I’ve been watching a series of courses on Persuasive UX by Chris Nodder on Lynda.com. The courses are a series of short talks about crafting the user experience on websites to drive users to your goals.
Ethics of Persuasive Design
One of the questions asked regarding the ethics of persuasive design is:
When is it okay to change people’s minds?
The answer: it depends. One thing Chris does is help answer that question by breaking down persuasive UX design into four approaches:
- Evil
- Design that mostly benefits only the Designer, not the User.
- Commercial
- Design that mutually benefits the Designer and the User.
- Motivational
- Design that benefits the User and Society at large.
- Charitable
- Design that mostly benefits society.
Is “Evil” design good?
The use of “evil” might sound a bit harsh, but I think it’s termed that way to really make you think before you design something. Here’s an example:
Suppose I want to make a website that’s a portfolio of my work. I could take any of these approaches and result in something different:
- I could take a charitable approach in providing free resources that I’ve either used or created. These resources can be used by the public, but they also serve to showcase my skill and experience.
- A motivational approach might offer the same free resources, yet focus more on providing Users with case studies in how I created these resources. In this approach, I’d be selling more of what I can provide for the User.
- With a commercial approach, I would likely focus more on the case studies and how I can serve the User. I wouldn’t care much about providing free resources as I would care about connecting with the User in order to best serve them.
- I could take an “evil” approach and mostly disregard the User. In this approach, I put what I want on my website because I want to. Perhaps I’m just being silly by posting grumpy cat photos on the site. Or perhaps I’m deliberately trying to scam people. Either of these count as “evil” design, since the User doesn’t benefit at all (unless they like grumpy cats or having their identity stolen).
The calling out of certain types of design as “evil” really gets me thinking: Am I designing to serve only me, or others?