Tag Archives: ux

Mar 25 2023
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Human-Centred Garden Design: Crafting Outdoor Spaces for Real People and Meaningful Experiences

For too long, garden design has been preoccupied with the designer’s narrative, often neglecting the end user’s experience. In the last decade, this trend, most obviously identified in the RHS Show season, led to a curious neglect in truly considering the people who would inhabit our outdoor spaces. It’s time to shift our perspective and embrace human-centred design principles in garden design, creating more engaging, meaningful experiences. I’ve made no secret to friends and colleagues that I would love to add garden design to my portfolio and bring to it the skills I’ve developed in 25 years of user-centric thinking. So, inspired by examining the work of four of my favourite designers, Annika Zetterman, Dan Pearson Studio, Pollyanna Wilkinson, and Ulf Nordfjell, perhaps I can show you that we can chart a new course in this direction.

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New Nordic Gardens, Lidingö @annikazetterman https://www.instagram.com/newnordicgardens/

First up, Swedish landscape architect Annika Zetterman who designs modern, functional gardens (above) that blend natural elements with contemporary aesthetics. Her work is a prime example of human-centred design, as she focuses on the needs and desires of those who will use the space, demonstrated by her sophisticated integration of functional elements and materiality with a tightly curated palette of planting. Zetterman’s gardens encourage interaction, exploration, and enjoyment, providing accessible pathways, inviting seating areas, and even edible gardens all of which reflect and understand how the landscape and environment evolves with seasonality.

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Dan Pearson @coyotewillow https://www.instagram.com/coyotewillow/

Dan Pearson, a British landscape designer, is celebrated for his complex naturalistic schemes. Yet, the essence of his work lies in its focus on the relationship between people and their environment. Pearson’s gardens promote a deep sense of connection and belonging, as they encourage users to engage with nature. His work, which by the way is mind-boggling complex and exacting the details, is a testament to the importance of working with nature and reflecting a human-centred view of the world, without the need for spurious socio-political narratives.

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Pollyanna Wilkson @pollyanna_wilkinson https://www.instagram.com/p/CFASzhLA6j1/

Pollyanna Wilkinson’s sustainable, wildlife-friendly gardens place the user experience at their heart. Her designs are horticulturally informed, visually stunning while remaining beneficial to the environment and local ecosystems. Wilkinson’s work is in my view to be much admired for its focus on real people’s experiences in domestic settings, sidestepping heavy-handed narratives and catering to and honest, relatable human scale. Her gardens foster intimacy and attentiveness to the people and fauna that interact within the space.

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PRIVATE GARDEN II, Nordfjell Collection nordfjellcollection.se

Ulf Nordfjell, another Swedish landscape architect, is renowned for his minimalist, elegant designs. It was Ulf’s work that got me interested in garden design, over and above my previous assumption it was pretty much just ‘picking some plants’. Drawing on Scandinavian traditions, Nordfjell’s work features clean lines, simple geometry, and precisely chosen planting schemes. Despite their often minimalist appearance, his gardens embody human-centred design principles, offering inviting spaces that promote relaxation, contemplation, and connection to the natural world. Nordfjell’s work frequently includes larger structures and perhaps a little more sculpture in them, but in all cases these are complementary rather than incongruous statements.

These four designers, although wildly different in their execution, demonstrate how human-centred design can revitalise contemporary garden design. By shifting the focus from the designer’s story to the end user’s experience, we can create outdoor spaces that are more engaging, functional, and meaningful. As I’ve mentioned in my previous writings on user experience and behavioural psychology, understanding and catering to human motivations and behaviours are crucial in designing spaces that resonate with people.

In the last decade or so, as I see it, too many gardens were designed as showcases for the designer’s ego (ironically Diarmaid has appeared on a podcast talking about HCD so I’ll just about forgive him for the gimmick of his 2016 effort with its solid octagonal folly and a formal terrace of clipped box, that every that every 15 mins rotated and moved around), or as crass art pieces, rather than havens for the people who would actually use them. By embracing the principles of human-centred design, we can shift the paradigm and create gardens that truly enrich the lives of their users. Let’s look to the work of Zetterman, Pearson, Wilkinson, and Nordfjell as inspiration for a new era in garden design, one where the needs and desires of people take centre stage.

