Social representations and interface layout: A new way of enhancing persuasive technology applied to organ donation

Abstract

Although campaigns promoting organ donation have proved their effectiveness, increasing the number of people who explicitly agree to become donors is still difficult. Based on the social marketing notion of persuasive technology, we reasoned that it was timely to focus on the design of this persuasive technology and to analyze its contribution in particularly challenging contexts such as organ donation. More specifically, the originality of the present study lay in the way we linked the field of persuasive technology to the theory of social representations, and combined them with an analysis of the ergonomic aspects of interface layout. This study had two complementary goals. The first was to determine whether the sociocognitive salience of the central elements of social representations (i.e., the most frequent and important themes related to the subject—here, organ donation—for individuals), can be used to achieve persuasive outcomes. The second was to determine whether interface layout, in terms of information location and background characteristics (color and contrast), can strengthen the persuasive impact. University students (N > 200) were exposed to a computer screen displaying a message involving either central or peripheral elements of the social representations of organ donation (status), placed either in the middle or on one side of the screen (location), and shown against either a white or a blue background (background). Eye-tracking data were recorded, in addition to self-reported data. In line with the elaboration likelihood model, results showed that participants who were exposed to central (vs. peripheral) elements of the social representations of organ donation followed the central route in processing information. Moreover, they had stronger attitudes, and more of them stated that they were actual organ donors. Importantly, however, at least for some variables, these status-related effects were not independent of the interface layout. More specifically, the persuasive impact of the central elements was enhanced when the information was displayed in the middle (vs. the side) of the screen and when it was displayed on a white (vs. blue) background. We discuss the theoretical and practical issues raised by these results.

Collective fear and social representations of COVID-19. The role of the original ‘reasons’ for the fear object (Miedo colectivo y representaciones sociales de la COVID-19. El rol de las ‘razones’ originales para el objeto de miedo)

“…Dependiendo de las razones que los individuos atribuyen al fenómeno de la ansiedad colectiva, y de la durabilidad asociada con ella, las representaciones que este fenómeno son diferentes e implican comunicaciones focalizadas y adaptadas. De hecho, es conocido que las acciones de comunicación son más efectivas cuando se enfocan específicamente en los elementos organizadores de las representaciones sociales (Barbier et al, 2020).…”

“…Depending on the reasons that individuals attribute to a collective anxiety phenomenon and the durability that they associate with it, representations of this phenomenon differ and imply targeted and adapted communications. Indeed, it is known that communication actions are more effective when they specifically target the organizing elements of social representations (Barbier et al, 2020).…”

Exploring the Role of Visual Design in Digital Public Health Safety Education

“…Layout design aims to plan the organization of interface information, in order to help users browse content efficiently, reduce users' tasks and cognitive load, and try to solve the problem of disorientation faced by many users [15]. Although the research on interface layout spans many fields, such as online education [17,46,47], e-commerce [48,49] and Man-Machine systems [50,51], its core idea is to optimize the processing process when users receive information, and to improve task performance. A key element in layout design is that the layout needs to meet the information search strategies of different groups.…”

“…Sulikowski and Zdziebko [48] found that vertical layout is more attractive than horizontal layout in commodity recommendation systems, and the least attractive positions in the interface are at the bottom of the interface (vertical layout) and the right edge of the interface (horizontal layout). Barbier et al [46] stated that users tend to pay more attention to the visual elements in the middle of the interface. They stressed that the key information should be arranged on the interface where the human eye sees it first in the natural state, which can force the user to pay direct attention to the content.…”

How a Smart Technology Imposed by an Organization Can Arouse Ambivalent Psychological Empowerment: An Approach Leveraging the Theory of Social Representations

“…Considering the deficient communication from Enedis when deploying the smart technology, shown by the element "Lack of information" in our results, we choose to focus our recommendations on this axis. As previous literature has shown that communication about core elements of social representations rather than peripheral ones is more convincing (Barbier et al, 2020;Zbinden et al, 2011), specific communication on the two key positive aspects of psychological empowerment in the core representations of users, that is, money saving and ecology, may help to increase confidence in the smart device. Communications campaigns jointly executed by private energy suppliers and the public energy distributor could be undertaken.…”