Captology - Computer Technology as a Persuader
This is the first, of we hope many articles to be published by Joe McLeod - Olympic's Manging Director.
Joe opitimises the word 'visionary' and hence his tall, wide and extravagant thoughts are well worth tuning into! We trust you'll enjoy what he has to say as much as we do!
Captology - now this is a very interesting topic. It is a word that has been around the software business now for a little over 10 years. It was created by a brilliant psychologist; B J Fogg. As a doctoral student at Stanford University (1993-1997), Fogg used methods from experimental psychology to demonstrate that computers can change people's thoughts and behaviours in predictable ways. His thesis was entitled "Charismatic Computers."
Believe it - we can get computers to really help people do their work faster and more completely. We have done that for Big Save with their Sales Order Capture System, and with the implementation of the new Trader platform Brother now have complete and flexible control of user interaction. Of-course the original Trader platform that underpins the Woolworths and Foodtown online shopping sites was the work that focussed our minds on the importance of incremental improvements in the user experience. But back to B J Fogg……
He founded the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. The Lab received a grant from the National Science Foundation in 2005 to support experimental work investigating how mobile phones can motivate and persuade people, an area the lab calls "mobile persuasion." In 2003 Fogg published the book "Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do." This book lays the foundation for captology. The word comes from "Computers As Persuasive Technologies"
I loved his book. But it is not for everyone. We're in the business and designing systems that also help clients implement the human side of business change is not just an important part of our craft, it is a critical factor in you getting the results you want. Most of you will get more value from browsing his blog than reading his book, I suspect.
In a nutshell, persuasive technology is about using digital media to influence and change people's behaviour, attitudes and emotions. I won't go into all the details that fascinate me and bore others, but there is one very important point that needs to be made..."it takes more than technology and an attractive easy interface". Like all aspects of human behaviour, the pleasure, the joy, the excitement, the fantastic experience, is all about getting the timing right. Fogg calls these moments Persuasion Windows.
Persuasion windows are key-moments when people are more open to being persuaded, arising when personal motivation and ability coincide with a trigger or a call to action. Being able to identify, open and use persuasion windows is central to achieve behavioural change. (See BJ Fogg's Behavior Model to learn more about this.)
What Causes Behaviour Change?
The Behaviour Model shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for behaviour to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. When behaviour does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing.
Using the Behaviour Model (FBM) as a guide, designers can identify what stops users from performing behaviours that designers seek. For example, if users are not performing target behaviour, such as rating hotels on a travel web site, the FBM helps designers see what psychological element is lacking. But even more crucial for an effective persuasion strategy is to think clearly about the target behaviour or the type of behaviour you seek. Because not all behaviour is the same, BJ Fogg developed the Behaviour Grid framework to show what types of behaviour change might most easily be achieved through certain persuasive strategies and techniques.
Facing the challenge of collaborative innovation and crowd sourcing, companies increasingly make use of web 2.0 technology and tools to carry out and coordinate the fuzzy frontend of the innovation process. However, there are a number of issues in taking web 2.0 tools that have succeeded in an open web environment and applying them to the enterprise, one of them concerning how to motivate, enable and activate staff collaboration.
For this reason, Qwikir is equipped with process design features based on enablement, interaction and self-organization, in addition to standard conventional process modelling techniques that are biased towards predetermined task sequences and data structures. Persuasive technology is highly relevant in this context, because it focuses on attitude or behaviour change resulting from human-computer interaction.
I believe that a collaborative tool should above all be suggestive, offering guidance and warning, more than high-level control and regulation provided to keep things on the straight and narrow. For this reason, the use of persuasive technology aimed at forging connections, improving communication, and enabling coordination among groups of people is such an interesting area of research for us. That is why we are so excited about Qwikir.
We are doing some work for Claymark at the moment using Qwikir to provide a very simple yet collaborative web for the approval and annotation of purchase orders created in Dynamics GP.
Be in touch again soon - Joe.