As I have written previously on this blog, a human-centred approach can lead to creativity and innovation while avoiding homogenous, derivative, or sterile work. By embracing the plurality of human motivations, behaviours, and the endless variety of the environment and content, the human-centred designer can find infinite opportunities for creativity and innovation. In the end, this is as appealing as any Gold Medal from the RHS.

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Mar 30 2020
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Online queues, is there a better way?

traffic-about-to-crash

Source: Queue-it, technology currently shuttering Ocado and others in the UK.

The seed for this thought came from Robert Hall (of Foolproof) and I must caveat that I have limited knowledge of the development of load balancing and traffic management in this scenario so am prepared to be roundly schooled by those that do (paging Ross Peat). With that understood, my approach for FMCG delivery services is as follows:

Allow customers into your online store. The pinch point is the allocation of delivery slots, customers understand that this is a problem which needs to be sorted through a fair algorithm that balances the logistical complexity with needs-management for the vulnerable. So we can manage that expectation and support them with at least part of their intent. Unlike a physical store, there is no obvious reason to curtail the capacity for browsing and making product selection choices. Currently, the retailers are holding people at the door, keeping the virtual shutters down and telling them their checkout queues are too busy. They can’t even come in the door to see what products are on the shelves.

So, to correct this, allow customers into the store where they can be permitted to browse the inventory, select the items and quantities they desire (with predictions of availability based on the stock levels and completed purchase patterns) and then join the queue for a delivery slot. In this instance, some endowment effect is at work and the abandonment of their delivery is disincentivised.

This is where it gets complicated, my first thought was that the slot-wait should be a ‘ring back’ style queue where you’re contacted by email or text when slots are opened up and so the wait happens in the background without you having to attend to it in an open window. However, this would create a batch demand where traffic would flood in as tranches of slots are released. Then I thought perhaps customers could select a series of preferences for slots (a set of five preferred dates and times) and the system accounts for this demand and attempts to predict and balance the slot allocation, providing a trackable progress indicator to the customer.

Or perhaps something even more complex: an approach where essential items are batched for earlier delivery (fresh bread, milk, eggs, paracetamol, hygiene products) where items you’re prepared to wait for (laundry products, low-volume ambient lines) are held back at a lower priority. Consistent with this could be the creation of ‘essentials bundles’ which groups common essential items into a repeatable and pre-packaged SKU that could be delivered more efficiently than 0000s of unique baskets.

The data obtained from customers creating these (ahem) ‘hanging baskets’ can be used to help the retailers plan their sophisticated supply chains and delivery logistics. From a user experience perspective, I’m particularly keen that we find a way to open the shutters and not insist everyone waits outside the store only to be frustrated and disappointed at all steps of the journey once they’re in.

Over to you in the comments.

[this post originally appeared on LinkedIn 30 March 2020]

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Jun 10 2019
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This was UX, part I.

An infinity loop showing the customer journey of someone buying a cinema ticket and watching a film.

Cinema Experience Loop.

This is the first of an occasional series of explorations into my previous work. I’ll stay light on the reasons only to say that I’ve been clearing out some paperwork and rather than hang on to old documents I thought I’d scan them, creating a digital record (portfolio?) and have the opportunity to explore them in public.

First up is this hand-illustrated experience loop that looks at the ways in which we come to think about buying a cinema ticket and watching a film. Full disclosure this is a commissioned illustration based on my original sketches. I’d love to be that neat but, for a pitch, it needed a draughtsman’s hand.

So, we start on the left side with a motivation trigger. What makes a prospective cinema-goer interested? We imply that a decision to watch something has already been made and this circle investigates the processes being made to identify why the customer chooses this particular cinema (brand). The early phase of influence is all about holding on to a customer that could easily flip to a different venue or decide not to go at all if there is friction in the process of determining a match between film, scheduling and the booking experience. This period, from a creative perspective, opened up lots of discussion around what the on-site and off-site experiences are and how they increase motivation or add friction. How does, for example, the role of review sites like Rotten Tomatoes or, frankly, Google, impact on the linear nature of this flow. How might the (ahem) cadence of this part of the process change depending on whether you’re looking for the next few hours or in the next week?

We looked at the impact of losing a prospect at this point. How might we encourage them back into the decision and consideration phase? We might think about creative ways to re-target and the requirement to have a technical solution in place that identifies those people that are dropping out of the process.

