Cognitive Design

175 slides by Stephen Anderson that show how web designers use psychology to seduce (deliberately entice) users into various interactions. All of the devices revealed (e.g. challenges, points, levels, feedback loops, visual imagery, playing hard to get, ownership bias, social spoofing, etc.) will be familiar to cognitive designers but some of the examples may be new. I especially like his deconstruction of the social music site iLike.

Slide 85 will be of special interests to cognitive designers. He lists a dozen or so  ”Things we know about people” including that they are curious, lazy and want to be in the hero of the story. Although these description may seem mundane, they are actually a very good list of powerful cognitive needs that if met will produce very seductive designs.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Examples. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.