All web designers use perceptual persuasion in their designs, but without knowing they do. Interaction designer Wouter Middendorf delves into the matter:

“Persuasive design is hot. Especially on the web as designers found out that the internet perfectly lends itself for persuasion. The combination of both interpersonal and mass communication as well as its interactivity creates a perfect environment to apply persuasive techniques like the ones described by Maurits Kaptijn in his article on Persuasion Profiling. These kind of persuasive techniques can be traced back to psychological principles that rely on symbolic strategies to trigger emotions or emotional aspects in order to motivate people towards a preferred behavior. Almost all of these techniques work on the level where users interact with the website. A good example of such a persuasive technique on that interaction level can be found on LinkedIn. Users are persuaded (or motivated) to complete their profile through the completeness bar that is placed next to their LinkedIn profile. The psychological principle that is at work here is the fact that people crave for completion, which is why it works so well.

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With Apple, Inc. having the largest market capitalization of any company in the world, and an endless stream of CEOs and pundits talking about the importance of user experience, Peter Merholz suspects the phrase “user experience design” is no longer necessary, and could even be harmful.

Harmful because it suggests that the only folks who need to worry about user experience are the designers, when in fact companies need to treat user experience no different than they treat profitability, or corporate culture, or innovation, or anything else that’s essential for it’s ongoing success. The companies that succeed best in delivering great experience are those that have it as an organization-wide mindset.

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UX matters posted yesterday four new articles:

The world of services user experience
By Baruch Sachs
In a services organization, you are not only the UX expert, you are also expected to be a thought leader in areas that go far beyond UX. How will your user experience interact with other initiatives within an enterprise? Will the success of your project give you the ability to shine and offer you greater opportunity with your client? Is the organization for which you’re working mature enough to handle a robust UX program?

Cargo-cult user experience? There’s an app for that
By Peter Hornsby
In user experience, as in other fields, accepting received wisdom may seem to be the safe path. If a client is saying they want everything above the fold or a maximum of three clicks away, pushing back in a way that the client can understand can be hard. It’s harder still to push back if the received wisdom happens to be accepted by your peers in user experience. However, by spending the time to reflect on when and why something works and what its limitations are, you’ll become a better UX designer—without succumbing to the delusions of the cargo cult.

More lessons in the art of empathetic design and spontaneity from Degas
By Traci Lepore
Degas may have said that he knew nothing of inspiration or spontaneity, but in reality, he knew their meaning better than most artists. More important, he understood the work that is necessary to make either happen. So, I continue to be fascinated by Degas, his process, and the beauty of his work. Therefore, I am choosing to get a little off topic to explore some important lessons from Degas and what I like to call his performance art.

Gaining control over chaos: designing the emergency service experience
by Laura Keller
When service design is done well, the outcome may be a memorable vacation or a perfect latte. On the other hand, unsuccessful service design leads to unhappy customers, disgruntled employees, and often a floundering business. However, such outcomes pale in comparison to what’s at stake when designing emergency services. When emergency services are successful, their outcome is much simpler: people are safe and secure.

A pair of remarkable projects created by Ben Fry (co-developer of Processing) and his company Fathom may seem like simple marketing, but one day soon could enterprise software look like this?

“The point is, as the data we produce continues to grow–a trend many people call Big Data–there will be more and more value gained by simply making sense of data that already exists. Reams of raw figures like the ones hinted at above don’t help if they’re too big to be captured by human intuition. And that, ultimately, is the great hope of infographics: To help us add intelligence and insight to the digital noise buzzing around us every day.”

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User experience is a priority that should, in some way, find a home within the design of any new-media strategy, writes Brian Solis.

“The reality is that the relationship businesses hope to have with customers through these new devices, applications, or networks and their true state are not one in the same. In fact, it is woefully one-sided, and usually not to the advantage of customers, which for all intents and purposes still affects businesses.

Rather than examine the role new technologies and platforms can play in improving customer relationships and experiences, many businesses invest in “attendance” strategies where a brand is present in both trendy and established channels, but not defining meaningful experiences or outcomes. Simply stated, businesses are underestimating the significance of customer experiences.”

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Ciara Taylor was also at Interaction 12 in Dublin and reports on the keynote talk by Anthony Dunne for Core77.

“Interaction design and designing interactions… are they the same concept? Anthony Dunne, partner at Dunne and Raby and professor at Royal College of Arts in London, gave a keynote at Interaction12 that began this discussion for the attendees. In Dunne’s talk titled “What if…Crafting Design Speculation,” he asks designers to use imagination to think about what kind of futures we want—opening up the problem space. What if “we shift from how the world is to designing for how the world could be?” What if…we designed for alternate realities or fictional scenarios?”

