Stephen Anderson on Seductive Interactions

A few months back the board of the Houston Interactive Marketing Association decided to start a series of workshops that allowed attendees to delve more deeply into topics than time permitted during the monthly luncheons. Next week Stephen Anderson will be presenting the second of those workshops The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions. Stephen is one of those rare people who not only only gets good design and interaction, but also really understands why people make certain choices when interacting with those designs. I first met Stephen a few years back when he presented The Force Behind Star Wars: Turning Design Ideas into Reality at a Refresh Houston meeting. Since then I have learned that 1)He is a great speaker 2)We share the same birthday 2) He is a designer with an incredible passion for figuring out how to use basic psychology to improve the design of experiences.

I have recently been studying influence and persuasion a lot myself and wanted to hear more about what inspired Stephen to create this workshop and the new card deck that he has been working on for several months. Here are his answers:

Question: What inspired you to create The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions?
Stephen: I was working on two projects– one being a technology startup, the other a media focused software application (along the lines of Boxee). With both projects I noticed something: while there was a great experience being offered once you started using the tool, most people didn’t stick around that long! Either because of initial assumptions or confusion, people would leave before they knew was was being offered. It’s a universal problem–how do you get people to spend more than a few minutes with your site? I came back to a small handful of applications that did a great job of getting me up and going, through a mix of convenience, but also playful and (what I describe as) “seductive” interactions. I started cataloging these examples and looking for explanations, from various texts and research, as to why these experiences are so engaging. It was this search for explanations that led to the creation of the Mental Notes card deck.

Question: How did this lead to the creation of Mental Notes?
Stephen: I’m a big fan of method cards: The Creative Whack Pack, IDEO’s method cards, Eno’s oblique strategies, the Thinkpack and others are all on my bookshelf. That, and I think I’m a sucker for cards of all kinds– I guess it’s my “collecting” nature! Anyway, I’ve had an idea for a different kind of deck for several years, one that has broader application than Web sites. But, in preparing the Seductive Interactions presentation, I started collecting all these ideas and principles, from various sources: psychology texts, certainly, but also books on behavioral economics, storytelling, cognitive science, game mechanics, social design and so on. Since these ideas– many of them being things we can observe just by watching other people–have been given proper names by researchers, it was easy to capture each on it’s own card. From there, it was easy to map ideas (represented on these cards) back to the great Web experiences I was deconstructing….

If you live in the Houston area and have an interest in user experience and design I would highly recommend attending this workshop.