The art and science of seductive interactions

The first workshop of the first day of web 2.0 expo captivated me initially by the title alone: ”The art and science of seductive interactions”. When reading about the workshop I was even more intrigued:

”As designers, we work hard to provide powerful features in our applications, but if users don’t take advantage, it’s all waste. We have to extend our designer’s toolkit, leveraging the latest thinking from behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric.”

Todays workshop did not dissapoint. It was a really good seminar and workshop where we were gathered into small groups with a clear agenda and task for the day. The core message of the workshop was to build and design websites that fulfills the visitors goals as well as the company’s business goals and to motivate user interaction by the use of psychological triggers like humour, feedback loops, curiosity, the need for self-expression and hunger for encouragement.

We were all given the task to for a specific problem try to figure out which psychological triggers to use in order to solve that problem / make a service more useful for the users.

The seminar gave me a lot of good ideas to bring home, especially when it comes to looking beyond usability and estetics when building a website and putting more focus on usefulness and increasing motivation. We put a lot of importance on usability and that it should be easy to navigate sites and click on the right things and have the possibility to interact, that we tend to forget to motivate the users to want to search, click and interact.

The workshop was held by Stephen Anderson from PoetPainter, a company which helps businesses to use psychology to design better experiences.

/Sara