Do Users Know What Designers Are Up To? Product Experience and the Inference of Persuasive Intentions

Wright then proceeded to introduce the idea that consumers develop knowledge of persuasion that helps them to identify how, when and why marketers are trying to influence them. Almost a decade later, Friestad and Wright (1994) published ‘The Persuasion Knowledge Model’, which elaborated the conceptual foundations for studying how consumers identify that they are involved in ‘persuasion episodes’ and how they actively manage those episodes to achieve their own goals. In this article, I propose that the Persuasion Knowledge Model is relevant to the study of product experience because just like advertisements, products may be shaped by persuasive intentions, these intentions may be inferred from the product and these inferences may shape users’ experiences. Like Wright, I see this as something that we might be expected to know about, something that we should know about, but something that we don’t know much about. This article aims to encourage and facilitate the study of whether, how and to what effect users infer the persuasive intentions of designers. In line with this objective, the focus is not on reporting empirical work, but on establishing the theoretical and methodological foundations on which such work might be developed. The article begins by explaining why aspects of product experience might be thought of as persuasion episodes. I then review the Persuasion Knowledge Model and discuss how it relates to product experience. This leads to the identification of three key research questions for design and the description of how some basic research methods could be adapted to address those questions. I then discuss some extracts from an exploratory study of users’ design knowledge so that the reader can assess the plausibility of the proposed work and appreciate some of its potential difficulties. Finally, I outline how considering users’ perspectives on designers’ intentions might both challenge and complement traditional ideas about product experience. ORIGINAL ARTICLE