Persuasive Design Articles & Videos

  • The Hidden Why: Behavioral Economics for UX

    Use behavioral-economics frameworks to uncover hidden friction in your experience and design UX solutions that better support user action.

  • Clean the Sludge from Decision-Making Workflows

    Help users make choices they’ll be satisfied with to boost satisfaction and retention by simplifying decision-making workflows.

  • Delightful UX Is Like a 3-Legged Stool

    Delight can be experienced viscerally, behaviorally, and reflectively. A delightful design must consider all three of these pillars.

  • Psychology for UX: Study Guide

    Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about some principles of human psychology and how they relate to UX design.

  • Basic Psychology Is Essential for UX Practitioners

    Basic psychological principles can guide you as a UX designer because most users share many common characteristics. Consider learning more about: motivation, attention, memory, persuasion, learning, decision making, emotion, sensation, perception, or cognitive biases.

  • Two Tips for Better UX Storytelling

    Effective storytelling involves both engaging the audience and structuring stories in a concise, yet effective manner. You can improve your user stories by taking advantage of the concept of story triangle and of the story-mountain template.

  • Autonomy, Relatedness, and Competence in UX Design

    Addressing these 3 fundamental psychological needs in our products increases user motivation and well-being. Users will be more engaged and more likely to use our designs.

  • Reciprocation: Why Login Walls Aren’t Always “Better"

    The reciprocity principle states that people, when given something upfront, tend to feel a sense of obligation to repay what has been provided. Login walls reverse this sequence and require users to disclose personal info before allowing access to content. People often resent this, and may not be as forthcoming or cooperative as a result.

  • Social Proof in UX

    Users take cues from other humans: if many others like something or do something, that makes people feel that this thing must be good.

  • The Scarcity Principle in UX: Don't Miss Out!

    When people think that something is rare or only available for a limited time, they will tend to act fast to secure that scarce item. This behavioral principle can be used in user experience design, but beware of overuse.

  • Net Promoter Score in User Experience

    Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple satisfaction metric that's collected in a single question. While easy to understand, it's insufficiently nuanced to help with detailed UX design decisions.

  • 4 Trustworthiness Factors

    Users are constantly evaluating whether they believe what you're saying and whether to leave a website. You can do 4 things to make users trust you more and stay on your site.

  • Video Game Engagement vs Addiction

    An engaging gameplay experience is good design. But there's a fine line between engagement and addiction, which would be bad UX, especially in the long term.

  • Persuasive Storytelling Rule #1: Adapt Your Vocabulary

    Storytelling is a powerful technique for UX teams and for working with stakeholders, but only if you use the proper words for your audience's domain. Here are tips for building vocabulary for your stories.

  • The Halo Effect in UX Design

    The Halo Effect says that any one element in a user's experience with a company will rub off on their interpretation of other elements and their feelings about the company as a whole. Good design in one part of a website will make people like other parts better (and like the company better), but the opposite is also true.

  • The Negativity Bias in a User's Experience

    Negative experiences have stronger emotional impact on humans than positive experiences do. Thus, in designing the user experience, we need extra emphasis on avoiding those lows.

  • How Anchoring Influences UX

    Anchoring is a psychological principle which can impact how people perceive value and make decisions — in real life and on an interface.

  • Ecommerce Selling Strategies from Brick and Mortar Stores

    The user experience of shopping online can be enhanced by employing proven selling strategies from physical stores in the design of ecommerce websites.

  • How Priming Influences UX

    Priming is a basic principle of psychology with big impact on user interface design: exposure to something makes a user more likely to think and react in related ways at later steps in the interaction.

  • 6 Rules for Persuasive Storytelling

    Stories build empathy and make the user needs and pain points memorable to your team. Effective stories speak the language of the audience, are rooted in data, and take advantage of compelling artifacts.