6 Persuasive Product Design Steps to Get Conversions

Our friends over at Human Factors International recently posted a great video on the six steps to persuasive product design. Take a look at the video below and notice how those steps can get your users to act on your call to action and take that next step:

What Eric Schaffer is taking about it is a more holistic approach to product design. Let's take a closer look at Eric's six steps:

1. Understand our users' emotional battles. We need to understand our users' drives, blocks, emotions and beliefs at key conversion points. Interviewing allows us to delve deep into our customers, learning if they are elephants, deers or rabbits. Even a quick conversation can help us understand the blocks that prevent users from taking those next steps.
2. User insights. Collecting insights from a bunch of customers can reveal the stronger issues at work, such as fear or guilt. That's where thorough user research can be immensely helpful. Nate Bolt gave an amazing soapbox talk on the importance of user research in product design. Check out the transcript and slides of his soapbox here.
3. Pick an emotional strategy likely to work. Product design shouldn't ignore the power of emotion to drive engagement. Designers can even use the seven deadly sins to generate momentum among users.
4. Create a frame for the theme. Focus on a theme, creating a framework or meme for it. This can be central to your product or products. For instance, our apps are centered around the idea that you can design great products faster. In other words, we need to understand the what, why, who and how of our products.
5. Methods of influence. Along with creating a framework, the method of influence, such as testimonial or scarcity, is crucial to communicating the theme. What is the method that's going to best evoke a user's emotions? After all, numerous studies have highlighted how emotions drive our decisions.
6. Study the flow of interactions. We have to study how users move through all the interactions through to the very point of conversion. Think of it this way: What grabs a user's attention? What sustains a user through the interactions? Is your call to action clear? Does it give the user that emotional push to take the next step?

These six steps, however, aren't a one-time thing. This is an ongoing process and doesn't end once a product is launched. Keeping in touch with regular users can key you in on when there is a breakdown of any of these steps and where you might need to reevaluate your approach.