#chris nodder

I’ve never met a sticky note I didn’t like....

This example of a user journey map is a great example of combining storyboarding style with the sticky note jamboree that is brainstorming in user experience circles. I may follow this example for my submission. Since this is an intended portfolio piece, that we are building the entire term on, I’m hesitant to not ‘get it right.’ The trouble with countless stickies (outside of my obscenely illegible handwriting) is that after a certain point they get messy and disorderly. 

This structure, in addition to the notecard on poster board with sticky note contents transferred below, recommended in Chris Nodder’s UXD Techniques: Creating Scenarios and Storyboards might be the way to go with this nascent project. I’m still hemming and hawing over the right approach, but not unlike scenarios, going back and forth between viable and not-so-hot ideas, is the best way to find the keeper!

On another note, I’m including some noteworthy notes pulled from this week’s readings by Jonas Lowgren and the Interaction Design Foundation, that I found to illuminate what everyone is talking about when they say IxD. These terms, like UXD and Information Architecture or Content Strategy, get tossed about like jargon I think, when really they have such nuanced and different meanings, depending on the actual context of application and point in time or project, agile or waterfall.

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“The aim of the following chapter is to provide an introductory overview of the concept and the field of interaction design, loosely grounded in historical developments.”

“The notion of shaping is used consciously to suggest a designerly activity (as opposed to, e.g., ‘building’ which suggests engineering, or ‘making’ or ‘creating’ that could refer to more or less anything). More specifically, I find it to be a distinctive trait of interaction design that the gestation process is a Design process, in the capital-D sense of the word. This in turn implies five major characteristics.”

“Designing Interactions, industrial designer and IDEO founder Bill Moggridge reminisces (p. 14):

“I felt that there was an opportunity to create a new design discipline, dedicated to creating imaginative and attractive solutions in a virtual world, where one could design behaviors, animations, and sounds as well as shapes. This would be the equivalent of industrial design but in software rather than three-dimensional objects. Like industrial design, the discipline would start from the needs and desires of the people who use a product or service, and strive to create designs that would give aesthetic pleasure as well as lasting satisfaction and enjoyment.”

The  five major characteristics are:

Design involves changing situations by shaping and deploying artifacts

Design is about exploring possible futures

Design entails framing the ‘problem’ in parallel with creating possible ‘solutions'

Design involves thinking through sketching and other tangible representations

“When sketching snapshots or aspects of possible futures (such as a not-yet-existing product), the designer is not merely copying images from her inner eye. The drawings are micro-experiments that respond with insights into strengths, weaknesses and possible changes in a tight loop of thinking that involves the hand, the senses and the mind. The same notion applies for other sketching media used in design practice. For interaction design, there are particular implications to be observed from the temporal nature of our design material. One of them is that when designing innovative interaction techniques, it may be necessary to sketch in software and hardware rather than staying with lo-fi sketching media.”

“In general, the notion of sketching is more about the mindset of the designer than about the medium used. If a particular external representation serves to engage the designer in a conversation about the details and implications of a not-yet-finalized idea, and if it is quick, tentative and truly disposable, then it is a sketch. It could be anything from a napkin drawing to a piece of programming code, perhaps even written in the language that is normally used to build products for delivery - what matters is the purpose and intention.”

Design addresses instrumental, technical, aesthetical and ethical aspects throughout

“Interaction design as a designerly activity would insist that the aesthetical and ethical qualities can never be ignored or factored out. Whether something looks and feels good to use”

This book by Chris Nodder, as the title already suggests, is concerned with the seven deadly sins pride, sloth, gluttony, anger, envy, lust, and greed. But what do these human traits have to do with design? First of all, it is about understanding human behaviour and comprehending that human frailty can provide a learning experience. As Nodder argues, designers work very hard to control behaviours and emotions, so design is all about persuasion. Only relatively late, did psychologists and researchers find out why people behave and react a certain way. So, design is also often used to make money out of our weaknesses even if the intentions might be good. Most of the time, we do not even realise that we are manipulated. 