By contrast, the process of attending the cinema is explored on the right-hand side. This is where we looked to add a little friction, slow it down and engage the customer to embed a brand experience that is memorable. Creatively we wanted to introduce ideas around the venue arrival, recognition of the customer at point-of-sale and the personalisation of the foyer experience. How might we influence that crucial ‘take your seats’ phase, where your sense of anticipation is at its peak and where you’re most receptive to the little moments of delight that make the brand stand out?

The film itself is the green section, not much we can do here. This was largely out of our brand’s control. They could deliver exceptional sound and visuals – technology and seating design that was a cut above, but this was out of the purview of our pitch. At the end of the film, the opportunity to embed a great memory is significant. Kahneman talks of the effect of a crashing cymbal at the end of an orchestral score and this is the analogous moment, in more candid terms: don’t fuck it up. To this end we had the opportunity to discuss the rating or review of the experience on exit and the supporting of advocacy, finding creative ways to build on that classic behaviour of walking out of the cinema excitedly chattering about what you’ve just seen – how could this, for example, be broadcast more immediately so that it might influence people in the decision phase?

Finally, there’s a period of reflection. A little later than that foyer exit, perhaps in the day or so after the event where the brand has an opportunity to deepen the memory and connection of the experience with reward, follow-up and loyalty options that potentially build on the momentum and retain the cinema goer within the brand’s orbit such that any future decision to view is even more likely to result in a return to our client’s site and location.

As an exercise, this was a classic customer journey analysis and was the result of deep, intensive thinking and research during a pitch. It’s the tip of a strategic iceberg and was visually the framework which we used to introduce and anchor the creative ideas we presented. It was a demonstration to our client that we thought about the role of loyalty, of the critical touchpoints and potential leaks. We could highlight the interventions we had designed: exceptionally easy booking and film discovery, a personalised welcome and pre-booked refreshments, an effortless review-and-share interaction.

I’m sure it can be critiqued and holes identified. It’s pitch material and therefore hardly the most intensively researched and finessed work – not like you might do with a multi-year client, but I’m proud of what it allowed us to present and the manner in which it demonstrates that UX can borrow from service design principles to add essential context to the flows, screens and interactions we design and present.

Get in the comments on the blog/LinkedIn and let me know what you think. More of this sort of thing soon come.

 

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Feb 07 2017
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Listen less, observe more. Human-centred designers must ask deeper questions

One of the most oft-repeated tropes of human-centred design is that we must pay attention to a person’s needs. These needs are often said to be identified through the observation of past behaviour. In digital (whatever that means these days) this is typically through the gathering of usage data. Sit in any pitch or briefing and it won’t be long before someone starts talking about dwell times, form drop offs and so on an so forth. Often a well-meaning ‘user experience’ staffer will pipe up about the need to develop personas, and a marketeer will add “based on our segmentation of course!” “of course!” they reply. Data is incontrovertible.

Really, businesses don’t like anecdotes. They’re not keen on stories (even if the managers are consuming books on storytelling and the engineers are developing use cases), so they rely on the known knowns – how people are using their site or service. It’s this, they say which informs us how people will use our experiences in the future.

I’m unconvinced. Increasingly I find myself resisting the temptation to read much into past behaviour. The empirical psychologist in me knows that, to be a predictor of future behaviour, fellow researchers have come to some agreement that there really are quite strict conditions for this to be the case:

  • The behaviour has to occur rather often (i.e. it’s high frequency).
  • The prediction is most accurate if based on a short time frame.
  • The predicted situation must be a close match for the past situation that the observation was made from.
  • The behaviour must not have been influenced by negative or corrective feedback.
  • The person must be unchanged and, finally,
  • The person must be generally consistent with their behaviours.

That’s quite a set of experimental conditions to maintain. Consider this, if your customer bought from your site or interacted with your brand once before, can you honestly assume that they will meet all those conditions on their return visit? Even with high-traffic repeat visits I’d contend that there’s sufficient variance to make predictions at the very least, wobbly. Add in a timeline of a few weeks or months (like financial services sites, for example) and your prediction is looking essentially worthless.

Demographics are not behaviours
Quite apart from the predictive past performance within your own brand experience, what does this mean in terms of inferring behaviour from others’ actions? One of my bugbears is the regurgitation of segmentation and demographic-led personas. Passed on from media buying and market research these exhibit the classic failure of data vs. insight, that is they offer no illumination. As an identical twin who shares the same postcode, age, socio economic group and racial profile as my brother, the lazy marketeer assumes I have the same needs and behaviours as he. Though there is some cross-over, there is much that is also different and to paint with broad strokes is to miss the kind of detail in human-centred design that creates real breakthroughs. Repeat after me: demographics are not behaviours.

