User Experience, design, etc
I’ve alluded to framing in two previous posts:
Framing is a potent tool used by marketers, linguists, business strategists, and designers. What is it?
A frame is simply the body of concepts, stories, scenarios and values related to a term, phrase or idea. Read the rest of this entry »
image by Rosenfield MediaBefore I make more of a fool of myself by talking about sustainability and my role in saving the world, I should probably read some more. I’m starting with these two books: “Nudge” by Thaler and Sunstein, and “Design is The Problem” by Nathan Shedroff. I respect both works for their non-traditional approach to sustainability: “Nudge” begins with the problem of human psychology, DiTP with design principles. Which helps when you know little about environmental science. Read the rest of this entry »
What figure does the term mentor bring to mind? Albert Eisteinn? Alfred Hitchcock? Yve Saint Laurent? Michael Jordan? Mentor figures are those that inspire us, and for inspiration we often look towards the lofty heavens.
But our mentors don’t have to be away in dream-land. Read the rest of this entry »
They’ve got a section on the Mother Nature Network called The Lazy Environmentalist. I haven’t even read a piece of content, but I’m turned off already.
I get their point: we’ve got to make tiny changes in our lives to improve the environment. But laziness is the worst sounding description of green efforts: laziness is throwing the trash on the street instead of in a waste receptacle, leaving the tv on while falling asleep, keeping the sink running to check the oven.
The headline is just a soundbyte, this blog post just a quick impression, but they touch upon the issue of motivating people to act responsibly, and how we should linguistically frame green efforts. Are we really trying to make people feel good about being lazy?
If there’s anything that serves as a universal mentor, it’s the written word.
I’m an avid reader of blogs. Anything related to UX and design, and I’m probably subscribed to it. Blogs are great spaces for engagement, they provide multiple perspectives on a single topic, and they’re a great way for invisible and unrepresented populations to make an impact on larger bodies of knowledge.
I’m also a lover of novels. Transporting the reader to another time and place, a good novel is both a creative exercise and a relaxing release from the world. They can also provide in-depth instruction that most blogs are unable to provide.
Today, DailyBlogTips asked its readers: Is there still a need for reading books in this information age?
My answer, like most, is an emphatic yes; both blogs and books are valuable mentors. Their differences merely imply different use contexts.
Picking up a book requires a sitting of at least 45 minutes (for me). Chapters are longer than blog posts, and it usually requires at least reading through one whole section or chapter to gain the sense of closure and progress in the narrative. Admittedly, due to the amount of devotion required to get through a book, I have a bad habit of leaving books un-finished (sometimes with less than 20 pages left!). However, the time investment has a huge return: finishing a good book can be a formative experience, and with the right author and public acceptance, a book can create a shift in the cultural perception of reality.
Blogs on the other hand are quick fixes of information, meant to be skimmed during a coffee break or read on the subway. They can be left unfinished and saved for later reading – there are times I have more tabs open in Mozilla than I know what to do with. Furthermore, the nature of hypertext implies an interrupted narrative. Through hyper-links, readers are transported elsewhere in cyberspace not through their imaginations but through disruption of the perceptual stream, analagous to changing the channel on the tube.
Is blog consumption any better than TV consumption? I fear that this medium, which I admittedly am infatuated with, has slid down with “baser” modes of communication and authorship. The very freedom that allows anyone to create a blog does clog the airwaves with noise. Though I am all for open source media, there is something to be said about the institution of the publishing house that serves as a gateway to quality content.
Like the author of the original post, I’ve not been reading as much as I probably could be. It may indeed be a sign of the times that people are blogging more and probably reading fewer books. Many people probably share with me the problem of not having time to devote to reading a book; whether it’s coding, tweeting, writing the blog, or researching new gigs, I find it hard to set aside time for good reading.
However, these differences don’t stop me from buying and enjoying books. (some of my favorites I’ve listed above)
It’s one day after ZURB wired (see more at zurbwired.com), and I’ve taken away quite a lot, not the least of which is a snazzy Pie Ranch t-shirt. Listed below are 10 of the lessons I learned from my 24 hour experience at ZURB: Read about it after the jump
I’ll be down in the South Bay doing work for ZURB and Mission Pie in a 24-hour marketing strategy and design event. Read more about the marathon, ZURB wired. Hopefully there will be some Mission Pie provided at the event.
