Recap of Conference "Design for Conversion 2011": Persuasion for converting a visitor to a customer

Persuasion and Influence has been topics of this blog as the concepts I see beyond pure considerations of  usability and flow in interaction design. Originated in the techniques sales persons employ when convincing their customers (see Cialdini's book 'Influence', see synopsis) persuasion has arrived in the digital realm when BJ Fogg started his investigations about the motives behind people's interaction with the computer (see Captology). Long before that it was known through Reeves and Nass' work 'The Media Equation' (see synopsis) that humans basically interact with the computer in a social way. Taken together these works demonstrate for the interaction with computers a strong prevalence of concepts that humans learn during early life.

Our social nature, how we interact with others and from which grounds we trust them is the background of a new concepts: Persuasion Profiling (see Wired article: Welcome to the Brave New World of Persuasion Profiling). The Design for Conversion Conference (the next one to take place at the end of this week) is taking up this idea and will bring together interface designers, product owners and user experience experts to work on casestudies and deepen their understanding of how to work together to create user experiences that are able to change people's (bying) behaviours in a measurable way. See the presentation below for details, a pecha kucha presentation by the local conference organiser Lutz Schmitt or the blog entry by Marian Steinbach about the concept of the conference.

Design for Conversion in a nutshell

I am especially excited to see Dan Lockton speaking about design for behaviour change. Since I have worked in the FUN research project, I feel that incorporating game mechanics in electronic products has fallen too short. Now, Dan has also learnt from game design and included principles from game play in his Design with intent toolkit.

How to influence user behaviour: Design with Intent (Design for Persuasion, Brussels)

View more presentations from Dan Lockton

By the way: Arjan Haring is currently developing PersuasionAPI to make the concepts of persuasion applicable for marketing. The blog at Conversion Design (in English) and the blog at konversionsKRAFT (in German) are valuable sources of interesting readings about the topic.