After participating in a brilliant workshop held by Brian Cugelman at SXSW 2015, I had the chance to sit down with Brian for half an hour to a talk about how to best apply psychology to your user experience. I asked him for advice on how to effectively apply psychology to user experiences, how to keep the experience authentic, and how to avoid users dropping out too early.
Brian Cugelman runs AlterSpark, a consultancy company that specializes in training UX practitioners, business developers, and entrepreneurs on using psychology for digital behavior change.
Who is Brian Cugelman?
Brian Cugelman obtained his PhD in 2010 on Online Social Marketing and has his research on mass behaviour change technology has been published in the world’s top e-health journal. He has helped several organizations apply his principles including the Pentagon, United Nations, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, and several universities.
What are persuasive patterns and how can you apply them?
Persuasive Patterns are best practices that contain certain ingredients that work time and time again. To use them for your benefit, it is a matter of looking at them critically in their context and figuring out which of their factors can be applied elsewhere.
A scientific background gives you an understanding of those principles in a deeper way. Scientists who work in the front of the line develop their own terms, so often the scientists might have 5 different names for the same concept. There is little consensus. It really is a mess.
There are no hard and fast answers, as all the theories are proven to work only in a particular context with a particular audience. So what you want to do, is to try to figure out which type of recipe makes sense for which context. By examining the context, the theory will suggest, which factors you would want to look into.