Designing Motivational User Interfaces: Balancing Effective and Affective User Interface Design to Motivate Call Centre Advisors

Motivational User Interfaces (MUIs) fuse motivational and persuasive psychology with user interface design. MUIs were developed specifically for call centres, an industry which suffers high levels of employee burnout and churn. They were designed to reflect the balance between effect (delivering service) and affect (managing emotion). MUIs were designed using a framework of motivators taken from both psychology and user needs. This included capturing what motivates users in their job and why they choose to use technologies. This book describes the evolution of the MUI through three case studies. The first MUI was developed as a concept demonstrator for a telecommunications call centre. The second was created for a high street bank as a design specification for their future call centre vision. The third addressed problems with technology acceptance of a knowledge management system in a telecommunications call centre and illustrated how design could be used to help increase levels of technology acceptance. These designs demonstrated how MUIs could be used to help motivate call centre advisors and increase technology acceptance.

About the Author:

Nicola Millard combines a pragmatic operational view of serving customers with extensive research in her role as a British Telecommunications Customer Experience Futurologist. She joined BT in 1990 and gained her PhD in 2005 from Lancaster University. She writes and consults on call centre strategy and is a popular conference speaker.