Most people want to be good people: healthy, helpful, and leaving the world a little better than it was before. But most of us also have a hard time doing that. As designers, we can change user behavior towards more sustainable lifestyles: dropping throwaway consumerism in favor of sharing, maintenance, and reuse; walking or biking instead of driving; turning off lights, etc. For example, the average European has roughly half the environmental footprint of the average American not because of better engineering, but because of lifestyle: living in multi-unit housing close to work and shops radically reduces the car trips, road infrastructure, building energy, and building material per person. How can you change your user’s behavior? Persuasive design is the art of making your product’s user interactions nudge people in a desired direction. This can be subtle or powerful, and requires ethical consideration to ensure you’re helping your users, not hurting them. Below are videos explaining further.
Usage
Here are three short videos explaining how to use Fogg’s method of persuasive design:
Attribution: Video by Autodesk Sustainability Workshop
This video briefly explains how to use persuasive design to improve a user’s environmental impacts without changing the product’s engineering. Understand how you can increase people’s ability and motivation to do green behavior with the power of persuasive design.
Attribution: Video by Autodesk Sustainability Workshop
This video talks about improving people’s ability to behave more sustainably is one of the keys to persuasive design.
Attribution: Video by Autodesk Sustainability Workshop
This video talks about improving people’s motivation to behave more sustainably is another key to persuasive design.
Benefits
Persuasive design can do things that engineering can’t do—change people’s lifestyles so they choose more sustainable options. It can help people reduce energy use, reuse products or materials, and more without re-engineering products and without any new technologies.
Limitations/Risks
- What may be persuasive for one group of users or in one cultural context may not be effective or appropriate for others.
- Design for behavior change can only change behavior, it doesn’t re-engineer products, so it doesn’t change the environmental impacts per unit of product use.
- Persuasive design might have unintended consequences, manipulating users into making decisions that may not be in their best interest. Be careful to design ethically.