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The Eisenberg’s have come up with the basic dimentions of what motivates people to convert online:

Need. We can describe need on a continuum that ranges from critical to necessary to luxury. Through uncovery, we want to understand how urgent the felt need for the product or service is or might be.

Risk. Risk can be perceived as pertaining to the physical body, a career, self-esteem or self-actualization.

Knowledge. Knowledge contains depth and breadth, which can widen and deepen. Changes in knowledge can redefine the perception of need or risk. Uncovery helps reveal how difficult is it for customers to understand the nature of the product or service, or the procedures for buying. What do they need to know?

Consensus. We can understand consensus issues as decisions that are made anonymously, personally, or by groups. It’s important to understand how many people you have to persuade and at which point in the process you have to persuade them. Consensus is the dimension most people fail to define well when they design persuasive systems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Complexogram (above) is Brian and Jeffery Eisenberg’s construct for how people decide to convert - it’s like a histogram, which they admit is subjective.

What the Eisenbergs have done is create Personas and then map them against the Complexogram to create a unique Geometric Pattern for each Persona.

A Persona’s Complexogram might look something like this:

For example: this Persona  is called "David Commonsense" and it’s primary concerns are for diamond knowledge - it needs to understand what goes into creating a beautiful diamond and the associated costs. Near the end of its buying decision process, David must feel satisfied he has the knowledge he needs to make the best decision. As this Persona’s knowledge about diamonds increases so does his perception of risk

Personally, I don’t know how effective this Persona system is - but it seems to work for the Eisenbergs as they came up with it.  

It would be interesting if we could deduce the personas and Complexograms of those personas by just looking at traffic behavior on a site.