The idea of consumers buying an experience, rather than a product, was first introduced to me through reference to Pine & Gillmore’s book, The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Products in the market today, no matter how mundane, are packaged around some sort artificial or natural experiential context.
There are good and bad sides to this experience economy. A lot of bad stories get made up: McDonald’s as a lifestyle brand for the youthful and active, cigarette smoking as narcissistic and nihilistic cool.
It is time we begin to craft real experiences through products we design. What do I mean by that? First, a well-meaning and thought out experience is one that serves to please the consumer (or user, or audience) through total engagement: tapping into emotions of anticipation and satisfaction, create responsible narratives, and form bonds in a trusting relationship. Furthermore, a real user experience informs the consumer directly and responsibly about their product’s consumption and the context of use. This implies a built-in understanding of the user’s experience outside the web (or whatever platform we design our product).
We must be aware of how the experience we craft interacts with and compares to the audience’s lived experience. We must provide experiences that consumers are comfortable with, are informed about, feel are genuine and authentic, and allows them room for freedom and empowerment, much like the kind of life choices that humans actively and happily engage in.
Addendum: Wow there’s so much to be said about Jesse James Garrett’s closing statement at the IA summit this year. For now, this quote stood out in my mind. I’m literally losing sleep over this, writing 3 hours after I intended to go to sleep.
They take people, they hook them up to mRIs, you know “brain wave scanners” and then they show em tv commercials and they look at what parts of their brains light up when they watch these tv commercials… and they can figure out how to craft a tv commercial that will illicit a feeling of safety, or trust, or desire. So yeah, my first reaction when I heard about this stuff: wow I gotta get my hands on some of that…my second reaction was wait a minute, what are we talking here? A process designed to illicit specific patterns of neural activity in users; back in the 50s they called that mind control.
Now in a lot of ways we’re already in the mind control business: IA and interaction design both seek to reward and reinforce certain patterns of thought and behavior… So there’s always been an ethical dimension of this work. But who’s talking about this stuff, who’s taking this seriously? I don’t hear anybody talking about these things.
That I, like many others on this planet, need to increase our Ecological Intelligence. Yes, the trend has been repeated ad naseum, the marketers and advertisers who know it and exploit it. But we have not reached the point where our beliefs stand up to the promises our products and politicians have made. We have not yet reached a collective consciousness that understands our individual social and biological impacts. Let us hope our brains are able to evolve this mechanism.
Green design.
Web 2.0.
Since entering a more “corporate” (non-profit) setting, I am realizing how new these concepts are to a lot of company cultures where everyone is pining for a blog or a recycling program. Everyone’s got their own opinion about what these things are. Here are two such opinions I found to be interesting:
a UX podcast speaking with Marc Ettig of Fit Associates.
Ettig talks about the green design being contingent upon two important organizational behaviors which are emerging in the consumer market: 1) the move from worrying about “me” to worrying about “we”. 2) being concerned about quality of life, rather than (and independent of) just “having stuff” (about 45% of the way through the podcast). These new collective ideas are what is charging the movement towards greener products and services. What I like about his discussion is that green and sustainable means more than how we use materials, but it is an ethical attitude towards creating a better future (however that may be broadly defined).
My quest continues to find a green video game company. Who’s improving quality of life in the market?
Posted a week ago on DESIGNING *for humans, a blog post compares web 2.0 to older, nostalgic devices which serve as the web 2.0’s precursors. The Sony Walkman and Polaroid camera set up a culture of sharing media which made web 2.0 possible. D*fh takes their definition of web 2.0 from O’Reilly media:
2.0’s key attributes, O’Reilly presciently suggested, include “harnessing collective intelligence” (think Wikipedia) and “rich user experiences” (think YouTube).
They do a great job of illustrating how nebulous this concept really is, by tying the “2.0 concept” to devices which existed long before the web.