Applying persuasive design to increase engagement in sustainability-related projects : A case study of a climate change adaptation project’s website

Abstract: A website’s foundation should be its usability and its user engagement. Designers can go further and persuade users. The design practice of persuasive design revolves around affecting people indirectly by changing attitudes or behaviors through product features or service characteristics. This has been utilized in various fields with great success. The field of sustainability has become a new theme of study with the goal of influencing user behavior toward more sustainable actions. Researchers have claimed that persuasive design is an effective way to change behaviors and could be utilized to reach different sustainability goals with websites being a viable medium for this. Frameworks for the entirety of the design process have been suggested but there seems to be a lack of literature on guidelines for existing sustainability website designs. This thesis aims to provide guidelines for websites of sustainability-related projects by researching the involvement of similar projects through people’s experiences, motivations, and intentions along with identifying persuasive design characteristics that can increase engagement. The resulting guidelines will be useful for existing designs of websites for sustainability-related projects to increase its persuasive power. A literature review was conducted along with empirical methods of data collection such as a survey, semi-structured interviews, and competition analysis. Theory of planned behavior (TPB), Fogg Behavior Model (FBM), and the Persuasive Systems Design model (PSD) were utilized as theoretical frameworks for collecting data. The empirical methods results were analyzed through a table connecting the theoretical frameworks to understand the results. The findings suggested that people have strong motivations and positive attitudes toward sustainability-related projects but the involvement in such projects is affected by limited ability caused by different barriers. By optimizing the interactive system and applying the persuasive design characteristics, the barriers can be reduced, and the websites’ persuasive power can be increased. Five guidelines were suggested based on the empirical results. An evaluation of the guidelines was not conducted which is proposed as the next step for further research.