Design for the Mind: Seven Psychological Principles of Persuasive Design

by Victor S. Yocco

The days of purely aesthetic design are long gone. Today's web designers are driven by pertinent questions like these: How will I win the battle of the short attention span? How do I put visitors at ease and provide the information they're consciously (and unconsciously) expecting? How will the design of my site encourage users to engage, browse, or buy? There's a body of tested psychological principles that can transform your digital designs by anticipating and benefiting from how human beings react to stimuli. This scientific approach to the decision making process, attitudes to risk and reward, group influence, and more are a treasure trove ready for you to apply to the field of website design.

Design for the Mind: Seven Psychological Principles of Persuasive Design teaches web designers and developers how to create sites and applications that appeal to our innate natural responses as humans. Author Victor Yocco, a researcher on psychology and communication, introduces the most immediately relevant and applicable psychological concepts, breaks down each theory into easily-digested principles, then shows how they can be used to inform better design. The idea is not to produce a use-by-rote set of patterns for digital persuasion, but to deepen your understanding of why people react in the way they do to design features and approaches. After reading the book, you should be equipped to make your work more psychologically friendly, engaging, and persuasive.

Genres: Design, Psychology, Nonfiction, Technology, Software

240 pages, Unknown Binding

First published May 1, 2015

About the author

Victor is a Research Director for a Philadelphia based design and development firm. He works with clients across industries to incorporate the voice of the user into design. Victor received his PhD from The Ohio State University, where he studied psychology and communication with visitors in settings such as natural history museums, science centers, and zoos. He regularly writes and speaks on topics related to the application of psychological principles to design, and user experience research. Victor also speaks and writes on addressing the culture promoting alcohol use in design and tech. He has been a guest on a number of Podcasts including User Defenders with Jason Ogle.

Reviews

[Patty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear, on point, great exercises and examples. Great insights into how to create smart designs, not only beautiful, but efficient.

[Jean Tessier · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book shows how to apply principles from psychology and cognitive science when building user interfaces that are used by humans. Unfortunately, the author only has had limited exposure to psychology, so his knowledge lacks depth. He can point to research and quote various researchers, but it feels more by rote than internalized and comprehensive understanding. This is immediately apparent in the preface and shows up periodically along the book.

I appreciated the quick tour of psychological concepts. It gives many pointers for things to read further.


planned behaviors
decisions with an uncertain outcome
Fogg's model
how to influence the decisions of others
social influence
framing communications
persuasion, with a focus on ELM


These models clearly appeals to the author, but he could do a better job of convincing his readers that they are worthwhile models. It is not clear to the lay person whether these models are gaining traction in the psychology/behavior community. The way the author uses them to solve design issues reads more like a list of "life hacks".

Each concept is treated on its own, with few connections to each other. The formula for each chapter quickly becomes tedious. The author should have connected or contrasted the material on persuasion with the other psychological principles in the book. The case study near the end was a missed opportunity to tie the elements of the book together. They are hastily put together and rapidly glossed over, with too much focus on what was used and not enough on what was left out or why it didn't apply in that context.

The author also places a lot of value (to much, in my opinion) on having researchers drive the user testing. Yes, professionals will get you the very best results, but there is a lot you can do on your own and still get a much value.

In summary, the book is an interesting list of pointers for further research.

[Tracy]

This was a useful introduction that better described some things I knew about vaguely, gave names to other concepts, and presented some new to me information. I skimmed the book and had to generalize a lot of the info because I'm not a UX / web designer, but found parallels and compliments to my work with community-based social marketing and educational graphic design. The first half was better organized than the second, which seemed to break related concepts up into deeper focus than the first half did. This could have gone for a narrower page size or two column layout for easier reading.

[Yvo Hunink · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the perspectives and I definitely learned a lot and when I will be designing a new product I will go back to those lessons. However, the production of the book itself could be much better. Images that are hard to read. An endless stream of bullet points. Some repetitions. Also, the examples were too easy and straightforward, not that inspiring.

If you are designing a product, buy it and cherry pick the lessons that are valuable. However, not back to back reading material!

[Taya · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only book for uni I’ve read through.
The writing style is engaging and the examples quite explicit and clear. However, I wouldn’t say that the book is for those willing to know everything about psychological principles, they are discussed very briefly.
Would recommend reading as a quick guide on how to communicate with one’s customers or users.

[Christophe Addinquy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is about UX. Not the casual UX, but mostly the deep psychology anchored UX. Or at least it aims to be. Unfortunately, even if the author refer often to academic research papers, the text is often abstract and unclear. The book missed basic pedagogic approach, even the examples didn't ring a bell. In the end, it was a sisappointing book that left me with no clue about the message.
Ma note de lecture en Français ici

[T · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

A bit dense at times for me (definitely a novice in this field), but gave some good insight as to how to why people are attracted to things, how to appeal to this, and the steps to keep this attraction going. As a yoga teacher who is looking to expand an online presence (outside of the usual Instagram suspects), I'll be referring back to this book.

I received a copy of this book via a Goodreads giveaway. Many thanks to the author & publisher for their generosity.