Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us into Temptation

How to make customers feel good about doing what you want Learn how companies make us feel good about doing what they want. Approaching persuasive design from the dark side, this book melds psychology, marketing, and design concepts to show why we’re susceptible to certain persuasive techniques. Packed with examples from every nook and cranny of the web, it provides easily digestible and applicable patterns for putting these design techniques to work. Organized by the seven deadly sins, it includes: Pride — use social proof to position your product in line with your visitors’ values Sloth — build a path of least resistance that leads users where you want them to go Gluttony — escalate customers’ commitment and use loss aversion to keep them there Anger — understand the power of metaphysical arguments and anonymity Envy — create a culture of status around your product and feed aspirational desires Lust — turn desire into commitment by using emotion to defeat rational behavior Greed — keep customers engaged by reinforcing the behaviors you desire Now you too can leverage human fallibility to create powerful persuasive interfaces that people will love to use — but will you use your new knowledge for good or evil? Learn more on the companion website, evilbydesign.info.

Table of Contents:
Foreword xi Introduction xiii Evil designs and their virtuous counterparts xiii Pride 1 Misplaced pride causes cognitive dissonance 1 Provide reasons for people to use 3 Social proof: Using messages from friends to make it personal and emotional 5 Dispel doubt by repeating positive messages 7 Personal messages hit home 11 Gain public commitment to a decision 16 Change opinions by emphasizing general similarities 19 Use images of certification and endorsement 22 Closure: The appeal of completeness and desire for order 25 Help people complete a set 26 Pander to people’s desire for order 32 Manipulating pride to change beliefs 35 Sloth 39 Desire lines: From A to B with as few barriers as possible 39 Path of least resistance 41 Reduced options and smart defaults smooth the decision process 44 Provide fewer options 45 Pre-pick your preferred option 50 Make options hard to find or understand 53 Negative options: Don’t not sign up! 56 Sloth: Is it worth the effort? 64 Gluttony 67 Deserving our rewards 67 Make customers work for a reward 69 Consider a small reward rather than a big one 72 Hide the math 75 Show the problems 78 Escalating commitment: foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face 84 Foot-in-the-door 84 Door-in-the-face 87 Present hard decisions only after investment 90 Invoking gluttony with scarcity and loss aversion 93 The Tom Sawyer effect 93 Instill doubt to prevent cancellations 96 Impatience leads to compliance 99 Self-control: Gluttony’s nemesis 101 Anger 103 Avoiding anger 104 Use humor to deflect anger 104 Avoid overt anger with a slippery slope 107 Use metaphysical arguments to beat opponents 112 Embracing anger 117 Use anonymity to encourage repressed behaviors 119 Give people permission 124 Scare people (if you have the solution) 129 Using anger safely in your products 134 Envy 137 Manufacturing envy through desire and aspiration 138 Create desirability to produce envy 138 Create something aspirational 140 Make people feel ownership before they’ve bought 145 Status envy: demonstrating achievement and importance 150 Create status differences to drive behavior 151 Emphasize achievement as a form of status 154 Encourage payment as an alternative to achievement 156 Let users advertise their status 159 Let people feel important 161 Manufacturing and maintaining envy in your products 166 Lust 169 Creating lust: Using emotion to shape behavior 169 Say “I love you” 170 Be the second best 174 Frame your message as a question 178 Create an in-group 182 Controlling lust: Using desire to get a commitment 185 Give something to get something 186 Make something free 190 Sell the intangible value 195 Make a request in order to be seen more favorably 198 Lustful behavior 201 Greed 203 Learning from casinos: Luck, probability, and partial reinforcement schedules 204 Use a partial reinforcement schedule 208 Make it into a game 211 Customers should “win” rather than “finish” or “buy” 214 Further inflate people’s (already overconfident) feelings of skill and mastery 217 Make rewards seem due to skill, not luck 221 Create a walled garden 225 Anchoring and arbitrary coherence 227 Own the anchor 229 Move from money to tokens 233 Encourage breakage 236 Make it expensive 238 Show your second-best option first 240 Break coherence to justify prices 243 Feeling greedy? 246 Evil by Design 249 Should you feel bad about deception? 250 Should you feel bad about using the principles in this book? 254 Be purposefully persuasive 258 The Persuasive Patterns Game 259 References 269 Index 297

About the Author :
Chris Nodder is an independent consultant with 20 years' experience working with large organizations and lean startups to make user experience central to their business strategy. He was previously a director at the prestigious Nielsen Norman Group, and a senior user researcher at Microsoft. He has an MS in Human-Computer Interaction and a BS in Psychology.