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In anticipation of the upcoming IxDA Interaction12 Conference taking place in Dublin, Ireland February 1–4, Core77 is bringing us a preview of this year’s event, including this guest post by David Malouf, professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

“In the last year IxD, as a community of practice, has faced its strongest challenge to date. We have shifted from converging and assimilating to a community that is ever rapidly diverging.

The divergence is happening along the lines of the gravitational interests from where interaction design was born or where the slippery slope of our primary interest takes us. The divergence is also because the level of complexity of our problem sets have grown so vast that no single group can or should keep track of all of it. We have split basically along our primary lines of interest: Engineering, Individuals (psychology), Culture (anthropology) and Art.”

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Note that Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels will be attending Interaction12 as well.

Chapter twelve of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview. It deals with what HCI specialists call ‘affective computing’ and was written by Kristina Höök, professor in Human-Machine Interaction at Stockholm University.

As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design moved from designing and evaluating work-oriented applications towards dealing with leisure-oriented applications, such as games, social computing, art, and tools for creativity, we have had to consider e.g. what constitutes an experience, how to deal with users’ emotions, and understanding aesthetic practices and experiences.

The author describes three strands of affective computing: 1. Affective computing (based on cognition, and the most widely known); 2. Affective interaction (coming from a more culture-based angle); and 3. Technology as experience (arguably more art-based).

The different angles show projects that range from helping people with autism to creating text messages with emotion-related colours.

She finishes with a caution that with affective computing “we may easily cross the thin line from persuasion to coercion, creating for technological control of our behavior and bodies.” Her example is a parody fitness app ”I’m sorry, Dave, you shouldn’t eat that. Dave, you know I don’t like it when you eat donuts” just as you are about to grab a donut.”, but she could be talking about the XKCD take on Facebook suggestions as well.

(via Johnny Holland)

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Elizabeth Churchill, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, was the speaker at the October 2011 Creative Mornings event in San Francisco.

In her talk she discussed how we hide, reveal and misinterpret emotion online and off.

Watch video (30 min)

Brian Thomas Collins has made a career out of creating brand experiences, “a few of them great”. He writes:

“A good brand experience is when a brand does what we expect of it. A great brand experience is something we tell someone else about. In short, a great brand experience is a story, in which the brand user – not the brand – is the hero. A great brand experience is direct and transformative. It’s not a stunt or a fantasy. It’s not a campaign. It’s not the idea of something. It is something, something worth writing home about – or at least texting a friend. Brand awareness and engaged consumers are happy by-products, but not the point. The test for a great brand experience is result. Something new created. Something changed. A bell that can’t be un-rung.”

In an effort to make more of them great, he used eight principles.

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In September 2011, researcher Anna Snel defended her Ph.D thesis, entitled “For the love of experience: Changing the experience economy discourse“, at the University of Amsterdam. It is now available for download.

The attention for experiences as economic offerings has increased enormously in the last decade. However, the lack of a clear definition of experience and the bias towards the organization’s perspective in the discourse cause much confusion. In this study experience is taken back to its basis: the encounter between an individual and his or her environment. Different concepts, effects and values of experience are defined to construct a more integrative discourse for the experience economy from the individual’s perspective. To reap the benefits that the experience economy offers, the role of organizations has to change from a directing and controlling one to a more supporting and facilitating one. A true recognition of the co-creation that takes place in experiences shows how much latent potential for creating value there is yet to discover.

Download thesis

(via InfoDesign)

Experience designers investigate the motivations behind users’ behaviors to develop skill in predicting and guiding those behaviors. A short article by designer Sorin Pintilie.

“So, yes, experience can be designed— not all experiences, but certainly some experiences. And with time, experience designers will continue to investigate the inherent motivations behind users’ behaviors. They will continue to develop and refine their tools and skills to predict those behaviors with the help of cognitive sciences, which are already mapping out predictable and reliable links between stimuli and the reactions they produce.

A structuralist approach may be key in this process. As methodologies become more and more refined, other alternatives may arise. But for now, incorporating the knowledge provided by other specialties into an integrative design practice and learning to work together can be viable solutions for real improvement.”

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Chapter eleven of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview. It was written by Dag Svanaes, Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (and former professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea) and deals with the philosophy of interaction and the interactive user experience.

