Motiverende design - Jens Hofman Hansen

Use story telling
The Mac-related news site, Macnyt, has an associated discussion forum where
a formalized social hierarchy stimulates the users’ emotional needs. This tells a
story about novices and experts among the users. They attain a certain rank
depending on how long time they have been members and how many postings
they have written. This contributes – although probably on an unconscious
level – to the motivation of returning to the site several times a day.
Persuasive design and user-centered design
Persuasive design corresponds well with the idea of user-centered design and
does in this way not revolutionize any of its methods. I do though think that
persuasive design can contribute to a greater attention towards certain strategies
of motivation that could be interesting to take into account in the development
of a web site. Based on my own experiences with user-centered design,
I have commented on how I see persuasive design as a potential contribution to
further development of the well-known methods. As an example, user testing
has traditionally been an effective method for analyzing the users’ need of relevance.
If it isn’t based on interviews, though, it tends to focus very narrowly on
users’ functional needs. In the same way, user testing has traditionally been less
effective for uncovering the users’ emotional needs. The concept of persuasive
design can remind the designer that emotional determined motives can be included
in such an evaluation method as well.
Conclusion
Several perspectives including usability, relevance theory and aesthetics uncover
the motives of web users’ actions and constitute the concept of persuasive
design. It corresponds well with the methods known from user-centered
design. My model’s strategies of motivation point out which different needs
and motives the users base their actions on when visiting a web site. The different
effects available to the designer can be used to satisfy these needs in different
ways. Persuasive design still calls for a deep insight into the specific context
and user behaviour of a web site if we want to achieve the intended effect when
we use the strategies of motivation known from persuasive design.
ABSTRACT IX