Principles of persuasive design

Principles of Persuasive Design

I was attending Tom Gilb's Gilbfest'13 conference this week. It's a select group of people where everyone presents something to challenge and inform everyone else. I'm becoming a regular there and have spoken on changing minds topics in the past. This year I talked about design.

We all design. From a young age, we play with construction toys and build imaginary worlds. Designing is about much fun as you can have and I've had a wide range of jobs and been lucky enough to been involved in many design tasks, from game design to designing organizations.

In whatever discipline you design, you can often identify a set of core principles. Games, for example, need flow and punctuated success. Organizations, on the other hand benefit from alignment and clarity. If you start thinking across disciplines, then you can often find useful principles in one that can be applied in another, for example the principle of alignment in organizations can be used in games to connect purpose with actions.

And of course you can design persuasive and mind-changing activities. I've designed here from training classes to marketing literature and adverts. Even this blog is designed. And one of the things I've deliberately done when writing this website is to seek the underlying principles that appear in many places.

The changing minds principles may be used in design of other work where influence is important, which is pretty much everywhere. Games, organizations and more, all run on how people think, and which consequently may benefit from the application of these principles.

Whatever you do, you can look for principles and patterns, the common themes that underlie the production and use of the things you do. And then you can ask: How can I use these elsewhere?

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