Nodder defines evil design as something that “creates purposefully designed interfaces that make users emotionally involved in doing something that benefits the designer more than them” (xv). Therefore, he groups design techniques and the seven sins together since they both relate to human traits:

Pride:

“These days, the sense in which pride is bad is probably best summed up by the word hubris - arrogance, loss of touch with reality, overestimating one’s capabilities, thinking that you can do no wrong (...) It’s all about how the brain manages to rationalize or resolve two conflicting concepts: a state called cognitive dissonance” (1-2). -> changing opinions is much easier than changing  behaviours!

Provide many reasons for people to use your product!

Social proof: make it/messages personal and emotional (by including friends)!

Eliminate doubt by repeating positive messages!

Change opinions by emphasising general similarities!

Use images of certification and endorsement!

Help people complete tasks, sets, and collections!

Depend on people’s desire for oder: make them clean up!

Sloth: 

“(...) describes laziness, but laziness is the outcome rather than the source of sloth. Sloth is actually avoidance of work or a “don’t care” feeling. (...) Thinking of sloth as avoiding work or not caring about outcomes gives us a useful perspective; namely that people are not motivated to do more than the absolute minimum work to achieve their online aims. You could call this “lazy,” but that isn’t necessarily true. Instead, customers demand easy-to-use sites and software. We have been trained to look for cues that help us move forward in our tasks with the minimum of effort, and we’ll often abandon sites that make us work too hard (39)”.

Desire lines: From A to B with as few barriers as possible! 

Create a path of least resistance and make sure that your end goal is the easiest way through the process!

Reduce options and include smart defaults to smoothen the decision process!

Emphasise your first choice and make people accept this as theirs too!

Make options hard to find or understand!

Negative options: sign people up by default and make it hard for them to alter their decisions by hiding the desire lines in plain sight!

Gluttony: 

“(...) occurs when we over-consume to the point of extravagance or waste. (...) Companies encourage this overabundance by making us feel like we deserve to be rewarded and by escalating our level of commitment beyond what we first intended, drawing us in from early engagement through to full-on compliance. Sites also make us fearful of missing out—scarcity, exclusivity, and loss aversion play on the fears behind gluttony (67)”. 

Make customers work for (exclusive) rewards!

Hide the math (show answers rather than the workings)!

Show the problems (mention weaknesses before the user finds out) = build trust!

Foot-in-the-door: gain commitment to a small thing to convince about a big thing!

Door-in-the-face: first ask for a big thing and after being turned down ask for a smaller thing (the user is more likely to agree now since he/she is guilty of turning you down)!

Present hard decisions only after you are sure that the user is invested!

The Tom Sawyer effect: scarcity breeds desire!

Anger: 

(...) is fear with a focus: an understanding of what caused the fear and often also the capacity to resolve the fear by acting to remove it. It’s an active emotion; people want to deal with the cause of their anger in ways they don’t with other emotions. This happens on an intellectual and also a physical level, with biological changes as a result of feeling anger. (...) Anger has different effects on judgment and decision making than do other negative emotions. Anger influences how we perceive, reason, and choose. Its effects spill over from the initial cause to other things we’re doing, affecting how we respond to situations that have no bearing on the thing that initially made us angry (103)”.

Use humour to deflect anger and defuse the situation!

Use metaphysical arguments to beat opponents (have something that science can’t explain)!

Use anonymity to encourage repressed behaviours!

Give people permission and remove individual responsibility!

Scare people and remove that fear by presenting your product as the solution!

Envy: 

“(...) as a race we humans seem to be almost hard-wired to react to other people’s success with envy. (...)  In other words, we hate feeling like we’ve lost out. That feeling of deprivation, inferiority, or shame is the basis of destructive envy. With destructive envy, it’s not just that we want the thing that someone else has; we also want that other person to not have it because their having it makes us feel inferior. In these situations, we make decisions based not just on benefit to ourselves, but also to make gains over others around us. So, even if we found ourselves in a situation in which we could gain more by cooperating with someone, destructive envy dictates that we’d often rather not work together than be in a position in which that other person benefitted more than we did. Whether the root of someone’s envy is benign or destructive, it’s a powerful motivating force. That means it can be harnessed to make customers do things (137-138)”.

