James Williams from a recent Stanford master’s thesis by Devangi Vivrekar, called “Persuasive Design Techniques in the Attention Economy: User Awareness, Theory, and Ethics.” The thesis is mainly about how Vivrekar and her colleagues in the Human-Computer Interaction department designed and experimented with a system called Nudget. In an effort to make the user aware of persuasive design, Nudget used overlays to call out and describe several of the persuasive design elements in the Facebook interface as the user encountered them.