In 2016 where profiling and polling were shown to be so woefully ineffective at determining voter action (c.f. Brexit, Trump), isn’t it time we took a long hard look at the way in which we interrogate and model human behaviour? Fortunately some are doing this and we might look to important contexts like criminology, where they are identifying the desistance curve as offenders age and applying Bayes’s theorem to calculate offenders’ likely behaviour.

Will it rain today?
Where this leaves us is in the area of accuracy. Ultimately, as Rory has asserted in the past, analogous to our weather forecasting, we’re getting better at predicting short term behaviours but still a long way off high-fidelity predictions for weeks and months ahead. What’s helped Dare and other progressive human-centred design teams is looking at what are the stable traits of human behaviour and, furthermore, rigorously considering what is the relevance and integrity of data that forms the inputs of our predictions; we should never draw general conclusions from specific observations and it is this inductive reasoning that plagues our profession.

Nate Silver’s seminal ‘Signal and the Noise’ is undeniably popular and his models had much early success but criticisms begin to be levelled quite fairly when attempts are made to model personal and social behaviour not financial markets. I wonder if, dear reader, you’ve read Taleb’s “Black Swan“? (If you have I wonder if you read all of it? I’ve met few people that have and if you’re like me you found it’s autobiographical style impenetrable, obfuscating and bombastic. Even the Wikipedia summary suffers a similar fate) in short Taleb makes the same point, we care way too much about the inputs to our black box of analysis and truthfully understand very little of what’s going on in incredible complex systems. Taleb also points us at another user-centred design bear pit: the narrative fallacy. We construct user journeys, use cases and flows in narratives that serve to over emphasise what we think we know and bring with them all the confirmation bias of author and reader combined. How often do we still read that it’s important we design brilliant experiences that delight? You’ll see testimonials plastered on the walls of Customer Experience Officers’ offices and headline grabbing responses from frontline staff going above and beyond, and yet research has shown for some time that exceeding some expectations does no more for loyalty than a comprehensive approach to meeting most of them. But it’s just such a nice story isn’t it?

I don’t believe that the way human-centred designers unquestionably use the tools our industry have been using for the last 20-odd years gets us to great solutions.

I believe we need, like Khaneman did, to take the lessons from Taleb and stir in even more psychology, evolutionary psychology.

The answers are in our past, our prehistoric past
I’ve found comfort in developing an approach based on two seminal statements on consumer behaviour: The late David Ogilvy’s famous quote questioning the value of market research: “people don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.” and further Theodore Levitt’s “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole“. I would go one step further than Levitt and suggest that they want to hang that shelf that their spouse has been hassling them about so they can unlock a little more affection. Our modern age skulls house stone age minds and, as far as I’m concerned, a ludicrously overlooked truth is that we are a species that was for a very very long time motivated by procreation, the next meal and the next opportunity to rest. These basic needs of simple satisfaction surely form the basis of our the vast majority of our motivations and when we understood the roots of our behaviour we begin to unlock some truly creative solutions to our clients’ problems (there’s a reason everyone’s talking about Lagom and Hygge, simple satisfaction is incredibly human). We don’t get there by asking our customers this stuff, we get there only through anthropology and ethnography level observations: facial coding, eye tracking, galvanic skin response, neuromarketing. I’ve yet to see a CV where a UXr tells me they’re fascinated in anthropology or they’re fluent in FACS taxonomy, when I do I’ll hire them.

Research and analysis like this doesn’t come cheap and it doesn’t come quickly but tools like iMotions and IBM Watson have the potential to do for behaviour modelling what supercomputers have done for weather forecasting. Interpretation by inquisitive and analytical strategists that are comfortable asking ‘5 whys‘, doing field observations and contextual inquiries will guide us far better than fire hosing strategy and Ux teams with web analytics. To be clear, I am not dismissive of the role of usage data, I simply insist that it augments a broader collection of data gathered from IRL observations and a contextual understanding of human behaviour.

