How to Design for Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust

Introduction—The Persuasion Quest

Learn about the history of the field, how PET is additive and fully complementary to classic usability, and why PET will change the way you consider and design for your customer’s web experience forever!

Designing for Trust

Before you can persuade customers to act, you must ensure that your site engenders trust. Learn how to: design for credibility and trust, take hygiene factors into consideration, and how various online “markers” engender trust, such as credible organizations, design quality, FAQs, citations, current content, archives, testimonials, and more.

Emotional Design

Learn how to tap customer emotion to increase engagement via proven psychological principles, including: utility, practicality, and drive fulfillment; hierarchy, specificity, and depth of needs; eliciting negative and positive emotions; optimal levels of stimulation; and more.

Persuasion Design

Once the emotions are tapped, we’ll introduce you to the science of persuasion. Learn the psychological constructs required to get your consumers to act — every time. Discover how to use pay, impression, and pressure to your advantage via: extrinsic rewards, unanticipated costs, contrast principle, social proof, social learning, the power of people we like, scarcity, and more.

Overview of HFI’s PET design Process

Persuasion methodology is not new, but putting it into practice is. Learn how HFI has created a persuasion process and methodology that consists of PET: assessment, testing and review, user research and design, structure, research and analysis, strategy, and validation.

PET–Focused Personas and Scenarios

The underpinnings of persuasion design are the tools that classic usability analysts use, but with a PET twist. Learn where PET personas and scenarios come from, understand persona variables, learn the differences between PET and classic scenarios, and how to build PET scenarios.

Initial Assessment Methods

Learn how the PET test and PET review uncover data that will enable you to take what you’ve learned so far and apply it to your site. Learn how to utilize: emotional reports, video, eye tracking data, persona emotion reports, persuasion strategies, the seducible moment, and more.

User Research Methods

In order to target your PET Tools, you’ll want to talk to your customers. In this track, you’ll get a taste of a technique used to understand the emotional landscape of your customers.

PET Tactical Changes

Now you’ve learned about persuasion, emotion, and trust, as well as how to assess your site and conduct customer research. In this section, you’ll learn how to make quick, easy, high impact changes to the existing design. This is PET design for the real world, where you normally can’t do a complete redesign just for PET.

Validation Methods

Steeped in proven psychology, PET is teachable, repeatable and, perhaps most importantly, predictable. But you’ll still want to show that those predictions came true. Learn how to validate your design to see if your persuasion methods are working, if you are eliciting the desired emotions, and if your customers “will do” what you want them to do.