Rapport Persuasive Technology

Report Persuasive Technology DB305 - Persuasive Technology Group 6: Ken Chen, Tijmen van Gurp, Anouk van Ranst Lecturers: dr.ir. M.M. Tilde Bekker, dr.ir. H.A. Harm van Essen 9 May 2013

Introduction This module was done by three Master’s students from Industrial design. Within the one module week, we looked at different theories in persuasive technologies, that attempt to change attitude or behaviors by means of planned effects of interactive technology.

In our group (Group 6), we looked at 6 key principles of influence by Robert Cialdini, Foggs behavior Grid and functional triad and PLEX cards (Playful Experience). Our chosen context was situation at the Limbo path at the Technical University of Eindhoven where a lot of flyers are handed out and immediately thrown away.

Summary Persuasive Intent

Although we have seen these differences we have seen some common factors: they all

Our persuasive intent is to persuade people to go towards the information board and

at the TU/e and they are all familiar with the situation of flyering on the “Limbopad”.

want to reach their goal (TU/e) in a limited time, by bike or foot. They either work or study

take the info along with them on an interactive base. Our goal with this is to introduce a new promotion system in which a new behavior of receiving promotional messages was formed.

Design Concept

The ultimate goal of this new promotional situation is that more people pick up the

We proposed a brand new digital promotion system to substitute the existing flyers. With

available information from our system compared the to old situation (flyering). In the new

the interactive board that simulates the feeling of the events with different themes,

situation the promoters will have a supportive role in the system.

promotional information is presented in a much more playful and attractive way. People are no longer “forced” to accept promotional materials, but can choose to approach the

User Profile For the final design we decided to focus on changing the behavior of the people who receive the flyers. We recognized 3 different behavior types in this group: •

People who are willing to receive the flyer: we want this group to keep the information longer and be more interested in it.

•

People who hesitate about accepting a flyer: we want to persuade them to accept the information.

•

People who reject the flyers: we want this group to unlearn their existing behavior and persuade them to a new behavior.

ones that really interest them. The board will respond respectively to people from different distances. If they find some event really appealing, they can easily swipe their campus cards on that event, and then detailed information including tickets booking links and sharing links to social networking will be immediately sent to their email accounts.

Supporting Theories For our final concept we decided to use 2 theories from Fogg, his Behavioral Grid and Functional Triad.

■ Behavior Grid For our concept we used 3 different persona’s: •

Yes, I am interested! (Purple path, increase existing behavior from now on)

•

Hmm... What is this about ? (Green Path: start new behavior from now on )

•

I’m busy don’t disturb me (Black Path: Stop doing a behavior from now on)

■ Functional Triad Tool •

Tailoring: Information is tailored to you, because it knows your profile from your campus card

•

Tunneling: Because the right information is at the right time, only when you come closer more information is revealed.

We looked at the behavioral grid to see for each of these persons what triggers needed to be increased, what abilities needed to be enhanced and what motivations needed to be amplified.

Media •

Cause and Effect / Environment Simulation: the system will show you what happens through a simulation when you swipe your card.

Social Actor •

The system recognizes and greets you when you come closer, and thanks you when you swipe your card.

Design Process

Where We Start (Design Context)

Plans And Approaches

Within the given contexts we chose to work upon the waste topic. Relating waste to the

This module is conducted with the combination of studying theories and adopting them

TU/e campus site brought us rather quickly to the “concept of flyering”, its behavior (of all

into design practices. The design process was separated into three stages within which

different stakeholders) and the waste its actually produces made it an interesting

the first two iterations were more focused on exploring the theories than developing the

challenge. Most definitely we were interested by the life cycle of flyers and the different

concept, since the idea is to share knowledge of different frameworks among the groups.

emotions of all the stakeholders regarding the value of the message and the “object” itself.

In each iteration, we start with going deeper into the theories by reading literatures, followed with searching for existing design practices to reflect how the theory is working.

With this knowledge, we generated ideas by thinking how the theories can inspire us and benefit our design solutions. The final step is synthesizing the ideas into design concepts and making quick evaluations. In our design case, it is a context that we designers are also users, so we base on our own experience but also turn to other users and stakeholders (i.e. the security of TU/e campus) for richer feedback. However, as indicated above, the idea of the first two iterations are more about exploring the theories, therefore we picked the concepts that best illustrated the possibilities of the chosen framework.

While in the last iteration, we focused on the concept development by picking the most

The scenario that inspired us

suitable theories.

Most of the concepts we gathered focus on the playfulness

1st Iteration: Ideation For A Single Persuasive Intent From Multiple Principals

Based on the context we chose, we defined our initial persuasive intention as “To persuade the flyer receivers to spend more time reading the flyer, and if not interested, throw the flyer into bins.”