Bury the cliches
Henry Ford never said he didn’t listen to customers (I happily correct anyone who regurgitates the Faster Horse quote), Schiller never said Apple don’t do customer research (rather they do deep ethnographic studies and are ferociously tracking observed behaviour). I’m not saying we won’t learn from customer behaviour but rather, in order to get us to innovative, creative human experiences and behaviour change we must go beyond a facile and shallow observation of customer segments. We must build intelligent teams, use tools and encourage methodologies that give us the time to build upon the evolutionary roots of human behaviour and, whilst doing so, accept that our view extends no further than the horizon, we are powerless to know if it will snow next Christmas.

In a future post I will explain why I believe an automated approach to predicting and ‘optimising’ human behaviour through so-called personalisation offered by web platforms is not helpful at advancing our online experiences.

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Oct 14 2015
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Drawing Fire: How transparency in User Centred Design brings out the worst in our users.

There are certain roles in digital user-experience design that are coveted. Coveted for the opportunity they present to have your work seen and interacted with by a huge number of people, coveted because they represent Britain at its best, most accessible and world leading.

Jobs like the Government Digital Service and the British Broadcasting Corporation.

The new BBC.co.uk homepage across three screen sizes.

In that context, I’m a keen reader of the blogs both these organisations put out that explain and add authenticity to their work; the rigour and integrity of which is inspirational. [GDS & BBC]

Imagine then, having spent weeks and months developing user-centred solutions, using all the best thinking you can bear to the project. Deploying some of the brightest UX, Information Architecture and interaction design minds, commissioning (extensive) user testing and getting the buy-in and agreement of savvy and critical stakeholders. Imagine the end result being pushed to the expected audience and, in the spirit of transparency, sharing that journey online.

And then you read this response:

So another blog by another name showing all the hard work that has gone on the background, trying to justify the latest reason for the ‘responsive’ redesign. Just like the news app, just like the news page, you may have spent weeks shuffling you coloured bits of paper round on the wall and getting each other so excited that the toilets have never seen such use before, but the fact remains, you work has been pointless. The home page is crap, the news site is still crap and the news app still remains so crap, that those of us who still have access to version 2 now refuse to update.

And what will we see as a response to comments in this blog? Dismissal of those telling you that you have got the change wrong and continued insistence that this is the way forward. At least it’s something you can proudly tell you grandchildren in years to come, “I used to work for a Great British institution called the BBC and was involved in its downfall.”

Granted there is just a group of detractors and critics who are so full of hatred for a ‘biased’ BBC that one will never convince them, but even so, does this not make your heart sink? Sink at the ignorance, the stupidity at a group of people that cannot see how a truly incredible digital public service is designed entirely around the users. The undermining of the craft of the people that work on sites like this is deplorable. Patronisingly assuming that it’s just a self-congratulatory exercise involving coloured paper makes my blood boil.

When I read Hugh Gummett‘s original post I read about competitor analysis, stakeholder reviews, detailed requirements capture and interrogation of data. I can see there was more than cursory user testing, namely:

32 in-depth qualitative sessions and collecting quantitative feedback from around 400 people through surveys. Those recruited to provide feedback covered a wide range of demographics, had varied interests around areas such as news, sport, entertainment, lifestyle and learning..

Furthermore, the testing included a BETA site (opt-in) and multivariant testing of the implementations for the homepage. To give the team credit one really has to acknowledge that this was not a design done in a sealed room and foisted on a gullible public. But they can’t even win there, other commenters assert that 400 users aren’t sufficient as the BBC has 8 million users – not understanding how representative sampling works at all. Design a site for each one of those 8 million users? How does that work then? Sigh.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have looked at the comments, perhaps the UX team doesn’t either, nothing good ever comes from comment threads after all but my goodness me, as a way to demotivate this afternoon’s reading takes some beating.

Of course, if your head is as far above the parapet as it is at the BBC this kind of attack is inevitable. In our industry, we do have to stay strong and continue to work with confidence that we’re going about user-centred design in the right way. I take comfort from the fact that as practitioners we have raised the bar and are getting some many things right now that it takes a bit of pedantry and comment flaming to stir us and increase our resolve to ensure each implementation gets better and better for those that care about what we do.