“I will approach the question of interactivity from a number of angles, in the belief that a multi-paradigmatic analysis is necessary to give justice to the complexity of the phenomenon. I will start by defining the scope through some examples of interactive products and services. Next, I will analyse interactivity and the interactive user experience from a number of perspectives, including formal logic, cognitive science, phenomenology, and media and art studies. A number of other perspectives, e.g. ethnomethodology, semiotics, and activity theory, are highly relevant, but are not included here.”

Lengthy comments to Svanaes’ chapter were provided by Donald A. Norman and Eva Hornecker.

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“The experience map highlighted [on the left - click to enlarge] was part of an overall initiative for Rail Europe, Inc., a US distributor that offers North American travelers a single place to book rail tickets and passes throughout Europe, instead of going to numerous websites. They already had a good website and an award-winning contact center, but they wanted to get a better handle on their customers’ journeys across all touchpoints, which would allow them to more fully understand where they should focus their budget, design and technology resources. Derived from this overall “diagnostic” evaluation, of which the map was just one part, were a number of recommendations for focused initiatives. The experience map helped create a shared empathic understanding of the customers’ interactions with the Rail Europe touchpoints over time and space.”

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The speakers: pioneers Usman Haque, founder of Pachube, and Matt Jones, formerly at the BBC, Dopplr and Nokia, and now a principal at design agency BERG.

Videos:
- Part 1: Usman Haque (17:20)
- Part 2: Matt Jones (18:58)
- Part 3: Q&A (26:49)

“The wristband itself is superbly designed: The slight oval shape and rubberized case mean that it hews to your wrist without bouncing around, which would have made it into an annoying bangle. But the wristband is a minor part of the offering. The real product is the software, and the interaction experience. And that’s where things go wrong: The software is too buggy and confusing, the user experience too unresolved. But rather than carp on what’s wrong, I wanted to lay out a few lessons that the product’s shortcomings teach you about app design and user experience design in general. A product like this teaches us all how to make things better.”

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“Problems should be fixed through simple solutions, something you don’t have to configure, maintain, control. The perfect solution needs to be so simple and transparent you forget it’s even there.

However, elegantly minimal designs don’t happen by chance. They’re the result of difficult decisions. Whether in the ideation, designing, or the testing phases of projects, UX practitioners have a critical role in restraining the feature sets within our designs to reduce the complexity on projects.

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They are on a mission to make free and open educational materials: There are so many great minds in the human-computer interaction and interaction design community and they want to empower these authors to reach all their interested readers around the world.

Their currently featured chapter (one out of nine) is an authoritative overview of Social Computing by Tom Erickson – veteran researcher at IBM Research Lab. It includes 9 HD videos filmed in Copenhagen and commentaries by renowned designers/researchers like Elizabeth Churchill from Yahoo! and Andrea Forte.

Read chapter (and watch videos)

The ~2-hour exchange with and between Don and Jon and the audience (comprised mostly of AAU students) was particularly engaging, thoughtful, rich, and delightful.

Topics addressed included the nature of and the difference between art and design, whether design should be taught in art schools (such as AAU), Abraham Maslow, usability, what design (or all) education should be like, the problem with “design thinking” courses, the destiny of printed magazines and printed books, aging and ageism, the relationship between HCI and interaction design, Arduino, simplicity, social media, Google, privacy, design research, the context in which design occurs, the Austin Center for Design, solving wicked problems, whether designers make good entreprenuers, politics, Herb Simon & cybernetics, the strengths & weaknesses of interconnected systems, and how designers should position themselves.

Read highlights (and watch full video)

Abstract

The Government is taking behavioural science very seriously, but existing nudge-based approaches to behaviour change tend to represent what Aditya Chakraborty called “Cute technocratic solutions to most minor problems”. The major adaptive challenges of our time, including debt, climate change, public health and mental health, require a deeper and more ambitious approach.

Transforming Behaviour Change argues for a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between our social challenges, our behaviours and our brains, based on a considered response to two major cultural developments. The first is the growing ascendancy of neuroscientific interpretations of human behaviour, leading to fears of reductionism and pharmaceutical control. The second is behaviour change becoming an explicit goal of government policy, leading to fears of Government manipulation and coercion.

The report critically engages with these two developments, and proposes an alternative approach to behaviour change that builds on existing public and professional interest in brains and behaviour. We set out to shift attention away from the threatening idea of ‘science as authority’, justifying moral judgements, medical interventions and policy positions, and focus instead on the more productive notion of ‘science as provocation’, helping people foster the kinds of self-awareness and behaviour change they are seeking to develop.