Design News
What Britney Spears Can Teach UX Designers
The recent installment of the lip–sync saga contains a lesson for user experience design. I was wondering where the hidden story was, and I figure it is not about lip–synced performances. It’s about inauthentic performance, beating your audience over the head with the fact you’re just going through the motions. The alternative explanation (of poor UX design) fits the facts and comments much better. With fashion models pretending to be employees and customers, staring vacantly from page after page, most web site designs would make a lip syncer blush.
The takeaway is user experience hinges upon authenticity. In other words don’t spend forty million on “branding” and man your cash registers with bored, minimum wage flunkies robotically lip–syncing “Have a nice day.” Because your performance is your brand, and style won’t replace substance.
Of course, this is really a stretch to compare with web design, which actually fits much better with the Milli Vanilli scandal, which is just separating style from content. Separation to such an extent that a schism occurs.
Viral Marketing Update: Microsoft takes the wrong lesson from the Britney Spears incident, going viral in the worst way possible
New Design–Your–Own Coke Vending Machine Sends Data Back To Headquarters
Extremely interesting is Coca–Cola’s 100–Flavor Interactive Freestyle Soda Fountain. Although I can see a host of ways this can go wrong, the interaction design potential is intriguing. Coke is clearly looking to learn whether consumers as designers will come with the next big thing.
Competitive Camouflage Done The Right Way
Rather than blend into the background noise of monkey–see monkey–do imitation, The Man Who Hides Cars is about preventing imitation through design. Web design could learn a lot about preventing knockoffs through design, but not in the current primitive state of confusing technical complexity with design sophistication.
Nearly Context Aware Username & Password Entry Form
Chroma–Hash is very close to being another promising context aware widget. The demo page shows how it uses color feedback to help users. Better: Indication of a strong or weak password, and whether the username is taken by someone else.
Context Aware Ratings Widgets
Brewing a Better Rating System provides the kind of context aware widget required for a genuine information technology designed to assist users. Design Crux: Avoiding the Amazon Five–Star Milk Effect.
Cell Phones Provide The Bridge Between Bits and Atoms
Another intriguing look at what the cell phone will become is Xsights, which promises to augment physical objects with online media through taking a picture with an iPhone. For example, taking a picture of a movie poster to play the movie trailer. Such applications should make web–only designers aware of the merging of offline and online, bits and atoms.
Using a Wall of Wonder
User stories have three critical aspects. We can call these Card, Conversation, and Confirmation.
—Essential XP: Card, Conversation, Confirmation
Exploring business requirements with a Wall of Wonder gives a good overview of this collaboration technique. Card Confirmation Confirmation fits nicely into the Wall of Wonder technique.
Return on Design
for every dollar invested in advertising, packaging and promotion, and visual communication at the point of sale, companies realized a $7.21 ROI. But when the advertising didn't change (or there was no advertising)—and packaging design was the only thing that did change—there was a $15.17 average ROI on every dollar invested.
— Design: Proving the Value of Design
The Tropicana packaging fiasco dropped sales 20% for something as simple as a packaging change. Professional, clean and practically Web 2.0, the return on design was negative. It’s not just shelf appeal, either as this fulfillment example shows, packaging design extends to post purchase reassurance reducing return rates.
SEObsessive–Compulsives: It’s Like Google Bought Tourette’s Syndrome
Most designers can appreciate good search engine optimization. SEO long ago crossed the line of search engine ranking to SE rigging. Luckily search engine position as part of marketing (SEM) is making inroads, where someone (somewhere) takes a minute or two designing a site worth getting a good rank. Because good content generates traffic and one–way inbound links, without a paid SEO. Good page rank to a bad site design puts the SEO’s kids through college.
With search engine marketing in mind, keep the SEO–Compulsives destroying word of mouth and conversions with poorly designed web content on a short leash.
Stopping the Innovation Hemorrhage
An article on innovation talks about the question CEOs ask, “How can I make my company more innovative?” Wrong question. Employees and companies are already innovative. They find loopholes in a stifling wall of beaureaucratic roadblocks in order to do their job every day. The question is how to stop the hemorrhage of innovation by redeploying working within the system so your employees work on the system. The article Change By Design explains how even hospitals can apply design thinking to innovate.
More on Writing As Design
Writing as Design, Design as Writing is an interesting take on creating an experience through writing. J. Peterman is an example of writing which creates a user experience (that people actually desire).
Psychographics and Persona Design
Archetypes, psychographics and self–story – three geeky words to know in a post modern world is the crux between marketing and the interaction designer’s persona design. And, while most graphic designers don’t understand branding the article is a good foundation on how brands are designed …or run into a ditch.
Turning Fuel Efficient Driving Into a Game
Ford Fusion’s New Dashboard Helps Drivers Become More Fuel Efficient scoring your current driving habits, using a fuel score as incentive towards green behavior change: Persuasive design style. The Virtual Dash Tree concept is part of serious game design.
User Research: Saying I Am Not The User Like You Mean It
User research starts by saying in a loud clear voice, “I am not a typical user.” Eating your own dogfood is okay … when you’re selling product which is only fit for dogs.
Laddering is a user interview technique designed to get beneath dog food issues and into what customers desire enough to buy.
Designing for Repeat Customers
The hardest sale at least profit is the first sale to a new customer. This, along with people who will never do business with you, are the target users of too many web designers. Web designers should have some idea of how to target best customers and grow lifetime customer value like Zappos.
