PET Design Flashcards
An objective way of comparing how users behave using two or more designs of a website and provides the most definitive validation method for PET design. Different users are assigned randomly to different versions of the site, allowing usage statistics to be collected and compared. In particular, data on bounced, bolted, and bailed visits and if users are engaged, persuaded, and converted.
AB Testing
A cognitive bias in which people assign too much weight to the first piece of information (the anchor) they receive. For example, the initial price of a used car will set the standard for the rest of the negotiations, so that prices lower than the initial price seem more reasonable even if they are still higher than the car’s worth.
Anchoring Principle
A trust factor that shows diligence and demonstrates the established, enduring nature of your organization.
Archives
A PET technique for gaining trust. Tell the user something that is good for the user but clearly against interests of the site owner. For example, an insurance company that admits to not having the cheapest policy.
Argue Against Self Interest
If an organization or individual has achieved a widely-recognized and/or credible recognition for a job well done, it should proximately publish this fact because they are a trust factor.
Awards
One of the three levels in Donald Norman’s theory of Emotional Design. At this level, designs are judged by the extent that they support human tasks and behaviors as intended. Therefore, it is the primary focus for usability design.
Behavioral Level of Design
Aspects of the world a user believes to be true, whether they are or not. PET interviews seek to discover beliefs (along with feelings) as evidence for the drives and blocks that underpin design work.
Beliefs
Testing to assess the emotional/persuasive impact of a brand and/or determine how well a design supports the intended characteristics of a brand.
Brand Testing
If a business, organization, or individual has gained an official recognition of being skilled in a certain area, it should prominently publish this fact because it increases trust of the site. Examples include professional and academic qualifications, trade, software, ISO, and safety.
Certification
A trust factor that shows intellectual integrity and diligence. It promotes the impression that your site or company is an authority.
Citations
A PET technique in changing impression. Refers to the discomfort caused by holding two or more conflicting (dissonant) beliefs at the same time. People seek to reduce this discomfort by changing one of the beliefs. For example, if someone feels they paid too much for a car, they will change their attitude about the car to see it as more valuable and worth the price they paid.
Cognitive Dissonance
A device used by behaviorists in the first half of the 20th century to investigate drives. We used this in PET as an informal analogy for illustrating how persuasion tools work. For example, if a rat has to cross an electrified grid that delivers a painful shock to get to the cheese. The more painful the shock, the less likely the rodent will cross.
Columbia Obstruction Device
A PET technique in changing impression. People like to be consistent, so once a person has expressed an opinion or acted in a particular way, he will feel compelled to act in a way that is consistent with their expressed position. In PET, if you can design for ways of getting people to commit in a small way, they are more likely to take a bigger step in the future toward a desired direction. Also referred to as foot in the door.
Commitment
Images of ordinary people are a trust factor. Well-selected images of ordinary people will increase the level of trust in less credible sties, but may decrease the trust level in highly credible sites. This is because users may expect credible organizations to use famous people. Ill-considered stock photos will reduce trust by making people feel manipulated.
Common People
Once you get a person to do one small thing, it’s easier to get them to the next, then the next, and then the next. It’s a particular way of making use of commitment.
Compliance Laddering
Computers can play the full set of interpersonal roles that a person can play. They can be encouraging or helpful. People will react to the computer as if it were a person (even feeling obligated to the computer).
Computer as a Social Actor
A PET technique in changing impression. By pairing your product with a specific stimulus, the product will becoming emotionally associated with the characteristics of the stimulus.
Conditioning and Association
The falsification of a memory in which people fill gaps in recall with fabrications that they believe to be facts. For example, someone gives a rational explanation for irrational behavior that has an unconscious emotional cause.
Confabulation
People maintain a sense of themselves and attempt to act to maintain that self image. It’s common to have multiple roles with a somewhat different self image. People attempt to act consistently across those roles when possible. For example, someone who is honest with a friend is likely to be honest in the workplace.
