✍🏻 First appeared Nortal’s blog.

The next loop of User Experience is about designing for persuasion, emotion, and trust. You still need good usability, but it’s often not enough to design a website that is easy to understand, navigate, and interact. Just because people can do something does not guarantee that they will — they must be motivated and persuaded to make decisions that lead to conversion. PET Design is rooted in social psychology and it’s pioneered by Human Factors Inc. It complements classic usability and user experience best practice. In this article I’m going to give an overview of Design for Persuasion, Emotion and Trust (PET Design) and take a look at some PET techniques in detail.

Currently I’m working as a user experience architect at Nortal, but I started my career as a freelance graphic designer more than 12 years ago. Like many others, I created hundreds upon hundreds of web pages as a freelancer, but I have to admit I more often than not felt like a mere tool… a hammer in the client’s hands. They might have wanted me to blindly copy big brands, for example design an Audi or Chevrolet style site for a small auto dealer, even though the users of the site might have been looking for something else entirely. I wasn’t too happy about it.