Design Rhetoric
In the first and final analysis, design is about effecting change in people’s choices and behavior. People choose to use or enjoy a particular design. People change, modify or adapt their behavior in order to engage new features, new functionality and new experiences. In other words, they are persuaded—or they persuade themselves—that the design is worth their time, effort, money and/or resources.
—The Power of Persuasion; by Michael Schrage
The question isn’t whether or not you should use persuasive design techniques. You already use design rhetoric; the question is how effectively? The captology of design rhetoric has a practical objective: To understand, through user testing, what design communicates. In other words design rhetoric is fundamental to design and communication literacy.
The implication of tests like The Stanford Web Credibility project is users are increasingly design literate, they will “read” into design to determine credibility. Designers need to understand the user takeaway of design decisions, and most don’t.
Design Ultimatums “The computer won’t let me…”
When prompted, users told us they knew they could donate money to the Red Cross. What they didn’t learn was that they could also donate stock, clothes, and airline miles. Even though this information was readily available on the content page, no user realized there were other options. We learned the content page was not doing its job communicating all of the relevant information. To succeed, the team needed to highlight the different vehicles for donation better.
—5–Second Tests: Measuring Your Site’s Content Pages By Christine Perfetti
For an example of design rhetoric, take a nonprofit web site design. Making the site look opulent can send the wrong message. The user may get the impression the nonprofit has too much money or doesn’t spend money effectively. This does not mean a nonprofit site should be primitive looking, simply that it shouldn’t be overdesigned. Design rhetoric isn’t about making claims, but using the design to persuade users those claims have meaning.
Software construction provides the error code, an example of an ultimatum. Offering the user little information and less choice, error codes treat the user as just another chunk of code to pass data to.
Apple computer’s design rhetoric was to teach computers about people, when competitive wisdom was to adapt people to computers. It would have been far too easy to come up with hyperbole than develop the Apple human interface guidelines famous among interaction designers. Apple understands the alignment of product reality and marketing communication which returns to the classical roots of rhetoric as effective communication.
Users, wanting new music on their player, needed to purchase an entire CD album, even if they were only interested in a single song. Once purchased, putting the music on the machine was extremely difficult, requiring many steps and several different interfaces to “rip” the music, transfer it to the player, and subsequently listen to the music — all made by different companies with radically different commands and displays.
…Apple’s designers could see something better emerging from this mess. They imagined a future where music listeners could find the specific song they wanted, click a single button and the system would instantly purchase the music, download it, and transfer it to the player, ready to listen to.
—Innovation is the New Black
Notice nobody makes MP3 players anymore, they make (or try to make) iPod killers. Cloners try to reverse engineer the technology, never the focus on user experience. And so one imitator after another — many with specs superior to the iPod — fails. Apple didn’t construct a small computer for processing MP3 data files; they designed a system for users to manage their music collection. The people constructing websites fall into the same trap product developers do. Focusing on discrete components to the exclusion of the connections and integration of the parts. And the design faithfully communicates fragmentation to the user.
Let’s make a key distinction here: These features and functionalities may, indeed, be easy to use. They may also be accessible. But ease of use and ease of access do not converge magically into persuasiveness. Just because I find something is easy to do does not mean I am persuaded to do it.
—The Power of Persuasion; by Michael SchrageA design team competing with Apple has to understand the product ecosystem of hardware, software and services; connections and integration rather than components and superior specs. Bruce Tognazzini provides a crucial interaction design analysis, “The origins of these bits and pieces, however, is not what’s important about the iPhone. What’s important is that, for the first time, so many great ideas and processes have been assembled in one device, iterated until they squeak, and made accessible to normal human beings.” Apple is design driven, relying on system thinking, which is at odds with the context of reductionism and technology centered, feature directed competition.
Wii gestural controlers shift from the passive to active voice in design language. Wired magazine gets to the crux, asking “Will the first batch of games for Nintendo’s Wii console make elegant, intuitive use of the system’s motion–sensing controls? Or will they just be the same old games, with gesture control tacked on as an afterthought?”
One understanding from the study of design rhetoric is what the product line, pricing and business policy also communicate to the customer. Design speaks lounder than the words in marketing materials. When services and policy don’t match design, brand dissonance is what makes a product dissuasive. Applying design rhetoric you can spot flaws; consequently don’t just look at the iPhone, or the EDGE network — the components — watch Cingular/AT&T and Apple.
