Believe it or not, working as a designer or web designer will require you to know your users and motivate them. You might think that designers sound like phycology, but this is actually important for designers to acknowledge a little knowledge of phycology, especially about motivation and how to apply a good motivation in their design, since by utilizing good motivation on your design, you will provide strong reasons for users to take an action for buying your product. Take a look further on how motivation can really affect your design, such as follows.
What is Motivation?
Motivation is famously known as something that can encourage people. It gives motives, needs or wants that drive behavior and explain why people do something. In design, motivation is also needed; it could help designers see the direct way to make the product correspondent to users’ expectations and solve user’s problems. However, before your product can help users, first you have to create a product that can motivate users to try it.
There are two types of motivation that we know, extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation:
Extrinsic motivation
These motives come from outer sources, such as family, professional environment, competitions, contests, etc. In most cases, people who have extrinsic motivation are usually seeking of reward, such as money, prizes, diplomas, certificates, trophies, medals, praise, support, recognition, or the desire to compete with others. As a designer, we can discover users’ extrinsic motives through research for UX designers. Once we know their extrinsic motivation, we can create a design that can stimulate them.
Intrinsic motivation
Oppositely, intrinsic motivations come from inner sources, such as the need of self-improvement. This type of motivation is stronger than extrinsic motivation. If you can nail this motivation from a user, it will become a significant factor for retaining users. Therefore, it is important to get to know more about target audience at the stage of user research; in this way, designers can discover what their motives are and what kind of designs that will work for the specific users.
Knowing the types of motivation will surely help designers in creating a design that will attract and serve users best. In fact, this knowledge is necessary for UI/UX designers for several reasons, such as follows:
- Building navigation and call-to-action elements that can truly engage to users and motivate them to take action.
- Designing better layouts that can demonstrate key benefits or rewards.
- Creating a process that can motivate users to try the product and test its functions.
- Presenting aesthetic satisfaction so that users feel comfortable with your product.
- Providing the copy that can stimulate users through describing the benefits and achievements of your product.
- Encourage users to share their experience via various social networks; this can be a powerful extrinsic motive for other people nowadays.
Now that you know motivation is terribly important in design, by understanding users’ motivation, you can build the right design that can reach many users. So, don’t forget to analyze your users’ motivation before designing for them.