Stephen P. Anderson
April 8 9:00AM
How can we design interactions that encourage specific behaviors?
A while back, LinkedIn experimented with a feature: a little meter above the users’ information, showing their profile’s “percentage completed.” Suddenly, more users filled out their profiles. The feature didn’t have a clever interface, a sophisticated information architecture, or show any technical prowess. It just leveraged basic human psychology.
As designers, we work hard to provide powerful features in our applications, but if users don’t take advantage, it’s all waste. We have to extend our designer’s toolkit, leveraging the latest thinking from behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric.
Stephen will guide you through specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications, especially during the post-signup period, when it’s so easy to lose people. He’ll demonstrate how to engage your users through a process of playful discovery, which is vital whether you make consumer applications or design for the corporate environment.
We'll look at ways to:
• Ease users into your application’s features
• Integrate behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric into your design process
• Leverage your users’ natural curiosity and playfulness to bring your design to the next level
Throughout the day you will learn more than 50 insights from psychology and how they can be applied to Web design. Through and mix of practical examples and group activities, you will learn:
• Why a clear product story is critical to your product's success
• How visual imagery affects perception, attention and responses
• How language shapes our understanding and decision making
• Ways to apply feedback loops and personal informatics to create a performance-based game
• How even serious business apps can benefit from being more playful and gamelike
Why it's dangerous to mix intrinsic motivation with external rewards (and the latest findings on motivation)
...and other things to consider if you wish to create more seductive interactions.
Best of all, attendees will be given an advance copy of the Mental Notes card deck, which pulls together 50 of the best heuristics, biases, principles and patterns from a variety of human centered disciplines. Groups will use this brainstorming tool to respond to various design challenges created specifically for this workshop.
Regardless of your current project, the principles taught here can be applied universally. You will walk away inspired, and armed with creative ways to apply different insights into human behavior to the design of your Web sites and applications.
April 10 2:10PM
Having a shared vision, understood by all team members, is critical to product
design. But, between “putting a man on the moon” and the final countdown
are 1,000s of decisions-- decisions that need more input and direction than a
vision statement provides. How do you extend a vision statement such that it is
remains aspirational but is specific enough to clarify intention and make
difficult decisions easy?
Enter "design tenets."
Much like flying buttresses support grand cathedrals, design tenets support and
extend a grand core vision.
I've found these simple statements, typically 4-7 of them, to be one of the
most critical artifacts for any new product design process. Done well, design
tenets add character and definition to a product vision; where a clear vision
articulates “what” we hope to accomplish, design tenets clarify “how.”
More importantly, these statements provide specific design direction and help
products stay true to a clear vision, avoiding the inconsistent introduction of
features over time.
In this brief session, you'll learn how to identify and articulate design
tenets for your project in a way that anchors and inspires the design process.
This tactical presentation will cover:
-What design tenets are (and are not)
-Examples of design tenets from some familiar and not so familiar products,
and
-Specific tips on how to identify and write well-formed design tenets
These ideas can be introduced by anyone on a product development team.
April 10 2:45PM
So what do you do after you've worked out all the usability kinks from you application? You make it fun!
In this fast-paced workshop, you'll be introduced to the Mental NotesTM card deck, a design tool to help us tap into basic principles of human psychology. After a brief tutorial, groups will be given a design challenge- make a "good" site a whole lot better through a sprinkle of serendipity, arousal, rewards and other seductive elements.
Using principles from the Mental NotesTM card deck, you will discover how to:
• Ease users into your application’s features
• Integrate behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric into your design process
• Leverage your users’ natural curiosity and playfulness to bring your design to the next level
So, are you up for a challenge? Are you a creative thinker, or wanting to be? Join us as we explore ways to engage users through a process of playful discovery. Whether you make consumer applications or design for the corporate environment-- you will not want to miss this event.