Consistent Self Image
Preparation of the textual material, images, and interactions to support PET Persuasion Strategy. In PET, attention to detailed design of the wording, imagery, and layout is vital to ensuring persuasiveness and avoiding unintended side effects.
Content Design
A PET technique in changing impression. All things are evaluated by comparison to a reference. By manipulation the reference, you can change the way something is seen. For example, the same amount of food will look larger if it’s on a smaller plate.
Contrast Principle
Credibility is a prerequisite for trust and includes domain name, design quality, and physical address will encourage the belief that your website can be trusted.
Credible Organizations
A framing technique in which the criteria for comparing competing products are set selectively. This allows you to demonstrate your product meets all or most of the comparison criteria, whereas the competition does not. (Comparison Chart)
Criteria for Good
The action of selling an additional product or service to an existing customer. For example, you can offer another item either similarly priced or less expensive that can be added to the total purchase. The PET Sort technical identifies where in the user journey users are most likely to be persuaded (the seducible moment) and what additional items might then be purchased.
Cross Sell
The complete set of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services over the duration of their relationship with that supplier. The user experience of a customer during the process of considering and potentially purchasing an item is a component of their overall experience.
Customer Experience
A trust factor and one of the most significant ways to assess both the site and the organization. Users specifically search the web to find and review other users’ comments. Making provision on your site for these comments and ensuring you a providing a positive customer experience will increase trust.
Customer Service Comments
A PET technique in changing impression linked to the Contrast Principle. People want comparison before buying things, so you persuade them to select a short number of easily compared choices and then introduce another choice that is less equivalent or inferior. For example, you are more likely to get people to purchase a front loader washing machine if you give them two front loader choices (easily compared) and a 3rd choice of a top loader (less easy to compare). It’s easy to compare them, recognize the contrast in quality, and conclude the better quality item is the best value.
Decoy Strategy
A colloquial term we use for the Paradox of Choice
Decidophobia
A trust factor by which if design quality is high, people are more likely to trust your site.
Design Quality
A common cause of inaction by which people in a group check to see if others are acting before personally taking action. Since everyone is checking or waiting, no one is acting. The chance of someone acting becomes much smaller than if there is only one person present or responsible. Persuasive design seeks to avoid this by addressing the user in the first person (i.e., YOU must act now.)
Diffusion of Responsibility or Pluralistic Ignorance
A persuasive navigational technique that persuades people by having them discover goods or services they may not have thought of. For example, Ikea organizes their stores to force shoppers to walk through every department. the PET Scan technique supports this by identifying cross-sell and up-sell possibilities along the user journey and when the Seducible Moment might occur in each case.
Discovery Optimization
A PET technique in changing impression. A cognitive bias where people place greater value on what they already have vs. what they might acquire in the future. For example, in PET Design, you can offer a trial period, and once people are used to having the product, they might be reluctant to lose it. They’ll be even more likely to purchase the product if the payment is seen as smaller than the loss of the product.
Divestiture Aversion (Fear of Loss)
A trust factor of a site name that is easily spelled, memorable, meaningful, and easy to pronounce. Also, .gov, .com, and .org are more trustworthy.
Domain Name
Core needs that motivate the user toward persuasion objective and should be reinforced in the design.
Drives
The enjoyment that comes from a simple activity that is amusing and requires little skill.
Easy Fun
One’s ability to complete tasks and achieve goals. Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their ability to succeed in a particular situation. People are intrinsically motivated by this, so we should design systems and tasks that promote this feeling of success.
Efficacy
A mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. It’s a prime determinant of the sense of subjective well being.
Emotion
A state of heightened physiological activity often due to external stimuli associated with sex, food, or danger. Humans lower brain structures involved in the limbic system (the lizard brain) are central to reacting to these kinds of stimuli. In PET, we use arousing images to increase interest and engagement in the websites we design.