■ The first concept The first concept we got was to design a seductive installation that attracts the flyer receivers to stick the

In the 1st iteration, we picked the theory of six principles from social psychology by

unwanted flyers to co-create beautiful trees. This

Robert B. Cialdini included in the book “Influence: Shortcuts to behavior” as the vantage

concept employs the principle of creating

point for our design. The six principals are: reciprocation, commitment and consistency,

“reciprocation”, the device is given without asking for

social proof, authority, liking, scarify.

a favor for not throwing it away. It will feel like a depth not sticking it to the pole. That said the opposite effect

When we think of the problem of street trash cleaning, we quickly gathered a lot of

could happen that people who actually wanted to

interesting persuasive concepts that have been done by other designers. Most of the

keep the flyer also would stick it to this beautiful tree.

concepts focus on the playfulness of the trash bin so that people are more willing to interact with the design. If related to the principal, most of them are utilizing the “liking”.

But the framework we chose definitely expand our perspectives. We are inspired to see how the other five principles can help us come up with different ideas.

Concept inspired by principal “reciprocation”

■ The second concept

■ The third concept

The second concept was inspired by the principal of “commitment and consistency”. By

The third concept was designed with a balloon blued to each of the flyer, so that the

asking people to not immediately throw away the flyer before they receive a flyer, they are

“social pressure” will stop people throwing flyers away. The opposite thing that could

more committed to repeat this behavior.

happen would be that people would think its more fun to let the balloon fly away than they intrinsically believe that letting the balloon go is a waste.

Concept inspired by principal “commitment and consistency”

Concept inspired by principal “consensus”

Feedback And Reflection For this iteration, we tried to variate our concepts as much as possible, in order to explore the six principals and explain it a bit more to other groups. We picked the three most relevant and inspiring ones out of the six. Meanwhile, the concepts here are helping us to understand the context even better, especially when we asked some of the users’ opinions. The feedback we’ve got for the 1st iteration was that the context we chose is a bit complex. There are multiple persuasion possibilities in there and could be difficult to pick one of them. Based on this, we decided to distinguish which persuasion is most interesting to design for in the next iteration.

2nd Iteration: The Meaning Of Creating Playfulness In Persuasion The purpose of 2nd iteration was mainly to explore the framework of PLEX (Playful Experiences framework).The framework consists of 22 Playful Experience categories, covering a broad spectrum of experiences. A bit different from other groups, the framework we are assigned was not directly about designing for persuasion, but designing for playfulness in general, which came out to be very challenging for us to develop our own concept.

■ The first concept The first concept was inspired by the toy biting crocodile (Krokodil met kiespijn). It utilizes the thrill and competition in the game. The installation aims to make the way people get flyers more exciting. A negative thing to keep in mind here is that people might associate this with the game and try to get as many flyers out without getting be bitten.

We went through the framework of PLEX and got the impression that it was very useful in terms of getting inspiration when playfulness is specifically required within a design task to add. Also, we found it more interesting to combine multiple categories into one

Concept inspired by

concept, to enrich the persuasion effect.

game “Krokodil met kiespijn”

Before starting to ideate concepts, we mapped out the stakeholders in our context.

Among the three persuasion possibilities in the system, we picked the one between the university and the promoters, trying to simplify the design task.

The design intention for the 2nd iteration was: to change the way flyers are handed out

■ The second concept

so that the receivers will be more willing to accept the way of promotion.

The second one was also game inspired, with the concept to let people play with the balance by adding or removing flyers. The idea is to give them more feeling of control and completion.

Concept inspired by game “balance”

■ The third concept

■ More concepts

The third concept was about using people’s desire for eroticism and exploration, to

There are more concepts we have generated within this iteration, but since as mentioned

attract them to get the flyers sticked on the nude model.

above, the idea was more about sharing the knowledge of the framework. Some of the un presented concepts are chosen in our last iteration.

don’t

Concept that decreases user’s effort

Concept inspired by PLEX card “eroticism”

Concept that adds excitement through potential rewards

Final Iteration: Persuasion As The Key In Forming A New Behavior To form our definitive, final design and conclusion, we re-started the whole design

Our consultation learned us we were allowed to choose for the last option and use this

process from Stage 1. For this we consulted some of the important stakeholders who

context as a smart solution and enhance this first contact moment to backbone the

directly relate to the waste produced when flyering at the “Limbopad”. We received some

brand identity of the University. We had to support our design decisions with the theory to

unexpected feedback by the expert parties (including the BBC (Berging Bijzondere

prove that this system would be able to replace the existing situation.

Chemicaliën) and security service TU/e) within the interviews held on wednesday .

Against our personal opinions we learned from these parties that they do not see any problem relating to the waste nor the system. The bin works effective, and in our opinion too effective. If flyers are not read at all their purpose is not met and it is waste that they

We had to use the persuasive principles into our design decisions to generate a more “visionary design concept” than we would have if we choose for a direction that was focussed on changing an existing behavior.

are produced initially. This new insights forced us into reviewing our options which we debated during one of our Feedback sessions with Harm.

