Persuasive Design: Get Users To Do What You Want Them To!

You’ve designed a great product, fixed a stack of usability problems and spent a fortune on marketing. The only problem is that people aren’t using it.

In this 2010 session, Andy Budd, a founding partner at the user experience consultancy Clearleft, addresses that problem. He explains how to get users to do what you want them to through good design, human psychology and, as he puts it, a touch of mind control.

The talk is an early look at persuasive and seductive interface design, the idea that usability alone is not enough and that psychology shapes whether people act. Many of the principles involved appear as persuasive patterns in the UI-Patterns.com library.