User Experience for a Better World

Is PET design Really New?

I’ve got a few great questions that ask (often with great passion) if this PET Design is really new. They suggest I am churning up old stuff and claiming it is a new wave of the information age (for purposes of wealth, fame, and perhaps acclaim from my Mother). So let's be clear. PET design is not an all new skill set HFI suddenly invented. John Watson applied psychology to persuasion at JWT in the 1920s! In fact I personally published on the topic on online PET design in 1981. The area of online persuasion is NOT new, but its time is now.

The point I am making is that just now PET design is becoming the differentiator. It is routine to have good functional hardware and software. We are now getting near a point where it is routine to have usable offerings. As usability becomes a commodity, usability is no longer enough. To win in the market you need great hardware, software, and usability. But you must also design to optimize persuasion.

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Comment by Eric Schaffer on December 9, 2008 at 4:02pm: The foundation of PET has to be deep in the field of psychology. We need to be able to take principles of intrinsic motivation and drive fulfillment to ensure that our offerings create the right reaction in customers, we also need to also apply Don Norman's viewpoint on making things that people love. But then we have to go beyond this set of principles for designing desirable things.

In PET design we have to apply the sometimes scary principles of persuasion engineering. This is a set of dark arts that work off of people's emotional triggers and work at the level of habit. We need also to look at the question of engagement, perhaps creating fanatics! In any case there are indeed a lot of marketing people who have used these principles in their campaigns (though mostly they just prime, frame, and condition). But the interesting extension we are finding is the potential for application to online environments.

PET Design is powerful stuff. I've enjoyed focusing on it and have drawn on a very wide range of models and research to create the HFI methodology for PET. And i have hopes that we can start to use it in positive ways. In Africa these principles have been used to get people to wash with soap after using the toilet. It has saved many lives (though obviously not enough). But I wonder if we can go further still. I wonder how far we can go using PET Design to improve things?

Comment by Abey John on December 9, 2008 at 2:53pm: Good topic for discussion Eric, the questions which have been poppin up in my mind are - How does PET improve on conversion luminaries like Bryan Eisenberg's Always be Testing or Tim Ash's Landing Page Optimization?

Comment by Diane Chojnowski on November 25, 2008 at 6:22pm: Comments on Eric's post:

Robin said...

'usability is becoming a commodity' If only this was true. However the PET principles are very good, I think we should realize that proper UID is the basis which more than often is missing. On the other hand PET is the way to go for organizations with a proper UID-base.
October 7, 2008 4:06 AM