Create desirability for your object to produce envy as a motivating force!

Create something aspirational and produce benign envy!

Make people feel ownership before they’ve bought! 

Create status differences to drive behaviour (otherwise there is no envy)!

Emphasise achievement as a form of status and train them to keep coming back for more!

Let users advertise their status within a community!

Make people feel important and give them recognition to earn their trust/love!

Lust:

“We might often think of lust as sexual, but it actually describes an intense desire for any item. When we lust after something we stop thinking rationally. We look only for additional reasons to have it, not for reasons to abstain. So, when people have that craving, it doesn’t take much of a nudge to turn desire into action by convincing them to fulfill those lustful feelings. (...) Lust is the starting point; envy and greed are the results. To harness lust, companies must first get people to like them so that they are inclined to do what the company wants (169)”.

Flattery makes people more responsive to persuasion!

Frame your message as a question and give the user a sense of being addressed directly and individually!

Create an in-group and show your customers that they belong there!

Give something to get something and people will feel obligated to give back!

Make something free and eliminate rationality this way!

Sell the intangible value and change the perception rather than the reality!

Greed:

“(...) is the desire to get or keep more stuff than you need, either accumulating money or possessions (“whoever has the most toys wins”) or just to feel better than someone else does. (...) All talk of sin aside, there does seem to be a correlation between having more than one needs and being selfish. When talking about haves and have-nots, there are four possible behaviors: selfishness, altruism, spite, and cooperation. Greed happens when people pursue their own agenda at the expense of others, leading to selfish or spiteful behaviour (203)”.

Customers should win instead of finish/buy something (description matters)!

Further blow up people’s self-esteem and feeling of skills and mastery by giving them quick wins and train them to continue!

Make rewards look like they were earned by someone’s skills rather than luck!

Make sure that people have little reason to leave your site by walling them in!

Own the anchor point and control the terms of your offering!

Move from money to tokens with an arbitrary value!

Increase the price and people will appreciate your product more! 

Aside from the smart idea to connect the seven deadly sins to design, this book provides a nice collection of tips to persuade people to something you want. This can be helpful when you try to make a profit. Nevertheless, I would be careful with some of these principles as the online user has already learned what not to trust and quickly realises when he is being manipulated. At that point it is already too late since he will have lost trust in you and maybe even avoid your product. Although most of the ideas are rather subtle and might really work, I am somehow repelled by his main message that design is all about manipulating, influencing, and exploiting human behaviour. But maybe I am too idealistic about the field, who knows. However, aside from my mixed feelings, the book is well-written, presents nice examples, and is definitely worth reading. You will find a new perspective on design tools and what to choose for your work.

Buy the book here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118422147/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1118422147&linkCode=as2&tag=grumpyoldgit-20

Have Fun!

Don't Get In The Way of Information on the Web - Chris Nodder:

Lynda.com has thousands of tutorials, ranging all kinds of software-related subject matter. I was fortunate enough to watch one part of a tutorial looking at how websites are affected by the user experience, and how good navigation and design can pull more users in - and keep them there.

One key aspect of designing for web, is talking the web's language. Millions of people use millions of different websites on the internet, but there is a reason that many of these sites use the same design and terminology; put simply, because that is what everyone has become used to. There is expected to be some method to navigate the site through a horizontal or vertical sidebar, and the Home button should lead to the homepage, the Checkout button should lead to the checkout etc.

These basic fundamentals can be twisted slightly to adapt different sites, but they can never be wavered from too much so that the general user can navigate the site easily and not get bored/frustrated. This 'same design and terminology' is referred to as 'Standard Design', generalising a site so that anyone (and not just you) knows how to get around it.

The second key rule outlined by Chris Nodder, the designer must know their audience. As designers, we're always told to consider the audience in which we are designing for, and excellent design usually has its audience acknowledged in every detail; web is no different.

