This document summarizes an experiment conducted by Fin Kingma to test methods of subliminally steering users' instincts and behaviors without their conscious awareness. The experiment presented users with a time-pressured task to click buttons on a webpage, with background images and text designed to plant subliminal associations pointing to the "correct" buttons. However, the results found that users overwhelmingly clicked buttons opposite of what was intended, likely due to instinctive responses to cues like left-facing arrows. For a follow-up experiment, the same techniques will be used to steer users to click the left button instead, to test if subliminal triggers can be better aligned with instincts.

1. #Experimenting Rapport
Triggering Motivation
by Fin Kingma
20 november 2012

2. Overview
Reasoning
In my final year as Interaction Designer at the HKU I decided to focus my efforts on
understanding and translating motivation for design purposes. In short, motivation has two
components: a sustainer, and a trigger. The sustaining part focuses on the internalization of
the motivation. A lot of information can be found on this area on my motivation campaign
website: www.motivationcampaign.com.
But I still lack experience in understanding the triggering part. After I finalized my
motivation campaign (on sustaining), I started reading about persuasion design, emotional
design, affectance and other similar topics. Topics that describe how a person is triggered to
perform an action. I also watched several movies from Derren Brown, for inspiration.
In my efforts I discovered that the triggering part of motivation only partially depends our
cognitive processes. Most of our actions originate out of instincts and behavior.
After learning this, I decided to initialize a few experiments to test several triggering methods
and see if I can steer a user into a certain direction, without him being consciously aware of
the steering, using methods to steer the user's instincts and behavior.

3. Experiment #1
Goal
This first experiment is conducted to find out if I can get users to click on the same button,
without them being consciously aware which is the right button. The goal is to have at least
60% of all users click on the same button. I will place an alert on my Facebook to get enough
clicks on my webpage on short notice.
Premise
This first experiment was conducted according to two premises. The first:
1. If the user experiences enough negative pressure, he will be less able to use his
cognitive skills to make choices, to press the right buttons. This way I can focus solely
on steering the instinctive and behavioral level of the user.
2. To steer the instinctive and behavioral level I use subliminal messaging. If I place
enough associations with the desired button to click, I should give the user an
unconscious desire to click the right button (without him knowing that).
Variables
To ensure enough negative pressure I use the following:
1. Time pressure. A clock will count down from five to rush the user. This will happen
when the user clicks on the 'navigate' button to start navigation.
2. The five seconds of the clock will in fact count to zero in four seconds. This will
increase the time pressure effect.
3. Use of dark and low saturated colors. In the book Emotional Design I found a list of
methods that can be used to trigger a negative effect in users. The use of low saturated
colors is one of them.
To have the user choose quickly and without a preconsistent behavior I use the following:
1. I use Lorum Ipsum words for the buttons so that users do not have a preconsistent
desire to click on one of the buttons.
2. Restrictions. The user will only have three options to choose from. The user will also
have two stages in which he has to choose between options. In total there are 9
different options. But the goal of 60% will only count per each individual stage (having
an average of 33%).
To plant the right associations in the mind of the user I use the following:
1. The correct button for the first phase is 'Proin'. The correct button for the second phase
is 'Malesuada'.
2. The background of the page will carry words and letters that are part of the options

4. that I want the user to click on.
3. The background of the page will carry products that are relating to words that look
like the correct words
4. The text on the intro page will contain many words that start with the same two letters
as the correct buttons.
5. An image will be shown on the front page that will focus the attention of the user on
the position of the correct buttons.
Intro page
Navigation page

5. Navigation page 2
Result Page

6. Conclusion
As you can see in the Result Page a few unexpected things happen:
1. The correct first button only gets clicked 27% of the time. LESS than average.
2. The correct second button only gets clicked 14% of the time. Way less than average!
3. The middle button gets clicked the least. It is possible that the reason behind this is that
the associations worked, but had trouble dominating the instinctive and behavioral
level of the user.
4. Nearly 60% of the users clicked on the left button! That is almost the double of the
average expected! It is possible that users associate 'left' with turning back, due to the
use of arrows pointing to the left on most back-buttons. This is a logical response for
users that experience the negative pressure that was added to this webpage.
5. After most users clicked on the left button, they did not continue to choose the left
option, they suddenly moved their mouse upwards and 53% of them chose the upper
option.
Follow-up
During this experiment, I tried to make users click on the right button. Obviously it failed, but
for a follow-up experiment I plan to use these same techniques to point users to the left
button. Let's find out if for the next experiment I can get 80% of all users click on the left
button!