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Jun 12 2013
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Apple focussed on design as their signature

A series of videos, one presumably a TVC, are a clear indication alongside the WWDC keynote this week that Apple is all about design, designing for people and a slavish attention to quality and purpose. It’s hugely encouraging for those of us in the industry of making [digital] stuff better for people. Even if I don’t particularly like the iOS 7 palette…

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Jun 07 2012
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Experience design is rocket science

Back in January I posted an assertion that customer service isn’t hard to do. Sometimes I leave people wondering why I get paid a nice salary to pontificate on this stuff as it’s all pretty easy and largely the articulation of common sense. It’s the same argument I used to hear when telling people about the ‘obvious’ results of academic psychology studies. It’s easy to start believing this stuff and even though certain designs and designers are lauded for their pursuit of the obvious, others are called out as snake oil salesmen. Krug‘s done a nice line in books that make it plain how simple this all is.

This week, however I read two important posts. The first being from Harry Brignull, Senior UX at Brighton’s Clearleft. In his posts (slides and notes) he explores the mistakes he and the team made on the way to delivering the successful app experience for The Week. It rang true to read of his frustrations as blindingly obvious interface and navigation elements were wilfully ignored by apparently stupid users. How I nodded along recalling my recent experience with Treejack when my simple and straightforward site architecture for a major British institution was exposed as confusing and muddling one to users in a 500-person remote test. The second post, far more important and sobering, was the analysis of the last moments of Air France flight  447 (Popular Mechanics and Telegraph articles). With the recover of the various voice & data recorders a clearer picture of what happened on the flight deck emerged but, crucially, why the pilots behaved the way they did in the face of apparently obvious warnings and information has proved both incredibly complex and rather contentious.

This is where cognitive psychologists, engineers and really incredibly talented people are earning their crust. Analysing, exploring, experimenting and evaluating the hugely complex elements at work when we interact with systems. Our irrationality and unpredictability are being explored in light hearted ways as we persuasionists are asked to design new campaigns and digital experiences but when these forces work against us in catastrophic ways it causes us to pause and remember our colleagues and peers’ role in solving these riddles.

I might not be designing an error-proofed flight deck any time soon but I think it’s about time I stopped underselling our value quite so much. The work we do is complicated and rewarding, whether it’s saving lives, producing a digital magazine or shifting some more products. One of the final persuaders for me to transition from psychology to HCI was James Reason’s book Human Error and my course under Dr. Phillip Quinlan at York where we explored a variety of complex scenarios leading to catastrophic human error. Understanding the part designers had to play in helping us protect us from ourselves was a strong motivator. The book still sits on my shelf and I would heartily recommend it to anyone in this business.

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May 03 2012
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Draw Sometimes

Image

News reaches us today that Draw Something, a game I’m not ashamed to say I recently played A LOT, is suffering a sharp decline in usage. Unlike Angry Birds or similar meteorically successful mobile games, Draw Something exploded very quickly, peaking in April and has boomeranged – at least for frequent users – in recent weeks.

The BBC article raises the argument that this might be due to a general drop in appeal but doesn’t really explore what the pathology of this malaise might be. Here, for what they’re worth, are my thoughts:

Connection
One of my biggest bugbears with mobile app developers is their lazy attitude to making their apps work without a connection. Designing and testing an app in a production house with a gigabyte network is great but it’s not the real world. Draw Something is a time-killer app that’s perfect for the train, the tube/metro, planes and so-on – i.e. all the places you can’t get a reliable connection. That Draw Something insists on a connection is an Achilles heel. It wouldn’t be hard to design an offline process where you could complete your drawings and the data is cached to send next time a connection is obtained.

Regionalisation/Regionalization
The game used an American-centric dictionary and American-centric references. Obscure pop artists, minor celebrities and TV shows would regularly appear in the word list and lead to frustration as you’d have no idea who these people or items were – and could be pretty sure your friend wouldn’t know either. Cue using up valuable bombs to get new words. How hard would it be to localise the word database? Even when you did know the word the spelling might be the Yank version … again, easily fixed.

Effort
Roz points out that each game actually takes quite a bit of time. From the viewing of the other player’s guess (even if you skip it) to then watching the other player’s drawing. As an aside, even though there’s fun in seeing the construction of an image, especially when done by an artistically gifted friend, I still want to skip to the end and see the final image  in most cases. If you could just do your guesses and and leave the drawing bit until you have more time, that might make it feel a bit more manageable. There’s no ‘I’ll just have a quick go’ process built in to the sequence.

Inundation
All of those elements add up and As Ben Griffin says, the app was initially easy to manage as you had two or three friends playing. Once it became successful you could find yourself inundated with drawing requests. Compounded by the time it takes to play each game this meant that you are having to administer an ever-growing and impatient list of friends wanting to play. It’s a nagging list that feels like an unmanageable inbox which you, albeit in a mild way, resent and duly avoid.