Design Rhetoric Or Design Erudition
Leading customers to where they want to go, before they know it themselves, provides a huge competitive advantage. This approach involves all functions of the organization. It creates marketers with technological imagination and technologists with marketing imagination.
— C K Prahalad
Much is made of the term design language, yet in The Power of Persuasion Schrage admonishes “the design community must invest greater creativity and rigor exploiting the potential of design rhetoric.” When there is no responsibility to design effectively, what we have is design erudition, or a design monologue directed at users and customers. Outré designs, conspicuously unusual simply for the sake of being unusual, remove the user from the loop in the name of artistic license.
Design rhetoric concerns using design effectively to please or persuade. Rather than competing monologues, user testing makes design a conversation. Captology provides the tools and interaction design methodology to make design rhetoric possible.
Wherever there is stakeholder buy–in there is persuasion. Whenever there is information there is a decision to be made and there is influence. Web site designs either persuade or dissuade visitors from converting into customers. Product desirability is bound to the idea someone is moved to buy one product and not another.
Design as language should imply a responsibility to discover what the user understands. Design rhetoric simply makes the designer’s responsibility clear.
Related Articles
Design Crux Takes On The Alarm Clock
Resources
- I. A. Richards “Rhetoric is the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.”
- Gerard A. Hauser “Rhetoric is an instrumental use of language. One person engages another person in an exchange of symbols to accomplish some goal. It is not communication for communication’s sake. Rhetoric is communication that attempts to coordinate social action. For this reason, rhetorical communication is explicitly pragmatic. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that require immediate attention.”
- Samuel M. Edelman “Rhetoric can be defined as the art or method of reconciling of individual and systemic goals and constraints.”
- Charles Bazerman “The study of how people use language and other symbols to realize human goals and carry out human activities … ultimately a practical study offering people great control over their symbolic activity.”
- When ROI Isn’t Enough: Making Persuasive Cases for User–Centered Design is a good overview of what design rhetoric is.
- Bruce Tognazzini The iPhone User Experience: A First Look An insightful interaction design critique. In his Apple Phone article, Cringely does the information work of looking at services and policy. Reaction to the iPhone reveals how the electronics industry failed to beat the iPod “They think of smart phones as a computing tool, in which the number of features are more important than the user interface.” The Customer Service Elite charts Apple at #14 …no other PC company made the list.
- Apple is about design innovation, which brings up what few understand: The difference between invention and innovation. Products like the iPhone are much more about integration and related services than individual components and product specs. Design driven companies focus more on cutting edge customers than cutting edge inventions.
- GM: Cool But Misguided? “Moreover, while styling was what kept buyers coming back year after year for the latest edition of their favorite car, Donner could not stand the prima donnas in charge of automotive styling. So, out of touch with where the public wanted the car companies to go in the future and completely dismissive of those inside of GM who did understand the proper evolution of the automobile, Donner slowly but surely led GM off the path to success.” The design crux: Will these concepts ever get built? The concept–to–production design gap is like a clear, revealing memo from the executive suite.
- Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First makes a common error. The article confuses clarity of communication with effectiveness. Most sites communicate clearly. They communicate a missmatch of message to market clearly. They communicate how different stakeholders never came together to agree on site focus clearly. You don’t have to be an expert on rhetorical analysis to clearly see where the content strategy is missing, you only have to be a site user, or see your content as users do. All design rhetoric offers is understanding and control over what your design communicates.
- Zune Reviews: It's OK, But No iPod “…Microsoft was hoping to make a big splash. However, it won't be getting any help from the technology media, which have for the most part passed over the so–called “iPod killer” in lackluster reviews.” iPod rivals ready for prime time at last? “But analysts note that Apple rivals still lack a simple link between online services and devices.” Innovation is the New Black “Apple and Netflix gained insight by investing in understanding the current experience of their potential customers.”
- Much of the iPod was developed by outside companies including the scrollwheel. Few companies understand Apple’s design secret isn’t components, but system thinking, integration and use centered design, which confounds reverse engineering reductionism.
