Book Review: Seductive Interaction Design

Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences
Pages: 240
Number of Chapters: 25
Author: Stephen P. Anderson (@stephenanderson)
Available from Amazon.com

Chapter 1 - Why Seductive Interactions?
Chapter 2 - Why Aesthetics?
Chapter 3 - Are You Easily Understood?
Chapter 4 - Are You Attractive?
Chapter 5 - Who Do You Remind People Of?
Chapter 6 - When Aesthetics Aren’t Attractive
Chapter 7 - The Power of Faces
Chapter 8 - Are You Fun To Be Around?
Chapter 9 - Are You Unpredictable?
Chapter 10 - Are You Stimulating?
Chapter 11 - Are You Mysterious?
Chapter 12 - Can People Express Themselves Around You?
Chapter 13 - Small First Steps
Chapter 14 - Coming on Too Strong (and how not to!)
Chapter 15 - Attracting Attention
Chapter 16 - The Path of Least Resistance
Chapter 17 - The Influence of Words
Chapter 18 - An Eye for Details
Chapter 19 - Real World Games
Chapter 20 - A Challenge Worth Pursuing
Chapter 21 - Making Things Difficult
Chapter 22 - How Are We Doing?
Chapter 23 - What’s the Prize?
Chapter 24 - Let’s Get Serious
Chapter 25 - Only the Beginning

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. 

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. Anderson explains the power of ‘fun’ by introducing the elements of game design (challenges, choices, and conflicts) 

This book provided so many examples and references that even a proficient UX specialist would learn something new or easily be referred to other helpful sources of information. Rarely have I found so much information packed into such a short book. I highly recommend the book for newcomers to UX, but I also encourage experienced practitioners to grab a copy for reference.