Something to remember when creating a website is: 'Not everyone uses websites as much as you'. If you are trying to appeal to users your age that's great, but when considering the general public, you must consider both those significantly older and younger than you. The chances are that these two groups of people will not know how to manipulate fancy jQuery lightboxes, galleries and carousels unless they are simplified - in which a slideshow may be better used to display images.

A method that some companies use to get around the audience problem, is asking the audience in which field they best fit in (for example Home User, Small Business or Public Sector). Once your site is broken down into these separate strands, it will be easier to target advertisements, products, terminology etc. to someone that will know what they are/mean, or to simplify these things down so that the audience viewing them can understand.

The pitfall of this method is suspicion; people start to wonder why prices vary for different users, why certain products are recommended for them, and why it matters whether they are young, old, a home user, or a small business. It is for this reason that this method should be approached in the correct way, and done in a way that minimises suspicion.

The psychology that all content must be 3 or less clicks away from your homepage is false. The truth is that different users interact with a site in different ways, some like to delve into websites, some like to skim face-value. However, the common theme here was that users generally stay on a site with exciting content that they understand, regardless of the website's depth. If users are engaged in content that is targeted towards them, or discover a site that is engaging in nature, they are more likely to be engaged with it - it is as simple as that.

Navigation should be the simplest aspect of your website; if you have clear headings on the site then the hope is that no one will get lost. Do not name the same page more than once on your site, this may sound obvious, but referring to a page as The Forum, The Den and The Chatroom in different areas of the site will confuse users - what is more likely is that you will be the only person on the site that knows what you mean.

Do not give your navigation headings clever names; for example, don't call the funeral section of the site 'Kicking The Bucket', because again, the general audience may not have heard the phrase before and may not know what the heading refers to.

Adding key summaries to a site can keep users on a site for much longer; the thing that we all have to understand is that no one wants to read thick paragraphs of text to get a brief understanding about what yourself/a product on the site does. A page may be dedicated to separate items so users can read in greater detail if they wish, but for navigation and summaries, descriptions must be kept brief. In Chris Nodder's experience, he says that on most sites up to 50% of what is written can be deleted, whilst still giving the user the same understanding.

The final, most simple point of keeping websites accessible is simply make links look slightly different. If something does not look like a link, the general user will not know that it is a link; although the blue, underlined text can be deviated from, it is best to differentiate links in someway to highlight their usage to users.

Application usability con Chris Nodder è stata una lezione fichissima. Più che di layout e di campi a riempire, Chris ci ha raccontato che "dietro ogni tasto c'è una storia da raccontare".

E se Carlotta va sul vostro sito per comprare un dvd, "vuole sceglierlo, poi metterlo nel carrello, poi inserire i suoi dati e poi pagare". È più o meno come nella vita reale: se il percorso è diverso la storia si rompe e non ha più senso. 

Per aiutare Carlotta a seguire la strada giusta dobbiamo darle degli indizi e raggruppare i passaggi secondo uno schema logico: proximity, similarity, grouping and closure. Carlotta ve ne sarà grata. Anche perché siamo esseri abitudinari, e se c'è uno standard dobbiamo seguirlo.

Quindi qual è il modo migliore per costruire una pagina?

"La risposta è: dipende. Fate un test con almeno cinque persone. Osservate come si comportano e poi prendete una decisione".

Chris ha parlato dell'importanza dello spazio bianco (che non deve essere necessariamente bianco, basta che aiuti a raggruppare gli oggetti) e del suo odio nei confronti degli avvisi inutili.

"Dovremmo costruire una cimitero delle dialog box", ha detto. "Interrompono il flusso e prima di aggiungerne una dovremmo sempre chiederci: 'È qui perché è veramente utile, oppure perché ho sbagliato a progettare la struttura narrativa?'".

Un tizio seduto all'ultima fila ha borbottato che se seguiamo sempre lo stesso standard la struttura rimarrà identica e non si evolverà mai. "Sbagliato", ha risposto Chris. "Perché se spiegate i passaggi in modo chiaro, Carlotta imparerà cose sempre più complesse. Gmail, per esempio: prima non aveva tutti quei tasti per la formattazione del testo. Li hanno inseriti successivamente e con il tempo abbiamo imparato a usarli".