“Think small. Think lettuce” was the mindset that the 170 attendees at the Design for Persuasion Conference on the 1st of October in Brussels, Belgium at the Belgacom Surfhouse should have left with.
In the words of persuasive technologies expert and keynote speaker BJ Fogg from Stanford University in California: “No longer can you think and plan for years and years. You just have to keep trying stuff… Don’t be afraid not to succeed.”

Testing his own theory, Fogg recently posted a “non-fancy” video on Facebook of himself eating lots of lettuce to see what sort of results he could generate quickly. Many reactions came in fast in the form of comments and similar video spin-offs. Plus, within the comments were some suggestions that could lead to an even better version of the video. Fogg explained how simple and fast inventions can get big results these days and how it is time to start learning how to succeed in small things – to move away from what he called “the brain-drain” problem in which people with great talents and ideas but few opportunities leave countries and companies, taking their knowledge with them elsewhere.
“You make it too big a problem – plan too long” explained Fogg. “Everything big started small,” he added.

Along with trying new things it is also a good idea to see what is already out there and working well and to imitate it, according to Fogg and to many of the other guest speakers at the Design for Persuasion Conference which was partially sponsored by Hogeschool West Vlaanderen (Howest) and Interreg North Sea Region project E-Clic . In her introduction, conference organizer and Howest E-Clic Project Manager Christel De Maeyer gave several examples of persuasive technology that really worked in terms of viral marketing campaigns. De Maeyer demonstrated how clever advertising examples such as Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom’s popular “Who took my badjas” television advertisement spread like a virus online through social networking sites. She explained how this sort of mass spreading is a sign of the huge market in branding and buying, which can generate e-commerce and e-money.
So what is the key to persuading users that your idea, product,  brand, campaign or website is worth a click or better yet worth coming back for more and more?
Well, according to BJ Fogg and his fellow guest speakers, it is to design with the intent to persuade by putting “hot triggers” in the paths of your users that “motivate” them while making sure they have the “ability” to take the intended action right away. For this to be successful, the trigger, motivation and ability all have to take place at the same time.
There are everyday examples of this all around us and online with each speaker at the conference pointing out ones that work and could be worth imitating and adapting to fit your company’s profile and needs.
Fogg referred to the photo tagging function on Facebook. For example, you receive an email from Facebook saying that a friend tagged you in a photo (hot trigger). You want to see the photo of yourself fast because that’s just human nature, isn’t it (motivation)? There’s a quick link you can click on that will take you right to this photo of yourself (ability). Of course you might have to sign into Facebook if you aren’t  already but because the trigger is so hot it is no big deal and so you take action, without even really thinking about it.

Design for Persuasion guest speaker Dan Lockton from Brunel University in London also gave examples of how you can influence behavior by designing with intent. Lockton spoke about using different mixes of ”defaults,”  “framing” and “metaphors” in designing a pattern to influence user behavior. He gave the example of a distance learning program that was struggeling with keeping people motivated to continue courses they were taking online. In an effort to improve this situation they looked at the online course as a “metaphor” for  a real classroom course and looked at the idea of creating more of a social network for the online students comparative to that of a real classroom situation (metaphor). Rather than presenting the courses as a serious learning platform, they considered painting the courses differently – for example as a place to play around on the internet or perhaps the opposite – as a very challenging, competitive place (framing). To get people to stay in the learning sessions rather than click into other sites and get distracted, they could make them have to go through a process when leaving the learning page to persuade them to stay focused and not surf the web (default).

Lockton and other speakers agreed that “you cannot catch all users with one approach” and that “how you model your users will determine what kind of design technique you apply to try to influence their behavior.”



This is where the essential step of accurately profiling your users comes in.

One simple way, according to guest speakers and Business IT experts Klaas Punselie and James Kuypers from The Netherlands is to get actual users on board to get their input – from the very start. Punselie and Kuypers described how so often there is a real lack of user input when technical experts are developing applications, which leads to expensive, flawed results.

