Using Persuasion, Emotion, and Design to Meet Customer Needs

Course Description

This workshop is designed to teach you the fundamentals of Persuasive Webpage Design in order to help you encourage positive behavior and action online. You'll review principles well known to behavioral economists and psychologists, but rarely applied online despite their effectiveness.

You'll learn how these principles are integrated into the design of many sites (e.g., Groupon, Mint, etc.) and how these techniques are helping citizens make decisions and encourage positive behaviors (e.g., saving energy, being environmentally conscious in national parks, saving money).

In hands-on sessions you will apply these principles to group projects, consider the ethics of influence and how to appropriately apply these techniques to benefit citizens, and develop a take-home “persuasive design checklist” so you can immediately begin to use what you learned and share it with others.

What You Will Learn

The workshop, which features presentations along with interactive sessions, will teach you:

• How often we make decisions using emotion that are (at times) far from logical
• The core psychological principles of influence and persuasion
• How persuasive design is being used today in the commercial and government space in positive ways
• How to create a “persuasive design checklist” and ensure that your communications and calls to action are as effective as possible
• Concrete ways to apply these principles in your online work
• Where to learn more about this rapidly expanding field

Who Should Attend

This course is for everyone—web managers, content producers, public affairs officials, communications personnel, and anyone involved in a public outreach or citizen engagement that needs to encourage citizens to take action or help them to make decisions.

About the Instructor:

John Whalen has a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and over 10 years of User-Centered Design experience. John's specialty is in creating engaging user experiences using a mix of in-depth user study, online strategy, and deep understanding of human vision, visual attention, memory and decision making. John has lead design and redesign efforts for Fortune 500 clients in the financial, healthcare, eCommerce verticals, associations, and a number of government agencies including DOT/FMCSA, NIH/NINDS, US Courts, FDA, and USDA.

John's latest research interests include how best to make Open Government truly open, how we can positively change behavior using persuasive design, and how mobile devices are changing how we live, relate, and think.