UX Fundamentals for Non-UX Professionals: User Experience Principles for Managers, Writers, Designers, and Developers

Part IIIPersuasion

Persuasion

With drugstores dotting our neighborhoods like neon-lit aid stations, we sometimes forget that reliable medication was not always so obtainable. In the 1860s, patent medicine blanketed the American West. Cure-alls, such as Dr. William’s Pink Pills for Pale People¹ made out of Epsom salt and rust, claimed to offer comfort for ailments ranging from “loss of vital forces,” St. Vitus’s Dance,² and “all female weakness”—medically questionable but certainly unenviable afflictions. The era marked a time in American history, as well as the history of persuasion.

The late 1800s was also the golden age of railroads. The tracks of the First Transcontinental Railroad laid across nearly 2,000 miles of plains, hills and mountains ...