Captology Notebook

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September 24, 2004

7 guidelines for better nagware

More and more, software is being designed to nag us: Register your software! Upgrade to a new version! Back up your data! Like it or not, nagware is here to stay. But it doesn't have to be so annoying. To help improve the state of the art, I'm sharing some guidelines for designing effective nagware: 1. Let users choose how and when the nagging occurs (see
1. Nag at opportune moments Don't interrupt work flow -- soft nags vs hard nags -- causing you to click to dismiss.
2. point out the benefits of compliance
3. frame it as duty (or some way),
3b. frame it as your helping them
4. Give stats (you've used this . . . )
5. create a quick argument visuallly (dramatic visual of what you stand to gain or lose). -- cost benefit.
6. Let them choose how and when the nagging occurs. Allow users to turn off nags or reset preferences easily Naggine is foten left to engineers -- they don't give much thought, but this nagging ends up being central to your brand. It defines who you are and how you get what you want -- by force or by seduction.

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September 21, 2004

Tuesday Funnies

Courtesy of Peter Conrad
For more comics, visit www.peterconrad.com/funnies/index.html

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September 20, 2004

What sounds do people love and hate?

The sounds users hear can change how they navigate a web site. We demonstrated this in three experiments a while back. In general, people click on links or select paths that play pleasing feedback sounds. Our data showed an even more dramatic avoidance of negative sounds. Yes, sounds have an impact on user behavior. But what sounds do people love and hate? We wanted to find out, so we ran a large-scale exploratory study (over 700 participants, over 15,000 sound evaluations). A short article about our results appeared in the newest issue of interactions magazine, pages 64 to 66. Authored by our lab members Jon Effrat, Lisa Chan, myself, and Ling Kong, this article briefly describes our sound study and some implications for design. Just for fun, our article also gives a link to the "most loved" and "most hated" sounds in our study. You can listen for yourself. But be warned: The bad sounds are really awful. Article: What Sounds Do People Love and Hate? Most loved and hated sounds: http://credibility.stanford.edu/sounds/results.html

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September 14, 2004

Tuesday Funnies

Another comic view of how technologies are designed to change what we think and do.

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September 13, 2004

New article: "Credibility of Online Health Information"

Kris Freeman (University of Washington) let me know her thesis research got published. A while back I gave Kris a tiny bit of help, for which she graciously thanked me. I'm always happy to see new research about web credibility and expect more good things from Kris. Congrats! 2004. Freeman, K., Spyridakis, J. An Examination of Factors That Affect the Credibility of Online Health Information. Technical Communication. 51(2):239-263. (registration required to view article)

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September 08, 2004

Top Web Behavior #1: Enter your email address

The Behavior
This behavior is so common that it hardly needs description. Pretty much every website would love to collect your email address, and many are willing to go to the ends of the earth to induce you to give it up. And they'll be sure to send you a confirmation email, so don't try to enter bogus information.

What they gain (and you lose)
Personal data like your email address is extremely valuable. According to a quick check with a broker, 800 email addresses of doctors in Portland, OR will run about 45 cents each. And the same addresses can be sold over and over again. And this is all in addition to the extra revenue site owners hope to generate by bringing you back with emails about sales, special offers and new content.

But this is one behavior that most users are getting wise to, often inspecting privacy policies, creating throw-away email addresses or using services like Mailinator. It will be interesting to see how this behavior evolves, and whether it can keep its top spot as users become even more educated and cautious. (Written by Adam Wright)

Gallery
... Amazon.com
eBay.com
Microsoft.com
NYTimes.com
Webshots.com
(Compiled by Joshua Ainslie)

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September 07, 2004

Tuesday Funnies

A comic expression of persuasive tech... Courtesy of Peter Conrad
For more comics, visit www.peterconrad.com/funnies/index.html

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September 04, 2004

Trust and Credibility Online -- Join the global wiki

Are you interested in online trust and web credibility? If so, keep reading . . . The wiki for "Trust and Credibility Online" brings together interesting people and quality resources related to this topic. Wiki members contribute by growing and grooming the wiki. The wiki also helps people find partners for collaborations. If you're interested, email lab researcher David Danielson to get started. davidd [at] stanford [dot] edu

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September 02, 2004

10 ways computers manipulate people

My most recent captology course at Stanford focused on 10 ways computers manipulate people. In total, I've found about 60 strategies that software can use to change what people think and do. However, for a 10-week course this was way too much content, so we investigated just one strategy each week. On the last day of class, I handed out a ballot listing the 10 strategies we studied. I asked students to vote for the ones they found most powerful. Here's the vote tally: 25 - Making target behavior easy
23 - Playing on user emotions
17 - Rewarding users immediately
08 - Watching and reporting (aka surveillance)
07 - Structuring user behavior (or creating a ritual)
06 - Portraying the computer as an expert
06 - Offering a tradeoff
05 - Publicizing user reputation
05 - Rewarding users via incentives (long-term rewards)
03 - Being persistent Explaining each strategy would make this post really long, so I'll simply touch on a few. "Making target behavior easy" was the #1 choice by my students. Amazon makes good use of this strategy (one-click shopping), as do other websites and software vendors. When something is easy to do, we're more likely to do it. That's pretty obvious, but somehow this truth gets overlooked in many software products and web-based experiences. The #10 strategy was "being persistent"--software that nags you. In my view this is not the weakest strategy in the list, but my students didn't want to vote for it because, like most of us, they hate nagware -- patch this, register for that, and on and on. Our computers have become platforms for nagging. Even though this strategy annoys us, it works. The #2 strategy, playing on user emotions, is really too broad to be on the list. Yes, our emotions control us in many ways. But they work us differently. For example, fear creates a different type of manipulation opportunity than does a positive emotion, such as joy or amusement. You could write a book on how computing systems can evoke different emotions in order to achieve different outcomes. In fact, if I could rewrite Don Norman's most recent book, I'd start off by explaining why emotional design matters: because emotions can get people to think or behavior differently. Designing computing products for emotional impact is clearly part of captology. What strategy intrigues me the most? I find them all fascinating, but one strategy in the list is my current favorite because it's not well understood: "structuring user behavior." To get a glimpse of what this means, think about the rituals in our everyday lives, such as participating in church services, sending holiday greeting cards, getting through airport security, and more. These rituals not only change our behavior, but they also change our attitudes. Consider the airport security ritual. What's the point? Do they really think they'll catch a terrorist this way? Not likely. But the ritual at the airport is designed to make us feel safer. And it works. So what does ritualistic behavior have to do with computers? I'm proposing that more and more, we are engaging in rituals with our technologies, from visiting the same website each morning to checking our system for viruses each night. Because end-user computing is relatively young, our high-tech rituals are not well understood or even recognized. But this much is clear: People today who create high-tech rituals are much like the priests, prophets, and shamans of yore who used rituals to control the thoughts and actions of the masses.

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