■ What were the 3 options?

1. Persuading the promoters to persuade differently (i.e. TU/e could give a prize for someone with the nicest way of promotion) (Downside: this option would make us focused on regulations not on design/technology) 2. Change the bin itself (i.e. Smiling or humanized bin that persuades you too not immediately throw away the flyer.) We believe there is already done a lot in this direction. Applying meaningful interactive persuasive attributes to bins had a lot of questions how this will look like. We did not want to focus on signs/static attributes only.

3. Changing meaning of flyering: Focussed on the big picture instead of changing the specific behavior. This direction was most compelling to us, it spoke to our imagination, we saw opportunities how to implement the theory in the design phase of our concept (Downside: not focussed on one specific behavior change not the initial goal of the module.)

The initial idea of the chosen direction: changing meaning of flyering

experience flow and looked at how the 3 different persona’s would interact with the

■ Chosen Theory In our design of the final concept, we used 2 different theories from Bj Fogg. We decided to use these theories, because in the first iterations we used the more generalized persuasive mechanisms, and we wanted to learn more about constructive mechanism from the behavioral sciences.

focus on what triggers, abilities and motivations needed to be changed for each person at all the different points.

When we had a clear picture of how the experience flow would be we looked into how

Initially we decided to leave the theory out and we made an experience flow together with a scenario to make the concept really clear. We looked at different touch points within this

system at these points. Therefore we used Foggs behavioral grid, which helped us to

the system exactly would work. Our design requirements, i.e. the simulation of swiping your card on screen, were based upon elements from Foggs functional triad. We looked through each of the different lenses to see what factors could applied.

video of final concept (online version: vimeo.com/64927769)

Reflection In this module, the three of us had an amazing learning experience. Through three iterations of designing for behavior change, we gradually got familiar with the theories on persuasive technology. We strongly feel that we have gained more understanding about the use of behavioral models through the tough feedback we have got and the process we have followed. We learned that it is important to focus on a specific behavior change to avoid a too complex situation. Better is to start small and through several iterations add more layers of theory to it. In the short time available, our goal was too ambitious to get a clear answer if it would work or not. In the end for us it might have been the best choice we could have made. The trap we stepped into is one that we will not make again that easily.

In the rest of this reflection you will read more about what our process was, and what the feedback was that we received in between.

What We Did

Feedback Friday

Substituting existing behavior (bad) with a new behavior so they simply cannot do the old

In the final presentation, we got feedback that we should have focussed on one specific

behavior anymore. In the substitution we focused on making it as persuasive as flyering,

behavior and go deeper with the theories. We had difficulties presenting a coherent story

or even better through applying different theories on the concept. We focussed on the big

because we were lost in the trap of the complexity of the context. We had a good

picture (changing the meaning of flyering ) instead of changing the specific behavior

reflection together on how our effort had been in the wrong direction. We should have

(people are throwing flyers away immediately).

made the step to choose a single behavior to change, which we did not do because it clashed with our ambitions as designers. We see this as a very good learning point for

Analyzation

the future.

Because of the decision we made we had to assume what the behavior would be with our system. We assumed that some people will not interact with the system because that was their initial response on the flyer, getting him to using the system is not a behavior change, but based upon a hypothetical behavior which made it very complex. Â A second iteration would be needed to reach the goal of the module.

The goal was: to use the theory to persuade people to change existing (bad) behavior to a new behavior (expected behavior).

A second iteration would be needed to show us how people would behave in our system. This would allow us to pick one specific behavior and try to change this behavior through theories of persuasion. This iteration is for us hard to realize in such a short time. Instead we want to show our understanding of the theory through a concept that we had previously.

Example Of Concept We Had

Connected Theories

■ Existing behavior

■ Functional triad fogg

students on the limbo path throw the flyer away immediately after receiving it.

Suggestion: By the placement of the bins we suggest at opportune moments to throw away the flyer that it also possible to throw it away just a little further.

■ Persuasive intend Let students throw away the flyer later, to let them consider longer if the flyer is valuable for them and show more appreciation to the promoters.

Social Actor: Humanizing By physically changing the bins to show human emotions we believe that people will see that it is better to wait a little longer before throwing it away. It requires little effort and gives a better signal to the promoters.

■ Stakeholders

■ 6 key principles of influence by Robert Cialdini

The associations who flyer, and students who throw away the flyer immediately.

Social Proof: Assuming that the suggestion and social actor factors from foggs functional triad already persuade some people to throw away the flyer a bit later on the

■ Concept

limbo path we believe that people will also look at what other people are doing in this new

By redesigning how the bins are placed and what they communicate to people we

situation. They will follow the average reaction on these bins and follow this new behavior

believe we can persuade the students to not immediately throw away the flyer.

because people might feel uncertain what the expected behavior is.

an example of the concept we had during the last iteration