Oh, Behave
Last Thursday a networking group called The Fantastic Tavern hired out a pub in central London to kick off 2010 with a discussion around social media called “2010 Trends – what’s hot and what’s not”, organised by Michelle Flynn and Matt Bagwell from EMC Consulting. Ten of the city’s top thinkers each had 5 minutes to present their top trend and the audience used the sophisticated voting method of shouting loudest (always fun!) to choose the winner.
Among the great and the good (see my blog for the full story) was Richard Sedley, Director of cScape Customer Engagement Unit, who came second with his case for the value of Behavioural Architecture. During his five minute slot he gave a number of examples of designs that positively influenced behaviour, for example painting tube stairs to look like a piano encouraged people to take the stairs rather than the escalator, or persuading people not to fly-tip near his daughter’s nursery by giving them directions to the tip (rather than displaying threats of prosecution which had been tried and failed dismally).
This school of thought originated from Dan Lockton at Brunel University, who defines ‘Designing with Intent’ as “…strategic design that’s intended to influence or result in certain user behaviour”. There’s lots of information on behavioural design on the web, and although it was framed by Richard as something that can be harnessed for good (probably because he only had 5 minutes to state his case), Dan explains that: “Sometimes the behaviour-shaping is helpful to the user; sometimes it’s serving someone else against the user’s best interests. Sometimes it’s trying to get the user to do something; sometimes it’s trying to stop the user doing something.”
When I first read this it had vaguely sinister connotations, but of course the RSS link above the header image at the top of this page is designed to make you click on it, as are the links in this text. That’s not sinister! I found a great discussion thread from a blog on exactly this subject if you want to read both sides. Hopefully we’ll all be savvy enough to notice we’re being manipulated should there be an evil conglomerate of designers intent on bending us to their every whim.
This time last year, designing with Persuasion, Emotion and Trust was heralded as the next wave in website design. Trust is key to successful persuasive design. Once we’re promised one thing and get something different that trust is broken and is very hard to get back. Back at The Fantastic Tavern, Zuzanna Pasierbinska reinforced the idea that ‘The age of tolerance is over’. Consumers are more than happy to shout (and loudly, to as many people as they can) when they get bad service or feel that trust has been violated. It’s just not worth trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes because it’s likely to turn round and bite you right where it hurts. Unless you’re really clever…
