Summary: A Link show. James and Per discuss three articles found during their digital travels. We begin by talking about Deception and when does persuasive design become evil? Ethnographical research gets a run-through - too achedemic, or value for money? Finally we tackle the question: should designers code? Do we become pegasuses or unicorns? (Listening time: 38 minutes) References: How Deceptive Is Your Persuasive Design? UX Podcast Episode 39 with Jesper Åström Making the Most of Ethnographic Research Gorilla Research video from UXLx 2011 Unicorn, Shmunicorn - be a pegasus “Designers shouldn’t code” is the wrong answer to the right question A pink unicorn: https://twitter.com/uxpodcast/status/370823566293729280 Transcript: Per: Hello and welcome to episode 54 of UX Podcast. You’re listening to me, Per Axbom. James: And me James Royal-Lawson. Per: And you will notice I did not scream hello. James: No, you didn’t. We practiced before the show. Per: Yeah. Well, I was thinking about it real hard now. James: You were. Per: It is really difficult not to say hello loud because I’m so excited every time we record something. James: Yeah, we’re so happy to be here. Per: Lovely day in Stockholm. It’s a bit colder now going into August and I haven’t slept really well actually so I’m really tired this morning. I hope you will do most of the talking James. James: As long as you’re not grumpy. Per: I’m never grumpy. James: Never grumpy? Per: No. James: No. Per: I may slur and not talk very coherently but never, never, ever grumpy. James: As far as kind of like building up buy-in for this episode, you’re doing a fantastic job there Per. Per: Really? Aren’t I? What are we talking about today James? James: Oh, well. Today is a link show. View the full transcript Per: Yes, finally! We haven’t done one in a while. James: We haven’t done for a while. No, we’ve been quite wound up about certain topics. We’ve had a few topic shows and a few interviews including Brad Frost who’s in Sweden at the moment. Per: Oh, yeah. James: At this very moment. Not here with us. Unfortunately Per: Right. He’s in Malmö. James: Now, he is. Yeah. Also we’ve decided to throw together a link show. So we’ve got three links, articles to talk about today that we’ve found during our digital travels. Per: Right. James: As they are normally right? Per: And we don’t agree with any of them apparently. James: It would appear from our little chat this morning that we don’t agree. Per: We are really hard to please. James: Today we seem to be. See, see grumpy old men who haven’t slept. There we go. So which one is first? Per: Let’s start off with deception. [Music] James: This is How Deceptive Is Your Persuasive Design. Per: Yeah, it’s an article by Chris Nodder on the UX Magazine and you know how we design stuff and we have gotten into the habit of realizing that we need to use all these psychological tactics and techniques for persuading people and we’ve in recent episodes talked about social proof and scarcity and all these different things. James: And behavioural psychology. Per: Yeah, peak-end theory and sometimes we get into the, well, insight that perhaps we’re not just persuading people. We’re also deceiving them and this is more notably in the field of ecommerce which neither you nor I really work with a lot James. But if you’re in ecommerce and you’re trying to get people to buy stuff then you want to get people to buy as much stuff as possible because you used all these techniques and I think … James: There’s a business drive there that the business themselves want to convert everybody into customers. Per: Right. James: By and large. Per: And I think the hotel business is really good at this. Hotels.com, I mean you can find so many examples right there. There are not many rooms left.
