21 Oct 2008 1419H

Isn’t that . . . marketing’s function?!

Was reading a white paper from HFI the other day. Said they wanted to move beyond usability, which as I’ve noted in previous posts, as we typically experience it, is more normative than it is positive. In essence they described what Grokdotcom might call Persuasion Architecture, but which they are calling, Persuasion, Emotion and Trust. Since they’re in the business of selling something, I’m not going to link there, I’ll let you google for it. But it’s quite clear that findability and usability alone aren’t sufficient particularly for those of us who work in e-commerce, because while there are a number of techniques that allow people to design experiences which conform to conventions about how people expect things to work or where they would expect to find things, actually motivating the user to do something is an entirely different matter whatsoever. I’m sure something like this is not entirely unknown since there’s a whole research unit at Stanford dedicated to the study of persuasive technologies. So my question is then, well, are we now part of marketing? I have noticed in my journey that typically, in consulting firms, that “interactive marketing” is where user experience and the “creatives” like visual designers and the front-end crew is typically concentrated. And I don’t know if that is necessarily correct. I tend to think that we are all responsible for selling, ultimately, if you choose to work in the realm of e-commerce, and so a separate “interactive marketing” wing tends to build silos that shouldn’t necessarily exist: rather, one might choose make the entire organization silo-less by bringing creatives, technologists, and strategists together at the same table, whereby we might bake in the strategy for marketing as part of the solutions engineering lifecycle. But this leads us to discuss why we have silos for work whereby we don’t consider user experience or visual communications as part of every solution we sell in consulting.

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22 Oct 2008 0928H

Jeffrey Eisenberg writes:

Thank you for recognizing that Persuasion Architecture does deal with exactly this problem. I respect your decision not to link to us and with that in mind I’ll recommend a book in addition to our websites. We described our Persuasion Architecture methodology in greater detail in our book “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?”.

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