Emotion Arousal
The intentional and systematic creation of stimuli, objects, and interactions in order to create specific emotional effects. Viscerally or reflectively appealing images could be used in associations with a product or telling people the dangers associated with their behavior.
Emotional Design
A person’s verbal description of their internal emotional experience. In PET, we are interested in emotional reports that we elicit from users during PET interviews.
Emotional Report
Involvement in a user in interaction with an interface or other activity that will result in increased investment in the target product or service.
Engagement
The assessment process people adopt in determining if a website can be trusted:
- Rapid screening: Immediate rejection of websites that make a poor visual impression, show poor design quality, are boring, or include pop-up ads.
- Evaluation for Content: Longer-term acceptance of websites that provide an in-depth, expert, relevant, unbiased, and personalized information, using a clear language to describe a variety of topics.
Evaluating for Trust
The application of design processes with the goal of creating an appropriate experience for the person interacting with the product. this process begins with understanding the needs and wants of the user. Analysis focuses on cognitive, emotional, and motor aspects of the interaction and is completed when the quality of experience is measured with the developed product.
Experience Design
Promote trust by ensuring there’s plenty of good, up to date content throughout your site. Lack of content gives the impression that the site is unfinished, or little interest to your company, or you couldn’t think of anything else worthwhile to include.
Extensive, Current Content
A persuasion tool that affects the experience we have after making the decision. If before a decision is made, we set a particular expectation, then the actual experience will tend to align with that expectation. For example, if you expect a cup of coffee to be very high-quality, then you’ll experience that coffee as being a much higher quality.
Expectation
A persuasive technique for changing behavior in which a reward is given after the completion of a desired behavior. For example, buy one, get one free. In PET design, we recognize the extrinsic reward can be a powerful persuasive motivator. Its use is limited by the fact that people won’t be persuaded if they see a better reward elsewhere and if it destroys people’s more enduring intrinsic motivation that good design should be seeking.
Extrinsic Reward
Monitoring the visual scan and fixations of users. This is often represented as a heat map that shows areas looked at the most frequently or the longest. (Warmer colors such as red and yellow are areas getting the most visual attention.)
Eye Tracking
A trust tool in which pictures of famous people create better trust because it shows that successful people trust the brand and/or the company is well established and can afford to pay for a celebrity endorsement.
Famous People
A persuasion tool of telling people factual information to increase trust. This is a logical kind of persuasion, so they are surprisingly ineffective for persuasion.
Facts
A PET tool that provides feedback on the benefits of changing a behavior. Examples might include designs that demonstrate the health and financial benefits of quitting smoking (e.g., life expectancy increase over time and money saved so far). Motivating people to lose weight might be helped in this way. Data visualization techniques make feedback more engaging and thus more motivating.
Feedback
A PET technique in changing impression. We present information about a desired behavior in such a way that users will feel good both about the way they are and how they’ll feel if they follow the desired behavior. An example is persuading users to file for bankruptcy protection, telling them that there are external reasons to go bankrupt. “It’s not your fault and seeking protection is the responsible thing to do.” It should not be confused with making people feel good through extrinsic rewards.
Feel Good Principle
Satisfaction, triumph, and joy from succeeding in a difficult task. Closely linked to hard fun.
Fiero
A flow is described as the mental state of being fully immersed with energized focus and ecstasy while performing an activity. Flow is associated with a loss of self-awareness and focus on the activity itself. In PET, we can promote flow by designing challenging but achievable tasks. We should avoid designing tasks that are either too easy (boring) or hard (frustrating) and design so users can move to the next level of difficulty as their skills develop. This will maximize intrinsic motivation and engagement.
Flow Theory
Often used with priming, this is a PET technique where we change impression by applying a lens to the way realty is conveyed, so we can control the impression a product or service gives. Typically, we do this by putting the product or service into a specific context that will ensure it’s perceived positively by our targeted customers. An example could be showing professional people to a CEO who wants to be taken seriously at her job.
Framing
A trust factor that indicates expertise, diligence, and sensitivity to the needs of the user.
