McCoy, Katherine. ‘Information and Persuasion: Rivals or Partners?’ Design Issues 16, no. 3 (2000): 80–83. doi:10.1162/07479360052053342.
“Some content is understood as information and some content is labeled as persuasion, promotion, or even propaganda. In this scheme of things, information is noble.”
Richard Sal Wurman coined “information architecture” to describe graphic design. This “vision of communications fits well with the modernist ideal of objective, rational design” and that “persuasion is distasteful, associated with the worlds of advertising and marketing—emotional, subjective, manipulative, and superficial.”
Question
- What do you feel is the difference between graphic design and advertising?
- What forms of graphic design are also advertising?
- Is advertising always a bad thing and where might it have uses?
- Who participates in advertising?
Information and persuasion are not a dichotomy, “they are modes of communication that overlap and interact.”
Information must be persuasive in order to be noticed, distribute its content or encourage a behaviour as “even ostensibly informational content—factual, objective, even numerical—conceived with pure “informational” intentions of the sender—the airport or the local government—with no promotional intentions, must persuade many readers to pay attention, and to get involved.”
“Even an audience member that “needs” some information (i.e., for traffic safety) also must possess the “desire” for this information to complete the communications look. A message only becomes information when someone cares to make use of it.”
Persuasion “creates desire”.
Persuasion Definition
“A basic definition of persuasion is an attempt to shape or change a user’s behaviour or attitude. Persuasion exerts a direct influence on behaviour, and promotes a response. Promotional communications encourage behaviour.”
Seduction Definition
“Seduction is a key tool for persuasion.”
“Seduction initiates the entry step in the communication process, promising a reward for the audience’s attention. Once drawn into the communication piece, the quality and relevance of its information takes over, engaging the reader on deeper levels.”
“In these days of media saturation and multi-channeling, there is fierce competition for the reader’s attention, and readers have increasingly short attention spans. Seductive media can persuade a reader to pay attention, to get in bed with the message content and spend some time with it.”
Abbreviated to “these days…there is fierce competition for the reader’s attention…Seductive media can persuade a reader to pay attention…and spend some time with it [the message content’.”
Interactive Electronic Communications + Nonlinear Messaging
This provides a great discussion regarding digital navigation and UX design. However, in practice, I believe this is applied more to the banner and sidebar advertisements that websites serve daily which act as distraction from the information the reader visited the sight to glean. Advertising here doesn’t so much “seduce” the reader into paying attention to it but rather jumps in front of the reader shouting and waving its hands around like a child seeking acknowledgement.
“Persuasion and seduction seem especially relevant for the design of interactive electronic communications. Nonlinear messages make it difficult to orient and direct the reader with traditional graphic strategies conceived for linear message sequencing. An Internet site’s reader can choose their own paths, breezing by key content, and may be diverted by links to other sites on the Web.”
I’d argue that techniques employed by website marketing firms operate less on the idea of seduction and are based more on hijacking and subterfuge.
See: Reply-all #3 We Know What You Did
Interview with the Ethan Zuckerman who invented the Internet popup advertisement with a link to the article https://www.eyerys.com/articles/people/1367632976/opinions/advertising-original-sin-web. Note that the original The Atlantic article appears to be unavailable online.
McCoy continues: “seductive communications strategies can direct and prompt the reader/user to follow comprehensible reading paths, and to make appropriate responses in software operation.” She attributes responses in interactive media such as highlight “Ok” buttons as “persuasion to reduce effort and to channel the reader to useful paths through complex material and difficult software tools.” For Websites, this might also correlate to the way sites react to user action such as drop down menus and highlighted options.
Seduction in Three Steps
Attributed to Julie Khaslavsky and Nathan Shedroff in “Understanding Seductive Experiences.”
- Enticement “attractions attention and makes an attractive promise.
- Relationship “gives small fulfillments (or feedback) and promises more fulfilment.
- Delivery “on final promises, and the experience ends in a memorable way.”
This comes with a note “that effective seduction need not actually reach the third stage—that useful ongoing, long-term relationships can be based on incremental fulfillments.”
There’s a strong connection here to the way in social media such as Facebook and Instagram manage to engage and hold readers and users. Hearts and Likes provide validation for participation—the more you get the better you feel and the more you like—which encourages constant use. This seduction cannot be fulfilled within the application itself, however. Likes accumulate and fade away but never amount to the delivery fo total satisfaction.
She concludes “information/persuasion is not an “either/or” choice, but rather an “and/also” interaction between communication modes” and there can be “a complex interaction between the sender’s intentions, message content, the audience/user’s motivations, the communications context, and the designer’s strategies.
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