Using the reciprocity principle for a persuasive UX

Always try to give something to your users before you ask anything from them.

Yogesh Awasthi
UX Collective
Published in
3 min readMay 17, 2017

A few years back, A university Professor tried a little experiment. He sent Christmas cards to a sample of perfect strangers. Although he expected some reaction, the response that he received was overwhelming, holiday cards addressed to him came pouring back from the people who had never met nor heard of him!

In Social Psychology, Reciprocity is a social rule that says people should repay, in kind, what another person has provided for them.

Replace another person with our designs in definition written above and it paves the way to a persuasive user experience. I pondered over the thought that what if we could incorporate the social rule of reciprocity in our designs. Won’t that lead to better business outcomes? And won’t that work to our user’s advantage?

After digging deeper, I realised that a significant number of digital products that we use are making use of this principle in some way or other.

Language learning website, Duolingo is a prime example of that. Duolingo has one of the best on-boarding experiences, when you land on the home page you are welcomed with a clutter free, no-nonsense page that clearly asks you to Get started. Copy, “Learn a language for free. Forever.”, encourages you to click on CTA.

You choose a language that you want to learn and you start learning it! How simple? No login/Sign-up request at this point of time.

You enjoy learning the language and then after some time only after giving you something (In this case knowledge) Duolingo expects you to login/sign-up. And there too, the purpose of signing up is clear and encouraging, which is to save your progress and keep learning.

One important point was into play here:

First, Duolingo gave you knowledge about a new language without asking anything in return. And after some point of time, it asked you to do something only after doing a sort of favour.

Remember one golden rule:

Always try to give something to your users before you ask anything from them.

Famous Q&A website Quora, partially leverages this principle. If you happen to go to Quora through some external link or search results, you would still be able to see all the answers. Only when you click on some other question, you are prompted to login/sign-up.

We could see websites giving us information for free in form of social media content, newsletters, and PDFs​. Later on, users of the websites are likely to reciprocate some sort of favour to the website if they found the content informative.

In most instances, you can give small amount of the relevant product to potential customers and allow them to try it to see if they like it. You can expose the qualities of your product to your potential users and the beauty of this is that it somehow triggers social principle of reciprocity. And if used judiciously, it could lead to great business outcomes.

If this article resonates with you let me know by ♥︎ it. Thanks for reading.

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Yogesh Awasthi

UX Designer & Cognitive Psychology enthusiast.

Responses (3)

What are your thoughts?

The most intuitive interface is useless if users don’t understand the value of your product.

This is a great reminder. I think that there’s the temptation, if your value proposition isn’t quite as distilled as you would like, or your team is bouncing around a few different propositions they think might be the most relevant, to focus on the…

That’s so true and it explains why some apps just had poor UI at the beginning, but succeeded at the end. Their value proposition is too great to be affected by the UI at all.
of course it doesn’t mean the UI can be ignored, but it would be the second important thing at all.