FAQs
The introduction of game-like interactions to a design to increase arousal to make the site more fun, engaging, intrinsically motivating, and more persuasive.
Gamification
A technique promoting intrinsic motivation. Information is provided to users to set clear goals, shows their progress/performance in meeting those goals, and provides encouragement along the way. There are obvious examples in computer games where you can see your score compared to an opponents.
Goal Setting and Knowledge of Results
The path you design to guide customers along the user journey. This is important for Discovery Optimization is a key part of persuasive strategy used by Ikea for example. Analogously, it’s also used in persuasive website design to ensure that users are exposed with goods, services, and features you’d like to tempt them with.
Guided Path
Fun resulting from challenging situations.
Hard Fun
A PET technique in changing impression. To simplify a complex world, people will tend to judge goods and services offered at a higher price as superior to cheaper ones. In PET, setting a high price may unintentionally persuade people to buy goods, especially if they have no reference as to the real value of what’s being offered.
High Prices Equal Good
A cognitive bias in which people value things they can get NOW more than things of greater value they might get in the future. This is because at a deep emotional level, driven by the limbic system, we seek immediate gain to give us instant gratification. In contrast, rational evaluation of longer-term gains involves the frontal cortex. In battles between emotional tendencies and rationality, emotions usually win.
Hyperbolic Discounting
Motivation that comes from the pleasure of engaging in an activity such as completing a task or achieving a goal. It contrasts with extrinsic motivation, which is in response to the expectation of a reward.
Intrinsic Motivation
A trust factor that shows diligence and when linking to external authoritative sites, gives authority to your site by association. Including links can also be related to arguing against self interest because you’re admitting you do not have all the answers yourself and still want to be helpful even if that means sending users to other sites.
Links
Colloquial term to describe the lower brain structures (limbic system) humans have in common with less complex brains of animals such as lizards. Responsible for innate emotional responses to external stimuli.
Lizard Brain
A theory of motivation that needs are illustrated as layers in a pyramid. Needs at lower levels must be met before the higher levels. A mobile phone could apply to safety and social needs.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
A trust factor where people use their existing knowledge to assess if a website is trustworthy. So present some generally recognized facts that are commonly known by users as a foundation for building trust with more specialized information.
Match Existing Design Knowledge
A PET technique used in pressure compliance. Once you have a customer saying yes, they tend to continue. This is particularly true in online wizards.
Momentum of Yes
A theoretical model of the way the human brain responds emotional to the designs we produce. Norman describes three levels: visceral, behavioral, and reflective.
Norman’s Model of Emotional Design
A PET technique in pressure compliance. People feel pressured into complying with the will of authority figures. In PET design, you can use images, statements, and other content to convey authority figures, such as doctors, nurses, policeman, celerity chefs etc. to reinforce persuasive messages.
Obedience to Authority
A PET emotional design aim for achieving intrinsic motivation. The right degree of task difficulty to move the user toward a level of arousal that will motivate them intrinsically. Too basic is boring; too challenging is frustrating.
Optimal Level of Challenge
A PET emotional design aim for achieving intrinsic motivation. It requires unexpected information or facts to be represented to users that are seen as believable or potentially beneficially and yet unusual or uncomfortable. Neither too ordinary or too unbelievable.
Optimal Level of Dissonance
A PET emotional design aim for achieving intrinsic motivation. It requires an amount of stimulus complexity and amplitude that moves the user forward the right level of arousal to optimize a particular task or desired behavior. Repetitive and dull tasks can be optimized by playing rock music, whereas rock music might be too distracting for demanding tasks such as air traffic control.
Optimal Level of Stimulation
A PET technique in changing impression. This involves people’s tendency to simplify a complex world by grouping things together more than what’s accurate. The cheese is French so it must be good. Getting people to classify a product as one of a well-respected class of products, you will improve the impression of the one you’re promoting.
Over-categorization and Correlation