Using Comics to Storyboard the User Experience
Comics: Not just for laughs! offers some unique opportunities for UX designers to offer something more than warmed over usability leftovers. Currently, usability as UX deals with exactly one user emotion.
“Free” Requires More Marketing and Design Savvy …not less …not zero
Why are some people getting In Rainbows from P2P rather than the band's site? Probably because they find P2P easier to use.
—Radiohead Album Available for Free, But Fileshared Anyway
Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business is designed for mischief, not business success. While there is nothing wrong with $0.00 as a model, nor is digital economics dismissable, but that’s not what the article is about. The article seems more like the mythology of using the word free to avoid marketing or design savvy. Free as incantation is a recipe for disaster, and despite what they say, that’s how it is largely being applied. Zero pricing may be the ultimate competitive advantage for the amount of marketing and design ingenuity you’re forced to apply …if you’re not already famous.
Contrary to the article’s confusion of the physical with the digital, you can’t buy a chip for $0.00. And free doesn’t bribe people to use bad design.
Tcho Chocolate Uses Beta Testing To Get Closer To Customers
Tcho makes chocolate based on your feedback. Ostensibly like a software developer releases product, Tcho actually gets the beta test right. Rather than rushing to market with inferior product and hoping users accept the flaws, Tcho employs beta as a form of kaizen.
Most Businesses Have No Taste for Branding
Most companies design monkey–see, monkey–do business cammouflage, not a brand identity. Actual branding means designing a business people pick out of a crowd and choose for reasons other than lowest price. Companies like Psycho Donuts, Felony Franks and the Coffee Shop of Horrors have designed brands. People identify those companies who define themselves against me–too competition through a bold move and coherency of product design to service design; like calling take out orders “probation”. In other words, if you’re relying on the logo to make people forget the company is a pale photocopy of more innovative competitors, you’re out of luck.
Note to UX Field: Shopping is Social
Why You Should Get Involved With Social Shopping: E–commerce 2.0 at least acknowledges shopping is social. In contrast, ecommerce is a tack–on shopping cart app only supporting the transaction at the end. In the developer’s world, ecommerce users are only a life support system for a wallet. Between those extremes is visual merchandising.
IconNicholson’s Social Retailing® concept takes social media to the retail floor. That is UX design, which spans media.
Banana Time and UX Design Implications
Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction is about interruptions of work to increase user experience desirability. Doom as a tool for system administration is about the (forbidden) implications of true user experience design.
Time Styles and Scheduling Software
An article which should be fascinating to anyone developing scheduling software is the conflict between the manager’s scheduling style versus the maker’s time style. Unfortunately, the unit version of time is far too convenient for the scheduling software developer’s implementation model to consider the different ways people use time.
Designing New Kinds of Instruments
We Build the Parts, You Build the Product is an interesting design concept beyond Zoybar.
Design Thinking Spoils a Sweet Deal
Now, the Cupertino company has “radically tilted” the normal balance of power against AT&T and cellular networks as a whole.
— Apple’s iPhone “wrecking” the cell industry
From the consumer’s perspective, it’s difficult to see Apple’s iPhone “wrecking” the cell industry. What Apple wrecks are sweet deals, like GPS. Regular Design Crux readers know: scratch the objections against design thinking and you find the politics of power. The basic message of design thinking is business people can no longer be curators of the museum of past success. One reason the B–schools are being turned into D–schools is business people no longer administer the status quo’s leftover momentum; they design the future of the business. Design thinking has gotten so out–of–hand, you can’t even decorate the status quo with a new logo under the pretense of branding anymore.
One legitimate objection to design thinking: The utter lack of IT support for the managing as designing role. And one of the basic arguments of this site is information technology doesn’t exist without supporting a more active role for information workers. (Data processors are administrator/curators). Luckily, new kinds of software which qualifies as genuine information work technology is appearing. One new kind of software (in beta) is Computer Aided Business Model Design, offering real design possibilities.
The Next Economy
The old rules that most B–schools have preached were invented a century ago for supplying mass consumers with affordable goods and services. They are poorly suited to the values of today’s new consumers, who want help to live their lives as they choose, with personal control, voice, and a practical sense of connection. Many smart people have spent decades trying—and failing—to adapt the old model to this new pattern of consumer demand.
— The Old Solutions Have Become the New Problems
The basic argument of “Old Solutions” is the end of one era of capitalism and the beginning of distributed capitalism and the new support economy. What makes this relevant is Shoshana Zuboff’s model for the next economy is design driven.
Reducing Life Threatening Bugs With Hospital Fixture Design
The Design Bugs Out prototypes reduce MRSA and other Healthcare Associated Infections (HCAIs). The designs are easier to clean; less likely to hide and foster bacterial growth and designed to influence patient and staff behaviour to reduce the likelihood of exposure to HCAIs.
What the Design of Promotional Products Say About Your Business
Few companies think about the message promotional products give users. How many companies hiring a designer to project a green image are sending out earth friendly promotional products. Branding through design demands coherency in communications strategy for persuasion effectiveness.
Prototypes As Functional Spec
Confusion disappears when everyone starts using the same screens. Build an interface everyone can start looking at, using, clicking through, and “feeling” before you start worrying about back–end code. Get yourself in front of the customer experience as much as possible.
— 37Signals
Functional specs aren’t functional. Since there is no UI without use, how you create a user interface specification is with prototypes.
Key Disables Teen’s Cell Phone, Texting
A smart car key design which shuts off cell use is ideal for parents. However, it’s also a good example of smart objects as the fusion of bits and atoms giving everyday objects a virtual existence.