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Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Web Sites. Andrew Chak. 2003. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders. [ISBN 0-7357-1170-4. 340 pages, including index. $35.00 USD (softcover).]
"But what makes users click?" (p. xxiii). That's the question that author Andrew Chak poses in the preface to Submit now: Designing persuasive Web sites. Chak, a "user experience design consultant" by trade, maintains that the answer lies in understanding that prospective online buyers "need to be persuaded and supported through a decision-making process before they can even think about transacting" (p. xvii). Throughout the eight chapters that comprise his primer on persuasive Web page design, Chak proposes and discusses key persuasion concepts and design principles that Web site designers should apply to "[move] users along a decision cycle so that they are able to and want to click on that submit button" (p. xvii).
In the first chapter of Submit now, Chak presents some major theoretical concepts of the psychological process of persuasion. These concepts are scarcity, commitment, and consistency, reciprocity, social proof, authority, and liking. Chak does an adequate job of providing examples and explanations for these concepts in Chapter 1 and applying them to the design principles that he discusses in subsequent chapters. At times, though, he could be more explicit in making connections between these concepts and principles. However, implicit connections are fairly easy for the reader to make.
In the next four chapters, Chak categorizes and describes four main types of Internet shoppers: browsers, evaluators, transactors, and customers. He then discusses how to design Web sites that appeal to each shopper's needs, thus moving users along the decision path and motivating them to click the submit button.
Chak defines browsers as shoppers who do not yet know exactly what they want, but who have a vague idea about what product or service they might need and are looking for basic information about it. To persuade browsers to...