“The further you go down the development track, the harder it is to change it,” they said adding that it is very costly to go back and redesign from the beginning. They also cautioned that you should never assume or think you know what your client needs or wants. To design for persuasion, they explained, you can take risks and try different things in short cycles to help determine what the user wants. But it is essential to have the user on board from the get-go or your idea will probably fail.

Conference speaker Bart De Waele from Belgian website agency Netlash spoke about “addictive websites,” which you can’t help but keep coming back to.

“ Websites are designed for people,” De Waele said. “There are some basic human traits engrained in our brains. We are trying to use basic human psychological traits to make websites better.” De Waele went on to explain that web-builders need to be aware of human triggers and to accept that “users are not pin balls to be used at will – they are smart people.”
According to De Waele, web designers should keep in mind the following five basic human traits when creating persuasive and hopefully addictive websites: collecting, social validation, reciprocity, commitment and discovery. For example, popular business social networking site LinkedIn persuades users to get and give recommendations by displaying that you are only 80% done with your profile until you take that next step (collecting). “We want to collect things and we want our collections to be complete, “ said De Waele. “This drive – you can use it and translate it into a website.” The LinkedIn example, he added, drives users themselves to make the website better by making it more complete – and what a good way it is to collect expansive profile information on users.

In reference to “social validation” De Waele used the online book seller Amazon’s technique of telling users what other people are reading and buying  as an example. “We like to think we are unique but most of the time we are driven by what others do,” he said, adding that when you show who has signed up already for some product, event or service you are creating a social drive to get others to join up too.

Free, unconditional gifts are an example of using “reciprocity”. Everyone’s first and immediate friend on My Space, for example, is Tom. Having one friend right away drives people to make more friends.  Offering free shipping is another way for web shops to assure that users will make purchases based on the power of reciprocity. “If you buy me a cup of coffee, I feel obliged to buy you one back,” explained De Waele. “ We feel obliged to return the favor on some level.”

Little did you know that something like the simple and straightforward “like” option on Facebook was persuading you to stay on Facebook a little longer – to commit to going from a “lurker” to something closer to a “commentator” and perhaps eventually a “creator”. Everything on a website generally exists for a reason and often the reason is to make you stay as long as possible and keep coming back, while leaving a trail of profile information behind you for advertisers to revel in. This is how website success gets measured – by hits and return hits and duration on the sites. This is the type of evidence advertisers need to invest in a site.

“We are consistent,” De Waele said, describing “commitment”. “If we make our choice, we convince ourselves we have to follow through. You get someone on a path with a little step, with a little persuasion. With small steps, we are on a path and will stay on… Don’t make the mistake to make steps too big.”

“Discovery” is related to the actual  chemical reaction of the brain when lead to new things. De Waele explained that dopamine gets released in our brains when we anticipate discovery, which brings on a feeling of pleasure and well-being. An application on Linked In that tells you what sort of people have been viewing your profile in the previous days is a hot trigger that creates a curiosity that leads you to go further into the site and it helps to make you hooked.

“We have to think about how we can build these systematic into our websites,” De Waele said, later pointing out during a question and answer period that “discovery” is the most powerful human drive with “collecting” being the most practical one.

Guest speaker Richard Sedley from the company cScape in The UK presented the following similar six persuasive principles for digital effectiveness: persuasion windows (find the key moments to persuade users, such as when they are in a good mood or have just been disappointed or have made a mistake), storytelling (convince people by incorporating passion, an anti hero and an antagonist into a good story), social proof (show your users what other people like them are doing and they will want to do the same), error / correction (use quick errors and mistakes to illicit responses from users), reciprocity (if users feel like they owe you something, they will fill out profile forms better, for example) and relativity (when it comes to decision-making by users, comparisons rule).

Sedley gave examples such as putting something controversial on a website as a sample profile detail such as “I am a fan of” so-and-so football team.  In The UK, for example, people feel so strongly about their team that such a statement would illicit huge reactions, which in turn would help the website to gather profile information about its users, while securing more hits. You can also induce a temporary problem on a website and then quickly fix it so bring on a feeling of relief and appreciation in your users. Another approach could be to offer a few choices with two of them being quite the same but worded differently. Generally this would lead to a purchase of the middle choice, which in fact resembles the final choice. It all comes down to the power of having a choice.

