Column: More Than Words

“Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.”—Aristotle, Rhetoric

When you think of persuasion, what comes to mind? Tricks such as the name repetition and personality mirroring touted by Dunder Mifflin sales representatives? Devious emotional pleas like those Bart Simpson wields on his dad? The constantly shifting rhetoric of unctuous politicians? Deceptively “free” software that actually is spyware?

Such funny and frightening examples are not really persuasion at all. They are forms of manipulation, and they give persuasion a bad name. As I discussed in my previous column, elements of persuasion are important to creating winning content. To help safeguard content from becoming manipulation, we need to understand its distinction from persuasion. As a step toward that understanding, this article

• provides basic definitions of persuasion and manipulation
• explores the key differences between them
• describes some consequences for UX content

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As a participant in the Content Strategy Consortium at the IA Summit 2009, I have enjoyed watching content strategy grow into a user experience discipline. The most recent and significant sign of content strategy’s rise is the release of Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson. Kristina is a renowned content strategist, co-curator of the Content Strategy Consortium, and president of Brain Traffic. I was honored to chat recently with Kristina about her new book. Read More

Findable. Scannable. Readable. Concise. Layered. We know much these days about how to make Web content usable—thanks to experts such as Robert Horn, Jakob Nielsen, Ginny Redish, and Gerry McGovern. What we don’t understand as well, however, is how to make content win users over to take the actions we want them to take or have the perceptions we want them to have. We don’t understand how to make Web content both usable and persuasive. I, by no means, intend to imply that we should sacrifice the usability of content to make it more persuasive. Truly winning content must be both.

Gerry McGovern’s work perhaps delves deepest into the realm of persuasive content, emphasizing a customer-centric approach and the removal of filler content. However, I think we can do even more to win users over through content. I also remain unconvinced that the extreme minimalism McGovern supports is always appropriate. For instance, the “brutal” concision McGovern espouses in his recent article, “Killer Web Content Examples,” while usually appropriate for headlines, titles, or labels, risks creating the wrong tone in other types of content. As a starting point in the journey toward turning usable content into winning content, this article offers key resources that illuminate the creation of usable content and some tips for creating persuasive content I’ve garnered from my own experience. Read More