Evil by Design

Chris Nodder is an independent consultant with 20 years' experience working with large organizations and lean startups to make user experience central to their business strategy. He was previously a director at the prestigious Nielsen Norman Group, and a senior user researcher at Microsoft. He has an MS in Human-Computer Interaction and a BS in Psychology.

• Foreword xiIntroduction xiiiEvil designs and their virtuous counterparts xiiiPride 1Misplaced pride causes cognitive dissonance 1Provide reasons for people to use 3Social proof: Using messages from friends to make it personal and emotional 5Dispel doubt by repeating positive messages 7Personal messages hit home 11Gain public commitment to a decision 16Change opinions by emphasizing general similarities 19Use images of certification and endorsement 22Closure: The appeal of completeness and desire for order 25Help people complete a set 26Pander to people’s desire for order 32Manipulating pride to change beliefs 35Sloth 39Desire lines: From A to B with as few barriers as possible 39Path of least resistance 41Reduced options and smart defaults smooth the decision process 44Provide fewer options 45Pre-pick your preferred option 50Make options hard to find or understand 53Negative options: Don’t not sign up! 56Sloth: Is it worth the effort? 64Gluttony 67Deserving our rewards 67Make customers work for a reward 69Consider a small reward rather than a big one 72Hide the math 75Show the problems 78Escalating commitment: foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face 84Foot-in-the-door 84Door-in-the-face 87Present hard decisions only after investment 90Invoking gluttony with scarcity and loss aversion 93The Tom Sawyer effect 93Instill doubt to prevent cancellations 96Impatience leads to compliance 99Self-control: Gluttony’s nemesis 101Anger 103Avoiding anger 104Use humor to deflect anger 104Avoid overt anger with a slippery slope 107Use metaphysical arguments to beat opponents 112Embracing anger 117Use anonymity to encourage repressed behaviors 119Give people permission 124Scare people (if you have the solution) 129Using anger safely in your products 134Envy 137Manufacturing envy through desire and aspiration 138Create desirability to produce envy 138Create something aspirational 140Make people feel ownership before they’ve bought 145Status envy: demonstrating achievement and importance 150Create status differences to drive behavior 151Emphasize achievement as a form of status 154Encourage payment as an alternative to achievement 156Let users advertise their status 159Let people feel important 161Manufacturing and maintaining envy in your products 166Lust 169Creating lust: Using emotion to shape behavior 169Say “I love you” 170Be the second best 174Frame your message as a question 178Create an in-group 182Controlling lust: Using desire to get a commitment 185Give something to get something 186Make something free 190Sell the intangible value 195Make a request in order to be seen more favorably 198Lustful behavior 201Greed 203Learning from casinos: Luck, probability, and partial reinforcement schedules 204Use a partial reinforcement schedule 208Make it into a game 211Customers should “win” rather than “finish” or “buy” 214Further inflate people’s (already overconfident) feelings of skill and mastery 217Make rewards seem due to skill, not luck 221Create a walled garden 225Anchoring and arbitrary coherence 227Own the anchor 229Move from money to tokens 233Encourage breakage 236Make it expensive 238Show your second-best option first 240Break coherence to justify prices 243Feeling greedy? 246Evil by Design 249Should you feel bad about deception? 250Should you feel bad about using the principles in this book? 254Be purposefully persuasive 258The Persuasive Patterns Game 259References 269Index 297