Today the Persuasive Tech Lab works to create insight into how new tools — including mobile and social technologies — can help people form new habits in their lives. As part of this exploration, BJ Fogg taught a new Stanford course called “Creating Health Habits with Social & Mobile Technologies.” The overall goal was for students to become experts in using technology to create habits in everyday people.
Visit the Class website to view class details including student projects.
The mobile phone will soon become the most powerful channel for persuasion, more influential than TV, radio, print, or the Internet. This book presents 20 perspectives on how mobile devices can be designed to motivate and influence people—and how this emerging trend will change the way you live, work, and play.
Learn more at www.mobilepersuasion.com
We’d like to help you understand persuasive technology and the new tools for persuasion. We can introduce you to a new model of behavior change and outline steps for designing persuasive experiences. You can get started by doing these things:
The Persuasive Tech Lab creates innovative events to bring people together to share insights related to captology. Our goal is to connect people and foster collaborations in the real world.
We’ve designed the events to have a fast-pace format: 25 speakers in one day, each talking for just 12 minutes. Then we give lots of break time so people can talk.
We continued to share best practices and catalyze innovation using dance to help people lead healthier lives in 2014’s Design for Dance event.
We drew on insights from dancers, instructors, engineers, doctors, and other innovators who are all getting people to dance more. It was an event full of innovative people, moving stories, and many things to learn and do in creative, unexpected, and energizing ways.
At our Stanford lab, we believe dancing has unusual potential to promote health and happiness. But we also believe today’s options for dancing are too limited. People of all ages need new ways to bring dance into their daily lives to reap the physical, mental, and social benefits.
In 2013 we hosted the first Design for Dance event at Stanford University. Together we explored new solutions for making dance a routine activity in the lives of millions and started the “Movement” movement.
In May 2012, the Persuasive Tech Lab hosted Mobile Health 2012: Baby Steps for Big Change. We took a slightly different angle in 2012. Why? Because this method — rapid baby steps — leads to success in three areas: behavior change, collaborations, and experience design. We realized that “baby steps” is an odd focus for an entire event. But we thought it was absolutely the right focus for 2012.
The chronic problems in behavior change, collaborations, and product development have a common solution for innovators in Mobile health — and that solution is baby steps.
In 2011, the Persuasive Tech Lab and CDC hosted Mobile Health 2011: What Really Works at Stanford University. With this event we brought together 400 people from grass roots and national health organizations, academics and mobile vendors for insights and sharing best practices in what is working now to change health behaviors. We highlighted real solutions for real people — practical, proven solutions.
This sold out event hosted at Stanford had a precise and practical focus: We highlighted how today’s mobile technology can improve the health of everyday people. The emphasis was on what’s working to change behavior, right now.
The Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab hosted “Texting4Health,” the premiere conference on how mobile text messaging can promote better health in 2008. This topic matters because texting is the only viable interactive channel for reaching people on a mass scale around the world.
This expo was the final for with over 500 people attending to see demo’s of the applications. For press about this course, please see the course website. For a audio and video about the class and applications, check out this BayCHI program.
This event was the second international conference on persuasive technology. It was geared for people interested in how digital technology can motivate and influence people, a domain called captology. This includes the psychological and motivational effects of web sites, mobile phones, video games and more.
Over 260 people came to Stanford University for the first Mobile Persuasion conference in 2007. Hosted by Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, this “sold out” event brought together innovators, designers, and researchers interested in mobile technologies that change people’s beliefs and behaviors.
In 2006, the Captology Film Festival brought about 200 people together to watch 10 winning videos showing persuasive technology in action. In preparing for the event, people around the world submitted 600 ratings of 62 videos.
Please note that we no longer own the Captology.tv domain. This is an archived project and no longer available online.
BJ Fogg and others from the lab have done too many workshops to list. Our goal is always to help people design for impact.
“I came away feeling that I had experienced a terrific social networking and information-sharing event. Congratulations!” –Dr. Robert Gable
“You did a great job setting up the Persuasive Technology conference. I liked the fact that the sessions started right down to the minute! That’s pretty organized!”
–Jeff McCandless (NASA)
“You and your team did an amazing job. I learned a lot, met some interesting and strategically practical folks, and overall, had a great day.” –Deb Levine (ISIS)
“You did a great job on this event. It was a big success IMHO. Congratulations to you and your team.” –Don Jackson (TellMe Networks)
“Thanks for a great conference! I met some great people and overall the talks were of exceptional quality.” A.I.
“My friends and family are tired of hearing me talk about it, but Mobile Health 2010 was a great conference!” K.A.
“We loved the conference! The presentations were all really fascinating and the length of time worked really well, not to mention we made 17 extremely useful contacts that I think will either benefit our current projects or that we will collaborate with on new projects…” K.D.
“I had a blast, and thought it was the best run conference I have ever been to. It was fun, informative, and serious all at the same time – a hard balance to attain.” J.H.
“I loved the full agenda and how the information was delivered. Excellent speakers with resonating topics.” D.G.
“I thought it was a great value for the price and would attend again in a heartbeat. BJ, you
and your staff did a wonderful job.” S.Z.
“This was a fantastic gathering!! The energy and the quality of my interactions were amazing. Non stop value. Congratulations to all of you.” V.K.
