Designing & Measuring Behavior Change in an Enterprise Social Network

Loerracher, Tobias (2014) Designing & Measuring Behavior Change in an Enterprise Social Network. Masters thesis, HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil.

[thumbnail of Master-HCID13-Yammer-Loerracher.pdf]
Preview
Text
Master-HCID13-Yammer-Loerracher.pdf - Supplemental Material

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

This report describes a Master’s Thesis project about designing & measuring behavior change in the enterprise social network Yammer.
The intention of designing behavior change in an enterprise social network is to increase user adoption and engagement in order to achieve the business value in terms of team collaboration, employee engagement, connected organization and business agility.
To support behavior change in a product, the role of the designer is not only to remove the friction from an experience, but also to increase the motivation of the user to go through an experience and to stay engaged. One way for the designer to do this, is to leverage insights from psychology in the form of persuasive design patterns. An example for such a pattern is scarcity. If something is promoted as scarce, people perceive it as more desirable. This effect is used by websites like Amazon to encourage the user to purchase something, i.e. by displaying “only 1 left in stock – order soon”. A number of such patterns are described in the report.
To prove the value of applying persuasive design patterns in an enterprise social network, the goal of the project was not only to design behavior change, but also to measure behavior change. This has been achieved with a number of experiments (A/B tests) in Yammer according to the Lean Startup inspired Yammer development methodology. One experiment for example had the goal to build up the social graph by making people follow more coworkers using the set completion effect. Another one used the social proof effect to nudge people to post more work-related content on Yammer.
The results of the experiments described in this report have shown that leveraging persuasive design patterns can have a positive effect on user adoption and engagement, and should be taken into consideration when designing. The recommendation after finishing the project is to first use a behavior model to analyze why a certain behavior doesn’t happen and then apply persuasive design patterns and measure the effect in a Minimum Viable Product with experi-ments.

Item Type: Thesis (Masters)
Subjects: Topics > HCI Design
Divisions: Master of Advanced Studies in Human Computer Interaction Design
Depositing User: OST Deposit User
Contributors:
Contribution
Name
Email
Thesis advisor
Stokar, Dieter
UNSPECIFIED
Thesis advisor
Stolze, Markus
UNSPECIFIED
Date Deposited: 13 Nov 2014 13:37
Last Modified: 13 Nov 2014 13:37
URI: https://eprints.ost.ch/id/eprint/390

Actions (login required)

View Item
View Item