Whilst I’m confident that Zynga and the team behind it will continue to develop the app and ensure its long-term success (releasing commenting features shows it understands how people use the app – replacing artists writing messages to each other in the first frame), the undeniable failings I describe above do give us pause to reflect what makes a truly engaging mobile game experience that, importantly, can scale with popularity.

In the meantime, take a look at this collection of the most-talked about Draw Something efforts.

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Jan 27 2012
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Seduction & Persuasion

A seductive look from French actress Audrey Tautou

This week I had the pleasure of presenting to our Planning department at Dare and, whilst it’s not a new topic to many readers of this blog, it’s certainly rather popular – in fact, one could say this tool is sine qua non to the kit-bag of any Experience or Strategic planner in the advertising industry. And so it came to pass that I spent 45 minutes talking about seduction.

Firstly I’d like to express my thanks to Stephen P. Anderson without whom much of this presentation would not have existed. It was inspired and informed by his excellent book Seductive Interaction Design which is currently trading at an excellent price on Amazon in paperback & Kindle editions.

I presented not in terms of rules or mere anecdotes but tried to provide practical examples of where we have been and could be seduced into acting on – and this is important – hitherto-unexplored motivations. I chunked the slides into a series of moments in our encounters:

Aesthetics
From the utilitarian beauty of Google and Craigslist, to the the viscocity of the Apple iOS and taking in examples such as the role of female faces in encouraging ‘LiveChat’ encounters, I hope my audience could see the value in paying attention to what our experiences look like and what this says about our brands and the memories users take with them.

Tease
The ‘Stop Looking at my bottom‘ line on Innocent smoothies was a good example of being playful in seducing people, I’m sure there are plenty of quirky examples of this sort of stuff digitally. Sadly many of these are Error 404 pages that – if we’re good our jobs – our users shouldn’t see very often. After writing the presentation I came across this great example of copy on an Ocado email which represents a playful tease. Then there’s more obvious playful activities like the randomising functions you find on Wikipedia, Google’s Lucky button and so-on. Though few will ever beat Ben Fold’s Ode to Merton chat roulette.

I always like the anecdote that Apple had to make their random function on the iPod less random in order for it to feel more random.

“As humans, when we come across random clusters we naturally superimpose a pattern. We instinctively project an order on the chaos. It’s part of our psychological make-up. For example, when the iPod first came out and people started to use the shuffle feature, which plays songs in a random order, many people complained that it didn’t work. They said that too often songs from the same album, or the same artist, came up one after another. Yet that’s what randomness does – it creates counter-intuitively dense clusters.

‘We’re making it (the shuffle) less random to make it feel more random’: Apple CEO Steve Jobs changed the feature on the iPod after complaints from users In response to complaints from users, Jobs changed the programming behind the feature: ‘We’re making it (the shuffle) less random to make it feel more random.’  In other words, each new song now has to be significantly different from what came before, so as to conform to our expectation of randomness. Which isn’t really random at all.” – Alex Bellos

Then it was nice chance to show how figuring out and being stimulated by patterns can create compelling interfaces – which clearly meant reminding people of my award-winning work with Stefanie Posavec on myFry. I talk a lot about intentional friction when reminding people that user-centred design isn’t always about simplicity. After all, we all love a good poka-yoke, and so a bit of mystery like the Hot Wheels mystery car or the don’t open reward envelope is another example of intentionally making life (achievably) difficult in order to deepen the sense of engagement.

I closed this section by talking about how Cityville and Good Reads are great examples of interactions that allow users to play and be themselves, expressing themselves and their creativity. Cityville is a much bigger topic in terms of (eugh I hate this term) gamification which I didn’t have time to go into.

Subtleties
As Stephen points out, it’s all well and good talking about CityVille  and Innocent and seeing how fun brands can apply such approaches but what about when you’re dealing with a major financial services provider? It’s important to demonstrate that you don’t need to change the copy throughout your site or develop a game but rather just look at the little moments that make a difference in terms of perception and play to our existing biases. The classic Leventhal, Singer & Jones (1965) study at Yale led me in to showing two coffee loyalty cards for Cafe Gibbo. Both needed 10 stamps to achieve a free cup but one had the first two (of 12) stamped whilst the other was simply 10 blank circles. I asked the group to think about the behaviour that might result if the former card was stamped in front of you by a staff member who looked like they were doing you a favour whether that sense of reciprocity would be a sufficient nudge to you continuing to use that card. Perhaps it would. Pointing out that our decisions are not always economically perfect (both cards had the same economic effort to complete them) was important in establishing our irrationality.