“You guys were awesome and amazing. Truly, I loved it. The best I’ve ever been to. Worth every cent and I paid my own way. Full of great information….”
“The entire event felt very warm and welcoming. I left with lots of great connections and concrete plans to move projects forward. Everyone I met with was smart, engaged and really nice. It was a really rewarding time, both personally and professionally.”
“Thanks for a great conference that really maximized our time.”
“Make it happen at least once a year! Twice would be nice. Bi-coastal? I would show up quarterly because things change so fast and it is so exciting to be a part of this movement.”
Lab Director, Dr. BJ Fogg BJ Fogg teaches at least one class a year at Stanford, usually for the Department of Computer Science. From time to time, he’s appointed to Stanford’s School of Education‘s consulting faculty.
Dr. Fogg creates a new class each time he teaches. His courses focus on some aspect of persuasive technology.
The goal of was to help students become experts in designing behavior sequences that lead to long-term change. Specifically, students learned how to discover what sequences of behaviors create desirable health habits, such as exercise and meditation. The course also examined how digital platforms (primarily web and mobile) enhance research and design of behavior sequences. Students applied methods for analyzing and designing behaviors sequences to solve challenges in health: physical activity, nutrition, and stress reduction.
In this course, students studied three components: (1) what causes stress, (2) categories of calming mechanisms, and (3) persuasive design. They worked on two projects, Text2Calm and SocialCalm, and collectively developed a genre of technologies that increase emotional, cognitive, or physiological calm through mobile phones.
The overall goal for this class was for students to become experts in using technology to create habits in everyday people. The course focused on health behaviors, creating new habits, and using social networks and mobile phones as channels of persuasion.
This course focused on how online video can change people’s behaviors. In this course, we studied new methods for creating persuasive video, with a focus on metrics in guiding iterative design. Students created videos and campaigns to achieve target behaviors of their own choosing.
The goal of the class was to make each student an expert on the psychology of Facebook, especially in how persuasion works in that social network.
The course goal was to learn how to invent peace, and then to create resources for others to do the same. Students worked in small teams to run peace innovation trials with Web 2.0 technology.
This course focused on optimizing Facebook apps by learning the psychology of Facebook and using engagement metrics to make good product decisions.
Earlier courses taught by Dr. Fogg included: Mobile Persuasion (2006), Captology Design Methods (2005) and Web Credibility (2000).
The Persuasive Tech Lab has developed resources based on our research and Dr. Fogg’s teaching and experience. We have created frameworks and theories that are about helping people understand and measure what matters. As teachers and trainers we want to put the tools and resources on this page in your hands.
Technology is being designed to change what we think and do. This is at the core of the Persuasive Tech Lab’s research and interests. We believe mobile technology and social graphs, such as Facebook, will be the most powerful ways to influence people in the future because new technologies give us new ways to trigger behavior change. The resources on this page address using technology for persuasion.
The Persuasive Tech Lab creates insight into how computing products can be designed to influence and change human behavior. Drawing on these insights, the lab’s director, BJ Fogg, has created a new model of human behavior change. The resources on this page address relate especially to that model and how they guide research and design.
Over time the Persuasive Tech Lab has worked on many projects. We have selected several of our more popular, past projects to include in this section. These projects have completed or wound down and are no longer a main focus. You may still find some relevant resources related to these projects at the links below.
Please note we are no longer maintaining the websites associated with these projects and there may be outdated links and information.
Online video is a powerful way to persuade people. The 2008 elections in the U.S. gave a vivid demostration of how YouTube and similar sites could engage people with a persuasive message. In our lab we have studied the elements of persuasive video. Our work, which includes real-world interventions, has shown dramatic results. We expect this area to keep growing especially as we see the emergence of better tools for creating, distributing, and measuring online video.
To create insight on this topic, BJ Fogg organized a Stanford conference to bring experts together. He later created a new course called “Persuasive Online Video,” which was taught in Spring of 2009 with Enrique Allen.
CaptologyTV
Stanford Captology students created over 150 short videos to demonstrate how captology works online. The clips created for CaptologyTV showed how web services, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, are designed to motivate and persuade users. With CaptologyTV students showed how persuasive technology works in popular web sites.
As we created CaptologyTV, we starting seeing patterns of persuasion in the examples. So we dug deeper and synthesized a framework for online persuasion. Our lab published a peer-reviewed paper that summarizes the patterns of persuasion used by virtually every successful Web 2.0 company. We call this process the “Behavior Chain.”
Stanford Web Credibility Project
The Persuasive Tech Lab did early research on the factors that affect the credibility of websites. Since our investigations in the 1990s, we’ve found that online credibility has morphed. With the rise of Web 2.0 services, the focus of credibility evaluations extend beyond the page to the people represented. In other words, Credibiltity 2.0 has become more like reputation, or perceived reputation.
The researchers compiled 10 guidelines for building the credibility of a web site. These guidelines are based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people. It is still a popular resource today.
Persuasive Visual Stories for Small Screens
Building on our previous research about computers using the power of narratives, we’re investigating how to tell visual stories in a way anyone can understand, regardless of language or literacy. But that’s not all . . . we also want to deliver these stories via mobile phones, the most personal (and persuasive) of all interactive technologies. Previous steps in this research were funded by Stanford Media-X and the National Science Foundation.