Jeremy Gillies

March­mont Street, August 2009

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Appar­ently, men pre­fer web­sites designed by men and women pre­fer those designed by women.

Men’s pref­er­ences show greater visual-spatial abil­i­ties and reduced colour sen­si­tiv­ity, which are invalu­able skills for hunters. Women’s pref­er­ences show greater sen­si­tiv­ity to colour would have helped them in their gath­er­ing tasks.

Very likely mis-represented orig­i­nal research from the Telegraph

via @bengoldacre

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The suc­cess of the mas­ter­pieces seems to lie not so much in their free­dom from faults—indeed we tol­er­ate the gross­est errors in them all—but in the immense per­sua­sive­ness of a mind which has com­pletely mas­tered its perspective

Vir­ginia Woolf The Death of the Moth

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Made of Myth: How Tetris, Arkanoid, Sonic, Pong, & Super Mario were made

Amusement.fr have posted a selec­tion of images show­ing work­shops of iconic video games being cre­ated. This one’s Sonic.

via Min­istry of Type

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Cas­cais, Por­tu­gal, August 2009

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#sixweeks is a blog by Paul McCrud­den detail­ing the time he’s spent in shops and ser­vices over a six week period and then billing them.

For the six weeks from mid-June to end-July 2009, I recorded all the time and money I spent as a con­sumer. And, hav­ing invoiced over 50 com­pa­nies, I’m now wait­ing for them to pay me for this time I’ve spent with their brand.

I did this for two main rea­sons: firstly, to fur­ther under­stand how I spend my life as a con­sumer, and sec­ondly to chal­lenge the basic assump­tion that con­sumers are sub­servient to brands.

Appar­ently Pret A Manger has paid up and Cran­berry Fruit and Nut sales has invoiced him for the time they spent read­ing his blog.

An amus­ing insight into con­sumerism and brand sub­servience which not only serves the fight back against the brands but then, rather awk­wardly, ends up giv­ing them a plat­form to pro­mote their pro-consumer (pro­sumer?) good nature.

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Designed by Barker Gray for the Ashes tour 2009

via TheDieline.com

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Walk­ing in Scot­land, March 2007

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Eric Schaf­fer writes about per­sua­sive design, design­ing for per­sua­sion, emo­tion, and trust. Key to this research is study­ing the ‘feel’ of sites to the key demo­graphic of the user. While usabil­ity is be estab­lished as a base to the design, the emo­tional pull and per­cep­tion of trust to the user is the key to cre­at­ing per­sua­sive sites.

What strikes me as most inter­est­ing was the idea that per­sua­sive design can con­flict with usability:

In some ways, per­sua­sive design can actu­ally be eas­ier to imple­ment than clas­sic usabil­ity. Persuasion-oriented goals and design ele­ments are often min­i­mal in scope when com­pared to clas­sic usabil­ity goals like mak­ing every error mes­sage on an enter­prise site intel­li­gi­ble. Yet the strate­gies behind per­sua­sive design are not triv­ial. The design method­olo­gies are also dif­fer­ent from those of usability—in fact, they some­times con­flict with each other.

Mak­ing peo­ple feel engaged and com­mit­ted is intrin­sic to per­sua­sive design. To achieve this, it may be impor­tant to make them feel effec­tive when using a user inter­face. Though the car­di­nal rule of usabil­ity is to make it sim­ple, it’s pos­si­ble to make a design too sim­ple, thereby caus­ing users to lose the feel­ing of effec­tive­ness and engage­ment that stems from a more involved, com­plex inter­ac­tion. So, if you want users to expe­ri­ence a sense of dis­cov­ery or achieve­ment, con­sider inten­tion­ally build­ing in some inter­est­ing sources of chal­lenge for them to over­come along the path.

This may come as no sur­prise when you imag­ine per­sua­sive design may include tar­get­ted adver­tis­ing, the bane of a designer’s work (the ele­ment of trust is the tricky nut to crack when dab­bling with adverts on a site). How­ever the arti­cle sets out three inter­est­ing ways to estab­lish trust in the design of a web site:

• Build an FAQ

A FAQ on a Web site indi­cates the orga­ni­za­tion behind the site is not a fly-by-night oper­a­tion, but a solid enter­prise that is dili­gent enough to care about doc­u­ment­ing such things.

• Match exist­ing knowledge

pre­sent­ing a piece of infor­ma­tion users know is true to strengthen the cred­i­bil­ity of your sub­se­quent claims

• Argue against self-interest

To engen­der trust, it would be bet­ter to some­times rec­om­mend the cheap­est option. Once cus­tomers expe­ri­ence a company’s telling them You don’t really need to buy that from us, their trust rock­ets, likely result­ing in many more sales.

Inter­est­ing stuff. FAQ require­ment is inter­est­ing since they often are seen to be sign­posts to a lack of decent ux design

via UXMat­ters

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The need to design with con­tent in mind is dis­cussed in The Con­tent Conun­drum on Boxes and Arrows. While recog­nis­ing this is less of an issue on the social web, or smaller mar­ket­ing or micro web-sites, it is par­tic­u­larly per­ti­nent to large, mas­sively content-heavy web­sites with numer­ous stakeholders.

I wholly agree. In my expe­ri­ence, work­ing with the con­tent mak­ers (who, as the author Christo­pher Detzi, points out are cre­atives too) is vital to pro­duce a future-proof, use­able design.

via Boxes and Arrows

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