- We live in a service economy. Yet few companies understand how to design a superior customer experience. The crux of service design is you can have good process and still deliver bad service. Only recently have managers in the service sector realized applying design techniques to services can result in greater customer satisfaction, greater control over their offerings and greater profits.
- A semiotic communication model for interface design; Raffaella Scalisi “HCI has focused his attention on the medium and on the receiver, but there are some factors in the communication process that are even more important: the sender, the code and the context.”
- Visual Design for the User Interface Part 1: Design Fundamentals; Patrick J. Lynch, MS presents a thorough overview of visual design rhetoric for GUIs ranging from newspapers to biomedical application interfaces.
- Engadget covers the Apple case scratch flap while iSkin capitalizes on it with their own case line. Coolest Games Tap Wii’s Weirdness explains developers require unique interaction design based around the new user experience.
- A mirror that reflects your future self, alters your reflected appearance based on sensor input of your good or bad habits. Such feedback can persuade a behavior change before extrapolated effect becomes reality. Another example of dissuasive design rhetoric is a GPS equipped car sensor system detecting and logging a teen’s unsafe driving; reporting it directly to a parent’s cell phone.
- Nonprofits like charities have a rhetorical hurdle: explaining why efficiency isn’t effectiveness. A List Apart discusses a key to rhetorical website design: Start With a Clearly Defined Purpose, and having an excuse is not developing a purpose for a website.
- What design as language is meant to communicate can be endlessly debated in academic circles. What design as rhetoric might find a more pragmatic metric is the gross tonnage and popularity denominated in dollars spent for dummies books.
- Called silicon sanctimony by Cooper, when the implementation model trumps interaction design the result is a design ultimatum. Poorly designed error codes are one example of an ultimatum: illusory controls which force user consent. When product designs go wrong, ultimatums are often a cause.
- The ESP Game persuades by making the building of image tagwebs fun. Visitorville turns web visitors into web widgets; using a SimCity graphical front end for user friendly web site traffic analysis down to individual user segments. The article Delightful Identification & Persuasion: Towards an Analytical and Applied Rhetoric of Digital Games by Steffen P. Walz explains the rhetoric of digital games like SimCity.
- Perhaps the more practical application for design rhetoric is studying what persuades people to forward links alternatively known as viral marketing. Fledgling captologists can start with some background on the study of memetics. A good article for web marketers is What Makes It Viral?
- A shoe which persuades a more healthy lifestyle, the Square–eyes insole has a pedometer built in. The activity data is transmitted as time credits to a television or other device. The product design rhetoric is to persuade a different behavior in sedentary lifestyles.
- The STATIC! project uses ambient information design techniques to create a power cord which persuades a change in user energy consumption. By visualizing power used, a feedback loop is created allowing users to gain control over power consumption.
- Moen’s Design Your Own Kitchen configurator uses design rhetoric by placing faucet selection in context.
- Design Rhetoric & Handcrafted Objects This project was designed to prove a hypothesis that handcrafted objects use a persuasive design language that influences purchase decisions in some consumers. Looking at these object with a lens relying on design rhetoric as defined by Richard Buchannan, I created a survey to discover when logos (technological reasoning), pathos (emotion), and ethos (character) are influential factors in choosing handcrafted objects. Specifically, I was interested in asking people to compare two coffee/tea mugs to reveal “what matters.”
- “Yes, design is about “form follows function.” Yes, design is about “user–centered” features and accessible packaging. Yes, design is about “creating experiences.” But, design and the design process are also acts of persuasion. Good design—effective design process—possesses the power to persuade.” (PDF) The Power of Persuasion by Michael Schrage, author of Serious Play (Harvard Business School Press 2000).
- How Users Matter: The Co–Construction of Users and Technology; Edited by Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch. The premise of a “social construction of technology” brings to mind the William Gibson bromide, “The Street find its own uses for things — uses the manufacturer never imagined.” Where many companies used this basic idea to cede parts of marketing, research and even development to users, this book suggests the opposite. The book could be useful for advocating a look at users and technology as a system dynamic worthy of study. A refreshing change from the corporate translation of Gibson’s quote “throwing it at the wall and seeing what sticks.”
- Guiding Users with Persuasive Design: An Interview with Andrew Chak
- 5-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site’s Content Pages
- There are a range of definitions for rhetoric: