Jeremy Gillies

Designed by Barker Gray for the Ashes tour 2009

via TheDieline.com

Posted in Package Design | No Comments »

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

Posted in User Experience | No Comments »

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

Posted in User Experience | No Comments »

I want this Black and White clock by Vadim Kibardin

A light sen­sor will switch the clock to an invert mode: the fig­ures are white in the dark time of day and black at daytime.

via Design Milk

Posted in Design | No Comments »

Tan­til­is­ingly short excerpt from a doc­u­men­tary about human behav­ior within urban spaces.

The most used plazas tend to have a higher pro­por­tion of peo­ple in twos and threes than the less suc­cess­ful ones. But the most socia­ble plazas also have in absolute num­bers the great­est num­ber of indi­vid­u­als. A busy place, for some rea­son, seems to be the most con­ge­nial kind of place if you want to be alone.

I’d love to see the whole film. via kottke.org

Posted in Architecture | No Comments »

via INFRASTRUCTURIST.

Posted in Architecture | No Comments »