Two coffee loyalty cards showing one with two circles of 12 complete, the other with all ten blank

Which would you be more likely to complete?

Of course this kind of stuff is nothing new to people in the hospitality industry; salting (or seeding) the tip jar, applying choice architecture to restaurant menus, this kind of thing shows the history of the real world application of persuasive techniques. techniques we consumers readily accept as fair game. In restaurants it might even be as minor as putting a glass seeded with an empty monkey nut shell next to the dish of unopened kernels to suggest where to put one’s waste. On the web we see the value of order bias in the fact that Google and SEO companies makes a living from people clicking the first thing they see on the search results page and that having something visually promoted has a powerful effect.

Here I showed our own bit of choice architecture where we reduced the overwhelming choice offered by Standard Life’s Investment ISA to present 5 ‘bundled’ simple choice offers on the application form. Option one is to take one of these pre-packaged solutions, Option two [the ‘experts’ choice] was to select from a supermarket of funds. Not only did we hierarchically structure the page to promote the path of least resistance, but we used strong visuals and human-centred introspective copy: “Comfortable choosing from a wider range?”.

A screen grab of the application form for a Standard Life Stocks & Shares ISA

Making choices easier

Even something as simple as Facebook showing you the friends you will lose touch with when you deactivate your account is a clear example of using loss aversion (our tendency to disproportionally value things we have above those we do not)  reciprocity (your friends have shared their information with you..) and social proofs (everyone else is here) to – in their case – significantly reduce the number of deactivations per year. A few words about the power of emotionally intelligent signage and hopefully the point was made, this doesn’t need to be massive.

I couldn’t resist pointing out the classic HCI logic in the goal-architecture that means you get your card back at the ATM before your cash so that you don’t walk off with money and forget your card if the sequence was the other way around. A simple sequence decision.

Making a commitment
To close my 45 minutes I wanted  to touch on how making people do something different for a second, a few minutes even, can be incredibly powerful but that long-lasting behavioural change is incredibly difficult and complex. Perspective and influence over time from the herd and an array of variables means that designing such solutions is fraught with challenges. Though I didn’t mention it at the time I have talked before about my relationship with my energy supplier. Having used an energy monitor and post-usage data I was able to reduce the amount of gas and electricity I used at home, but after a while I realised I wasn’t getting any better. I’d reached a  plateau in savings, all my devices were low energy or used at their most efficient settings and so-on. I lost interest and stopped looking at the monitor or my reports. My usage crept back up. The classic YoYo seen in dieters and addictive behaviour like smoking.

It’s not enough to take these examples above and apply them to solutions as varied as increasing up-sell on insurance products, shifting metallic paint on new car configurations, moving people to a different mobile tariff, quitting smoking or eating more fruit and veg. Each instance requires a deep understanding of the specific problem, it’s motivators and triggers.

Which seemed a perfect time to call on Fogg. Running out of time now so if you want to know more about the application of behaviour change then do seek out these useful kits:

Finally,
In the coming months I hope to be able to share with you some of the excellent work my team (Aarti Dhodia and Tom Harle) have been  producing to bring behavioural influence to an exciting service to be launched by one of Dare’s clients. Until then, I hope you find inspiration and enjoyment in the examples here.

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Jan 05 2012
work

Pretty & Different ≠ Intuitive

Image

I like the idea of representing data sets in new ways. Particularly data sets where the relationships between entities are valuable. Because of this, and indeed the way it’s been rendered, I rather like Planetary by Bloom. However, in this rather fawning piece by John Pavlus on Fast Company, it’s astronomy-inspired interface is described variously as ‘intuitive’, ‘divinely ordered’ and with ‘human-friendly affordances’.

Forgive me, but didn’t it take humankind a rather long time to understand the causal relationships in the solar system to be understood? I wouldn’t necessarily say that we users would instinctively ‘get’ the metaphors used in Bloom’s work although we would appreciate them once shown. I think it takes some leap to suggest that there is more intuitive understanding of music data in seeing it in this new format than there would be in, say, a hierarchical list of artists, albums and tracks.

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