How persuasive is your website?
Persuasion is a hot topic these days. Modern websites have several interconnected goals: to inform, to enable task completion, to connect users socially, and to influence users’ behaviours and opinions. Read on to learn more about how you can build persuasion principles into your information architecture.
The persuasion angle finds some origin in BJ Fogg’s work at Stanford University, where he studies persuasive technology – that is, technology that is designed to change attitudes or behaviours of users through persuasion and social influence.
The intersection of persuasion and website strategy & design has since expanded to include some very interesting work.
- Persuasive architecture (Bryan Eisenberg)
- Designing websites for Persuasion, Emotion and Trust (Human Factors International)
- Using design to influence behaviour (Dan Lockton)
- Design For Persuasion Conference
- International Conference on Persuasive Technology
Needless to say, there are a lot of ways in which your website can persuade users to do something. But what role can information architecture, specifically, play in the persuasion game? How persuasive is your website’s information architecture?
Principles of Persuasive Technology
BJ Fogg’s seminal work describes a triad of persuasive technology, seen in the diagram below. Computers (and by extension websites) can behave as tools, mediums, or social actors in their capacity to persuade users.
Fogg’s functional triad of persuasive technology
Fogg has defined several principles of persuasive technology that are helpful for framing how they can manifest in information architecture. Below are the principles most relevant to information architecture.
The Principle of Reduction – Keep it simple, make it easy. Using computing technology to reduce complex behaviour to simple tasks increases the benefit/cost ratio of the behaviour and influences users to perform the behaviour.
The Principle of Tunnelling - Please follow the blue arrows. Using computing technology to guide users through a process or experience provides opportunities to persuade along the way.
Principle of Tailoring - Make it special, just for me. Information provided by computing technology will be more persuasive if it is tailored to the individual’s needs, interests, personality, or usage context.
Principle of Suggestion - You may also be interested in these fine products! A computing technology will have greater persuasive power if it offers suggestions at opportune moments.
Computers as persuasive social actors - What does everybody else think? A computing technology can leverage principles of social influence to motivate and persuade.
Within each of these principles, this blog series explores several applications within information architecture based on current academic research. It is encouraging to see these research results aligning well with many IA best practices.
Part One: Principle of Reduction
Part Two: Principles of Tunnelling and Tailoring
Part Three: Principles of Suggestion and Social Actors
Part One: Principle of Reduction
Keep it simple, make it easy. Design your information architecture to reduce complex behaviour to simple tasks, increasing the benefit/cost ratio of the behaviour and influencing users to perform the behaviour.
We consume meat, vegetables and information
On the web, quality content is often hidden amongst masses of “garbage” content. For web users, predictive judgements become the only tangible way to browse a website. That is, they evaluate a link based on a description of that link or the link label and make a quick decision on which link to select. (Taraborelli, 2008)
In fact, according to Pirelli’s (2007) theory of information foraging, people are informavores, hungering for information in order to gather and store it in order to better adapt to the world. At the same time, humans are cognitively lazy, and like to get maximum benefit for minimum return. Therefore humans show a strong preference for technology designs (and by extension, information architectures) that improves returns on information foraging.
While browsing a website, users will evaluate links based on information scent; that is, how strongly their path exhibits cues related to the desired outcome/information. Informavores, driven by their need for information and cognitive efficiency, will keep clicking as the scent gets stronger, until they give up.
It is therefore important that links and category descriptions describe precisely what users will find at the destination. Ensure the scent on a link is strong – do not use slogans or clever phrases. To further the hunting analogy, information architects should structure content to look like a nutritious meal and an easy catch (Neilsen, 2002). I recommend reading Jakob Neilsen’s fantastic article for further information.
First, last or in between
One of the biggest challenges for information architects is to categorize items in the most logical manner, or perhaps in the manner that appeals to the broadest audience. Categorization processes are influenced by culture, language and cohort. More generally, the Gestalt rules of proximity and similarity state respectively that items close together are perceived as being related and that items with a similar appearance are perceived as being related. (For a great article on how the Gestalt rules can apply to web design, click here).
Literature on persuasion has investigated position effects for decades, first showing primacy effects and then showing recency effects. (Murphy, Hofacker, & Mizerski, 2006) suggest that link positioning in list displays a primacy effect - that is, the higher a link’s position in a list, the greater the probability that it will be clicked. But there is also a recency effect - studies showed that website visitors had an increased tendency to click on links at the end of a list. The authors suggest these findings can be attributed to the same principle as found in information foraging theory - that selecting the first item in a list has a lower search and cognitive cost, and that the last item may remain in short-term memory longer and remains easier to select.
It’s how you say it: good link labels matter more than navigation structure
Miller and Remington (2004) found that navigation structures with eight selections per page produce faster search results than deeper structures with fewer selections per page. In contrast, users took significantly longer to find items in a three-tiered, 8-links-per-page structure than in a 16×32 or 32×16 structure. Additionally, they ascribed the quality of link labels as the dominating factor for how quickly people find items on a website. The authors advise information architects to structure navigation using reliable link labels rather than trying to achieve the “optimal’ number of links in a level of navigation, if that requires compromise in link label clarity.
Key takeaways
- Link labels and descriptions should provide a strong scent to the content behind the link.
- Carefully consider which links you will place in the first and last positions in a list, to take advantage of primacy and recency effects.
- A wide navigation structure with fewer levels performs better than a narrow navigation structure with more levels.
>> Continue to Part Two: Principles of Tunnelling and Tailoring
>> Continue to Part Three: Principles of Suggestion and Social Actors