives and articulating them precisely can we choose the appropriate techniques from our toolkit of persuasion technologies. For example, with PET design, HFI applies very specific techniques that are based on the principles of social pressure, scarcity, or contrast.

In some ways, persuasive design can actually be easier to implement than classic usability. Persuasion-oriented goals and design elements are often minimal in scope when compared to classic usability goals like making every error message on an enterprise site intelligible. Yet the strategies behind persuasive design are not trivial. The design methodologies are also different from those of usability—in fact, they sometimes conflict with each other.

Let’s look at an example. Making people feel engaged and committed is intrinsic to persuasive design. To achieve this, it may be important to make them feel effective when using a user interface. Though the cardinal rule of usability is to make it simple, it’s possible to make a design too simple, thereby causing users to lose the feeling of effectiveness and engagement that stems from a more involved, complex interaction. So, if you want users to experience a sense of discovery or achievement, consider intentionally building in some interesting sources of challenge for them to overcome along the path.

There is another important concept working against strict simplicity in design:

e-tailers want customers to encounter as many products as possible, just as retailers would in a bricks-and-mortar space. Yet their objective to cross-sell and up-sell can conflict with usability best practices.

Think of a shopping mall. If you’ve come to the mall to buy a widget, you’ll invariably find the widget store is on the farthest end of the mall from where you started, forcing you to pass many other stores along the way. If the store that carries your widget is a large one, the pattern repeats anew—you pass through perfume, ties, jewelry, and watches before you finally reach the widget department. Was getting from your car to the item you came to buy an efficient process? From a strict usability perspective, no. You may even have gotten lost along the way. But is it poorly designed? Quite the contrary. While making your way through the mall, you probably discovered many things you didn’t think you wanted, but may end up purchasing.

So, retail spaces are designed not to optimize efficiency, but to optimize persuasion opportunities. The same principle applies in the online environment. While preserving usability, so users don’t feel frustration or other negative emotions, it’s still possible to create a more interesting and entertaining user experience that maximizes persuasion opportunities.

The Science of Trust

Another critical component of persuasive design is establishing trust between the customer and the e-tailer from the start. Only on a platform of trust can we persuade customers to take the actions we intend on a site. But it’s not enough to simply want to be trusted. An organization must systematically foster user trust. HFI has deeply researched how to establish trust in the online environment and determined what variables are most significant in doing so. Because we’ve gained a systematic understanding of how to establish trust rather than leaving the result to chance, we’ve been able to develop a range of very specific trust-building techniques.

One example is the seemingly prosaic FAQ. A considerable body of research supports the idea that FAQs are very effective in establishing trust. A FAQ on a Web site indicates the organization behind the site is not a fly-by-night operation, but a solid enterprise that is diligent enough to care about documenting such things.

Another trust technique is matching existing knowledge—that is, presenting a piece of information users know is true to strengthen the credibility of your subsequent claims. We know from research that people feel more trust in Web sites that provide information they already know to be true—for example, a recommendation on a Web site focusing on health to take aspirin for heart longevity. It might seem odd to include content that covers what users already know, but seeing the known content makes users more confident in new information on the same site.

Another method of establishing trust is arguing against self-interest. HFI consults with one of the world’s largest computer manufacturers. On their Web site, they frequently recommend options, which can be helpful, but we became concerned when we discovered that all of the recommendations were for the most expensive options. To engender trust, it would be better to sometimes recommend the cheapest option. Once customers experience a company’s telling them You don’t really need to buy that from us, their trust rockets, likely resulting in many more sales.

PET Design Versus Traditional Marketing

HFI’s approach to persuasive design—PET design—goes beyond what traditional advertising or marketing agencies do. Persuasion is the name of the game for them, too, but the tried-and-true techniques of priming, framing, and conditioning—which get people to feel that a product is familiar, good, and attractive—are usually applied in older, static media in which messaging flows only one way.

PET design takes root in the dynamic and interactive environment of the Web 2.0 universe. It lets us go far beyond traditional marketing approaches to use persuasion tools and techniques such as influence methods that make a product or service appear particularly appealing. It covers the triggers that can be fired off to make people commit and take action. Ultimately, the goal might even be to create fanatics for your company or brand.

While there will always be a role for classical usability specialists, persuasive design requires the development of a new skill set. Though persuasive design is based on the user-centric perspectives usability experts already have, the scientific methods for achieving persuasive design are new. Usability specialists and designers can add greatly to the value they offer their companies by expanding their toolkits with persuasive design skills. Through this article, I hope I’ve encouraged you to explore the possibilities persuasive design presents. 

Additional Resources

• My new blog, Usability Is No Longer Enough, is dedicated specifically to the topic of persuasive design. I invite you to share your ideas there.
• For a more detailed explanation of specific PET design techniques, please see HFI’s white paper, “Designing for Conversion,” by Mona Patel.