Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences

Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based in Dallas, Texas. He created the Mental Notes card deck, a tool that's widely used by product teams to apply psychology to interaction design. Prior to venturing out on his own, Stephen spent more than a decade building and leading teams of information architects, interaction designers, and UI developers. He's designed web applications for technology startups as well as corporate clients like Nokia, Frito-Lay, Sabre Travel Network, and Chesapeake Energy. Between public speaking and project work, Stephen offers workshops and training to help organizations manage creative teams, make use of visual thinking, and design better customer experiences.

Stephen Anderson does an excellent job introducing the questions that we ask ourselves when we visit a website, open software, buy physical products, and gravitate toward certain people. The book's psychological approach to explaining the catalysts and triggers of human behavior is thorough and provides good examples of how to use those triggers to create a lasting and impressionable experiences. There are 25 chapters which are grouped into four sections...see section descriptions or skip to the bottom line.

Section one (Aesthetics, Beauty, and Behavior) covers topics like gestalt principles/psychology, perceived affordances, product credibility and personality, affect, cognition, and association. Anderson makes plenty of references to other quintessential UX books such as Designing with the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson, Visual Thinking for Design by Colin Ware, and Emotional Design by Donald Norman. Section two (Playful Seduction) covers ways to engage audiences with positive affective states such as humor, the mystique of unexpected behavior, and `delighters'. Anderson also uses specific phenomenon such as the information gap theory to explain alternate methods of eliminating the feeling of deprivation in users seeking information. Section three (The subtle Art of Seduction) covers some of the covert ways that our behavior is influenced by revealing topics such as the endowed progress effect, default options, and the many interfaces that offer suggestions such as Twitter's `Who to follow'. Topics such as loss aversion were clearly outlined and empowers users to be more aware of the influences we encounter while online. Section four (The Game of Seduction) takes a gamification approach to explaining the intrigue of certain user experiences. Read more ›

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I love this book. You can get something useful just by randomly opening it to any page, though I strongly suggest reading it start to finish, and then again with a highlighter! I was looking forward to this book for some time, though a little skeptical given: A) the bold promise of the book and B) this is a topic my own work centers around, so my bar was set quite high. But after spending time with the book, I believe it will be a *HUGE* help to anyone who takes the messages within it seriously.

It's a playful book on a playful topic, but that doesn't mean it isn't powerful. The author has done an amazing job of synthesizing research and implementation ideas from a wide range of domains, all devoted to one goal: creating sustainably engaging user experiences. He manages to do this while including a topic that I typically do NOT like: gamification. However, the author understands the deep implications of how these (game mechanics) techniques can be used, and stays focused on a user-centered context (as opposed to pure marketing-driven manipulation).

This book may look like yet another superficial "make things fun" or even "delightful customer experiences" book, but it's much more. If you want to give your users richer experiences at every level from initial exposure to more advanced use, and create users/customers more likely to stick around and grow with the product, I recommend this book. It's the only book I have found that summarizes these topics in a useful, actionable, way.

Footnote: I was shocked to find my name listed in the credits as an "inspiration" for the topic. I don't know the author, and I would have been extremely disappointed if the book failed to live up to its promise, given my "association" with it. Read more ›