While on Twitter I came across this great post about Persuasive Design by User Experience Analyst Lauren Martin. She shares her recent experience attending a presentation by Spencer Gerrol (Human Factors International) in Atlanta entitled “Beyond Usability: The Science of Persuasive Design”:

Usability, Gerrol summarized, is making it easier to get somewhere or do something. Persuasion is making the user want to get there, or perform the task in the first place. Without persuasion, simply making something easy to do, doesn’t necessarily make it something people want to do.

I would encourage you to read her entire blog post, but a quick summary of the main points around the elements of Persuasive Design include:

1. Understand Decision Making
2. Understand Emotion
3. Create Persuasive Interactions
4. Create Persuasive Visual Design
5. Create Persuasive Content Design
6. Design Guided Paths

It’s interesting, I had been doing Information Architecture for years prior to starting my own consultancy; just never put a label to it. (Pardon the really bad pun!) Over the years, I’ve found that the process is more important than the title.

Persuasive Design is critical to understand, in my opinion, because nobody except those within your specific discipline care how things get done; as long as those for whom we are designing are passionate about the results.

Thank you for sharing your experiences Lauren and I look forward to reading more from your Blog in the future!