The cognitive consequence of cogent designs | why UX was made for you
A methodology of UI/UX design known as persuasive design aims to influence the way individuals act by using the features of a product or service. Based on many psychological and sociological theories, persuasive design has become popular in e-commerce, organizational management, and public health, along with many other industries. Designers, however, frequently employ it in any industry requiring a target group’s long-term commitment through promoting steadfast patronage as opposed to single-transaction markets.
According to Stanford researcher BJ Fogg, three elements : motion, availability and a prompt must converge at the same point for any type of behavior to occur.
Let’s see this in action.
So, let’s say, you wake up in the morning — what’s the first thing you typically do? Check your phone? Needlessly interchanging between multiple apps, you find yourself with only a few minutes to spare before work or school. You don’t even recall where the time went. Even with the slight sensation of flicking your thumb to go to the next youtube video, you’re in an endless loop. So much so that many, including myself, don’t even realize how much time has passed.
In this case, and like many others, the user experience was developed to capture your attention and automate your behavior, and it’s more efficacious than might be apparent. These types of designs help you maximize rewards and skip over uninteresting elements of your feed with a simple action, and algorithms typically account for what you watch and what you skip when catering to your needs. Companies rely on UX for much more than aesthetic purposes, as you can see, and they work to enforce patterns that emerge from your psychological tendencies.
What do Youtube Shorts and other short form content media have to offer that makes them so addictive? A suggested shorts feed based on past behavior (prompt), easy access to shorts at all times (availability), and, most importantly an infinite scroll feature that distorts users’ sense of time with sticky rewards and quick skips (motion).
In simple terms — You use YouTube as a product, but they use you as a metric. Their feed of content entertains you, your feed of attention trains them. As such, UX is catered to you in mind with the principles of persuasive design to form a symbiotic relationship with the user.
It uses principles of cognitive neuroscience and the understanding of human behavior to make seemingly perfect decisions for the intended users. Since the market is saturated so much so, as designers we have stopped building products, we are building users by extending their attention. This is possible because of the surplus of data that users provide applications and industries every day merely by existing on the web. This, while optimal for your entertainment or attention, isn’t necessarily an approach without drawbacks.
Any design decision, big or small, will have an impact on the structure of your entire design, and hence on user journeys. The correct structures enable users, whereas the incorrect structures disable them. A good design doesn’t enforce wants and needs on its users, but works to serve the existing needs and behaviors in adaptable and simple ways. Instead of inventing new behaviors altogether, persuasive design can co-opt existing behaviors and use them to enable you to take on actions you already want to take.
The downside of persuasive design is that it really only works at peak performance when used as intended. Instead, consider how you can enforce enablers while reducing disablers. In this approach, we can aim to engage consumers and make it as simple as possible for them to achieve the objective we set for them earlier, allowing them to skip a step and exit the experience, only to resume at a later point. We don’t want users to feel burdened or limited by the intended behaviors we want to persuade them to take on. That being said, the best user experience is one that sets a good spectrum of things for your users to enjoy since not every user will act the same and flexibility is a key component to a scalable design.
The great part of cogent design is the social proof that goes into it. Based on the concept of normative social impact, social proof is a phenomenon in which people follow and copy the acts of others in order to exhibit accepted or correct behavior. For our Youtube Shorts example, social proof is your friends, family or acquaintances approving a product. Anyone who will send you or mention a Youtube Short will persuade you to want to enjoy it as well. Essentially it is a stamp of approval that you should use to keep up with trends and behaviors that are more easily generated in a population typically spread through word-of-mouth.
Persuasive design is a great tool that allows designers to apply social and psychological concepts to make designs more effective, engaging and have fun interactions for all users to have a bespoke experience. Next time you’re scrolling through the infinite loop of fun, snappy videos, take a moment to admire the design influences that made it possible for you to enjoy so many small moments together.
