During my presentation at MediaCT last month I showed a dozen examples of how we are being influenced by all kinds of cues around us. I explained what Persuasion Tactics are and what we as designers can do with them without crossing an ethical border.
Last friday we invited Rob Willems to give a talk at Concept7 about Serious Gaming. He explained what serious games are, who makes them and how they do that. Rob also talked about his own project Gambas, with which he tries to improve blind children’s physical skills while playing games with sighted friends and family.
Sustainability is a broad term. In this post I talk about environmental sustainability issues. We as designers can play a large role in creating an eco-friendlier world. When people think of design, they tend to think of artifacts. I think these artifacts are important, but merely a result. We need to design the design process, production process and people’s behavior.
My bookmarks for today
- Updating Our Understanding of Perception and Cognition: Part II Article focussing on cognition and cognitive/perceptual speed by Jeff Johnson (Author of Desiging with the Mind in Mind).
- Updating Our Understanding of Perception and Cognition: Part I Article focussing on visual perception by Jeff Johnson (Author of Desiging with the Mind in Mind).
- Adventures in Lines and Columns How HTML5 can help you in the development of a highly-interactive and visual demanding charting application.
- Playful User Experiences The most evident natural motivation is play.
Our daily sketching and prototyping work used to focus itself mainly on desktop applications. These days mobile is getting a larger and larger share of our design time. We need to adjust our design tools for this. During the months we’ve been doing this I came across several tools, I’ve listed and reviewed (where possible) them here.
A couple of months ago I read this book by Cialdini called ‘Influence’, he describes 6 powerful weapons of influence. I decided to read the follow-up Yes! 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive which describes 50 stories about the 6 persuasive weapons in action. For some of the weapons I tried to find examples on the web which (consciously or unconsciously) use them succesfully.
Some posts ago I wrote about an MBTI based ideation framework for sketching ideas. This week I came across this great video which explains the same four decision modes, the video is accompanied by great examples on the Mint website homepage.
Do you have to justify usability within your organization? At the second UX Book Club in Groningen we read ‘Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics’ by John S. Rhodes. We concluded this book could help you in the right direction, but beware, there’s more to it…
The moment website visitors enter your website, they’ll start organizing everything they see in order to make sense of it all. As a designer of websites you’re responsible for organizing the information in a way the message gets across in a proper way. Proximity and continuity laws of gestalt are the simplest ways to organize your information.
Want to know what Lego, Häagen-Dazs and Spiderman have in common? In this post my colleague Stefan Wobben and I talk about ideation frameworks and how they can help you finding the best ideas for your design challenge.
At Concept7 we developed our own MBTI sketching paper for ideation sessions. It helps you think inside the box of 4 personality traits. You can download it here for free.
Often people ask me how we know which ideas to choose from all the hundreds of ideas we’ve generated during brainstorm sessions. Apart from our gut feelings and experience there’s a method that could help us decide, define design principles.
A couple of months ago, we spotted the following trend amongst some of the most innovative internet companies: feedback features, beta versions and sneak previews of new websites. Companies do anything to get feedback from the end-user.
In Axure RP Pro two important functionalities like ‘masters’ and ‘dynamic panels’ help us create rich interactions really efficiently. In some cases they don’t work really well together, I tried to find a work-a-round which I’m sharing with you in a tab widget form today.
Do you think it’s hard to get started when you’re trying to come up with tons of great design solutions? Do you feel like you’re missing some great ideas when you’re done? A solid framework could help you. I think MBTI is a framework that can help you out.
All the information you need: The ‘User Innovation’ workshop will be given by the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies on friday September 25th 2009 (9:00h until 16:00h) and hosted by Concept7 in Paterswolde. Costs per person: € 599,00 (ex. vat).
Storing and finding back these ideas can sometimes be a real hazard. Even though we as human beings are much better at recognizing visuals cues above written documents there’s not so many storage materials and furniture available to help us efficiently store and refind the paperwork. At Concept7 we think we’ve found a solution for storing the most common forms of sketches and prototypes.
It was in the beginning of november last year when I was asked to lead three dream team design sessions for a large Dutch company. The problem we had to deal with was an information architectural problem on their website.
During my presentation at Fronteers I talked about the foundation of the gestalt theory and showed that gestalt psychology is about human perception. Researchers of this phenomenon discovered five principal laws that can be used in modern webdesign.
Images have more distinctive features than words. That’s why it’s easier to recognize sketches among sketches than it is to recognize words among other words. Sketches enhance accessibility to earlier ideas.
Unfortunately not everyone’s got an A3 printer. That’s why we’ve created an A4 version of our sketching paper.
After having used 960.gs’ sketching paper (with pleasure!) for a couple of months now I decided that their sketching paper templates just aren’t flexible enough for me and started figuring how to improve them. Today I’ve released our own sketching paper.
This summer we held a Concept7 family day. We were all asked to find a way to create a Concept7 ‘fan club’ or ‘family’. The whole Concept7 crew was divided in 4 small groups and were asked to go their own way and present their ideas at the end of the day.
It started out 2 years ago when my roommates at Concept7 and I had a discussion which concluded that everyone living on the countryside should have an engine of a Kreidler or a Zundapp on the kitchen table. Late summer in 2007 me and my girlfriend bought a little farmhouse in the country side.
Recent comments
Victor Conesa on Sketching and prototyping tools for iPhone apps
You forgot to mention Justinmind Prototyper http://www.justinmind.com, they have a great widgets library for iPhone in their blog http://www.justinmind.com/blog/wireframe-interactive-iphone-apps-iphone-library/Amir Khella on Sketching and prototyping tools for iPhone apps
Great list, Henk. I've been using Apple Keynote+Keynotopia to prototype iPad and iPhone apps and I highly recommend it!
Henk on Flickr