“It’s not just tricking people,” said Sedley; “We are helping people to make decisions.”



Guest speaker Amy Shuen, Professor of Management Practice who splits her time between Silicon Valley, Seattle, Europe and Asia, spoke about Web 2.0 Strategy in terms of doing good while making money. Web 2.0 generally refers to web applications that allow users to interact with other users and to change website content. Shuen  began her presentation outlining just how much has changed on the web since 1995 through 2005, when the web was just a place where you looked at websites.
“Two-thousand and five was a crossover point of uploads versus downloads,” Shuen explained. “More people were contributing and sharing content online. There were more givers than takers.”

Giving the example of the iPhone, Shuen explained how its invention not only changed the way that people used their phones but also created a huge market-place with the possibility to generate lots of profit and return on investment. Speaking about the Obama iPhone application, the photo-sharing site FlickR and Kiva, the first online lending platform, Shuen illustrated just how persuasive these sites and applications have become in a short time. She also spoke about how some sites such as FlickR failed first and fast but started to succeed as they got more and more familiar with their users’ needs. They got to know their customers better by having the users tell them what they wanted, such as “premium” customers who were willing to pay a bit more to have more user-tailored services.
All the “hot triggers” worked into the Obama iPhone application helped Obama to win the presidential election in The States by getting people to not only call friends urging them to vote but also to call people in the states that needed their votes the most. The application was so well worked out that if a person asked you what Obama’s stand was on health-care, for example, you could immediately send that information through. Shuen explained that these same principles of hot triggers as persuasion could be used for a brand and result in a large return on investment.

Kave, for example, was able to raise a lot of money in one day via Facebook, Shuen explained, adding “social media can be clearly effective.”



Other speakers at the Design for Persuasion Conference included Steven Verbruggen from the Belgian interactive services company Nascom and Thierry Briers from the Belgian IPTV service Belgacom TV, which was also one of the conference’s sponsors.
Verbruggen spoke about mobile persuasion and how advanced phone applications, text messaging and tele-voting are ways to bring on hot triggers and get people to take action. He urged people to play and to dream when coming up with ideas to generate user activity and quoted  American computer scientist Alan Kay by saying “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” adding that developers should ask themselves “if all rules and all physics disappeared, what could be great?”

“You need a vision / dream to be able to build stuff. How can this actually be built?” is what you need to ask yourself according to Verbruggen and you will come up with ways to build it.



Briers from Belgacom also spoke about how important triggers and user feedback are and how online media use is measurable, which is a great help when it comes to getting advertisers on board, which in turn is the way to generate profit. He explained how it is necessary to design flexible, creative and customized interfaces to influence users to keep coming back.

“Consumers are more in control of media consumption,” said Briers. “A radical change is happening in marketing. It’s not enough to talk about your product. You need to focus on customers.”



The Design for Persuasion Conference concluded with panel discussions based on questions from the audience. The main messages that came out of the discussions and the conference were that we have to move towards a new way of thinking and that even though it can be very hard for organizations and companies to let go of old ways, they have no choice anymore. Within companies, it is time to champion how to do things faster and with evidence. Rather than looking at the great things the competition has come up with and saying “I wish we could have done that,” you have to realize that “you still can do it!” You have to take some risks.

Take BJ Fogg’s lettuce video as an example which lead people not only to leave comments but also to make their own videos of themselves eating lettuce too, or bringing it to another level with a video of themselves eating something that they themselves liked more than lettuce. Did they know they were being subtly persuaded to take some sort of action themselves?
In the words of Design for Persuasion keynote speaker BJ Fogg: “The best persuasion is when it doesn’t feel like persuasion at all.”

By Sarah Markewich – October 2009
E-Clic project assistant at De Hogeschool West-Vlaanderen (Howest)

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