Using design to influence behaviour part 2

So this week on my CXL institute digital psychology and persuation class, I continue from where I stopped in last week

Homeostasis: our bodies’ predisposition to keep it in a healthy, balanced state so whenever we’re feeling stressed or under pressure, we usually spiral until that stress or pressure is addressed. So there’s a lot of things that motivates our body to take action against a bad situation,

• Safety and security
• Relationships and community, avoiding being rejected by communities or feeling alone
• Status and self esteem
• Parenting
• Love
• Sex

We feel loss more because the motivators that drive us don’t last as much as the ones that get us to pay attention

So we can look at the motivational model from the point of view of one neurotransmitter and one hormone — dopamine. It plays a role in our motivational circuitry in activating curiosity, interest in something, where a person will move toward something if they could have some reward,engagement, and then dopamine also plays a role in whether someone has an emotional reward if what they expected is what they got. Dopamine is not just simple, you get a little spritzer and you get an emotional reward.There’s more to it, it plays a role in the whole motivational process that gets people up, moving,and going towards something. When we talk about incentive, we’re talking about triggering a dopamine response and getting someone to pay attention. So when someone’s motivated, they’re actually curious, engaged and energized. Now cortisol’s different.

2. UI pressure tactics:

Balance between motivating and overwhelming stress, when you design for any interactive process, you want to reduce too much stress.

Every error, every problem that we subject our users to will cause more, and more, and more stress,so when we design for any interactive process,we want to reduce as much of the accidental stress inducers,and that way we can use the more official pressure tactics that we want.So let’s look at a couple of these. A very popular one is our time limits. So any time we use urgency techniques like “offer lasts till………” ,we’re essentially putting on time limits, and we’re saying, “Look, there’s a limited time,”and if you don’t act, you will miss out.”So there’s a consequence,and so that’s where time limits have a certain element of stress and pressure to them, and we know that the more people have to do in less time,the more we crank up and we ratchet up that stress,and so time limits are often things that we can introduce into our offers,and our products, and the things that we do.

It’s a smarter choice to never use false time pressures because people can become fairly resentful when they find out that you’re using dishonest pressure tactics. Have sincere time limits, structure offers with limits, have real time limits that you stick to and then you can have very motivating time pressure that is used in conjunction with motivating messages.

Another thing are quantity limiters, which involves you showing how many items are left (Only 10 copies available) So basically, if your prospects or customers don’t act, they might not get your product. This is telling them that there’s consequences if they don’t take action. Someone else’s going to lose out, so then now that turns into an instant stress-inducing technique. Here’s another thing, competitors. So the competitors say that if you don’t act,someone else is going to take it,so that’s dealing with limited scarcity and time at the same time,and so obviously sites that bank up all three are just ratcheting up the pressure and stress. Now when you use these techniques, be insanely careful. Do not overdo them. There’s a point where you can motivate people, but you can also cause potential damage here, and if you are using these techniques, make sure you wipe out all other accidental stress inducers cause these can be extremely highly stress-inducing.

Social Influence: With social influence, it’s interesting because all you need to do to turn on social influence is to make people aware of the presence of others.

That they have to be watching what other people are doing, or feel that other people are watching them. And that’s insanely simple. Anytime you’re using social influence techniques, you’re basically putting the person into a social environment, whether they want to be there or not, or you’re making them feel like they’re in a social environment, whether they want to be there or not.

Decision:

If a person feels a sense of motivation and they’re on board, there’s a number of UI and tools that you can use to help them make up their mind.The main one is pricing tables, that’s where we have different comparisons. A pricing table is as much as self contained design pattern architected to get someone to make a very specific choices any other persuasive design pattern. In itself, it’s fully designed to motivate someone to move and take action. And when you start to look at them, you realize that they draw on a number of features that are a lot more than just straightforward here’s a product and different price points. The pricing table is a bit like a game,like a set of options A, B, and C.

So when it comes to decision making,one of the main tools that we use is the comparison system. You might introduce a D product which is a decoy (wrote about this here). In reality, D is a bogus fake product that you introduce because you want to get more people to buy C.

A decoy is a product that is not designed to sell, it’s just there to show your customers that C is obviously the smartest choice to make and sometimes, even make them feel like by choosing C, they’ve ripped your business off.

Trust: While trying to build trust, a great area to focus on is expectation management because it deals with uncertainty, and it can also help people reduce stress by letting people know what’s coming next.So there’s a lot of anxiety in interactive design. Any UI that’s using expecting management will help reduce these risks altogether.

Trust is one of the core factors in behavior change, and it’s made, often,in a fraction of a second, and a lot of it is tied inwith the credibility of our source. It’s how people interpret, or how they know our brand. There are different models of trust. A situation where our target audience feels like they’re in a certain level of danger and that they have to take a risk to depend on us, but they’re willing to take that risk because they believe we will act in their interest. And so, a trusting situation is always one that has a level of danger or risk, if there’s no risk, you do not need to have trust.What that means is that in anything we design,we have to understand that we’re putting people at risk with our offers so we have to win their trust by establishing a credible source.

Reinforcer: A reinforcer is anything that increases the odds that our audience will take action again. This can include rewards that we give to our audience but it could also include punishments if they do the bad behavior.

the level of dopamine spike that a person receives after having taken an action is related proportionally to the level of motivation that they will experience the next time they see the triggers associated with that behavior.