What’s the Price of Everything?
Great trailer for the upcoming book, “The Price of Everything?”.
Is Gamification the Future of Marketing?
A modern Shakespeare would claim that, “All the world’s a game,” then it might be time for us to collectively revisit what we mean by ‘game’ and extract the concept of ‘fun’ from the pastimes of our youth. If sending out invoices can be fun, why can’t your customer interactions be fun? With a few exceptions I think it would be a mistake to brush off the concept no matter what business you’re in. Customer experiences – even the most mundane – can be more rewarding and pleasurable (for all involved) if you think differently about your customers’ motivations. Help them do what they already want or need to do and if you can make it fun or pleasurable and social – even better.
Ze Frank poses the following to a range of heavy-hitting creatives like Imogen Heap and Ben Stiller:
“When you make things with an audience in mind, do you have internal representations of that audience to help guide you in the process? Are you in dialogue with a cast of proto-audience members that somehow represent different facets of your perceived audience? Are there little homunculi that provide editorial voices different from your own? Do you interact with them verbally or do you bounce things off of some sort of an emotional surface? Did some sort of averaging form them or were they inspired by particular moments of feedback? Do they have a shape? How would you describe their points of view? What do they look like? Do they have names? Are there ones you trust more than others? Are there ones you avoid?”
Personality in Design: Atmosphere, Character And Feel
A good discussion of the emotional considerations of design & aesthetics.
Read the full article for complete examples.
At the end of the day, personality is about user experience. People look for unique, fun or pleasant experiences when they deal with businesses or other individuals. Understanding your personality is identifying what kind of user experience is offered. While personality can encompass many elements there are a few key points that we can look out for when trying to communicate through design:
- Attitude
- Language and Respect
- Visual Language
- Atmosphere
- Color
- Texture
- Quality and Organization
Connotation is a powerful tool that designers can easily leverage. By recalling certain objects, colors, or textures we can evoke a connotation that we want to be associated with a design:
- Subtle is strong
- Focus on experiences
Remember: personality is about emotion.
While we would love to believe that we make our decisions based on pure cold logic, the human mind simply doesn’t operate that way and we shouldn’t expect it to. If it did, then everything would be white and gray. As designers, we have the unique ability to consider different concrete and emotional elements when building business solutions. This is our most powerful skill as designers. It enables us to communicate beyond simple functionality and usefulness to interact with people’s real decision making mechanisms.
Read the full Harvard Business Review article for complete examples.
1. Quality is more important than design in business.
There’s a persistent belief in a trade-off between style and substance. In reality, design is a way of conveying quality.
What’s true in the lives of individuals applies to companies as well—when you’re exhausted, overwhelmed or confused about what to do next, you never look your best. Good design is like putting on a suit for an interview—it shows the other person that you care about the relationship.
2. It is more important for to offer a great price than a great design.
Some great designs and brands do cost more, but there is no absolute correlation between price and design. Great design exists at all price points. Some of the best-known examples are companies such as Target, IKEA and LEGO that offer goods in a budget-conscious segment.
More importantly, some of the most innovative designs today were created with affordability and scarcity in mind. The push for sustainability across industries is likely to amplify this trend.
3. I would like to have a great design, but I have to launch on time.
Design by definition must include execution. Focusing on design forces an organization to test ideas, synthesize feedback, and generate new concepts at a rapid pace. Historically, designers were brought in at the end of the launch process—and creating concepts under intense pressure is still the norm.
Design efforts don’t slow down product launches. Indecision does. A widely shared set of decision criteria around design can make the process more efficient.
4. Design and aesthetics are too subjective—I need data to make decisions.
Although great design speaks to a consumer’s needs and emotions, there is no single aesthetic that companies must drive toward. Consistency between the brand values and the physical design is what creates a superior consumer experience. Moreover, design priorities are based in actual data. Consumer testing and feedback can be achieved at low cost today with the internet and social media.
5. I will create the product or service; I trust the advertising experts to tell the story.
The worlds of brand, advertising and design are rapidly converging. Well-crafted marketing and branding can boost the impact of a great design, but unless the message is reinforced by real-world experience, the effect is usually temporary.
Business leaders don’t need to go to design school to bring great design into their companies. (Ed: Do designers need to go to business school?)
They need to remember bring their own core skills—listening to consumers, asking questions, and openness to new ideas—into the design process. Design doesn’t work in a vacuum—it’s the alignment with the right business model and service that creates a compelling consumer experience. Getting to great design requires looking at consumers, not competing products, more thoughtfully.
Brilliant little article from Clearleft’s Cennydd Bowles:
And then, of course, you ask us how we work. We respond with confidence, bold Helvetica outlining our design process: research, ideas, prototyping, testing, iteration. We hope you approve of our rigor, and perhaps even believe it ourselves.
But the project is always more fluid. We splash between the phases, unable to separate ideas from output, problem from solution. We explore promising avenues that, days later, become dead ends. Sometimes, we solve a month’s problem in an hour. It seems unfair to charge you the same regardless, but it avoids those difficult conversations.
Try as we may, we can’t justify every decision. The birth of an idea is ineffable. Although we hope it came from our research and analysis, we can never know for sure. Intuition and experience influence our every thought.
We try to predict the effect of our work, but the truth is that design is always a gamble. We can tip the odds in your favor, but never guarantee a jackpot.
Sometimes we proclaim design to be art, sometimes science. This upsets both the artists and the scientists. Fortunately, it’s neither. We claim to understand human behavior, but are surprised by it daily. Despite what we say, there are wrong answers. The fold is a myth only when it suits us. And yes, criticism still stings.
Don’t misunderstand—we aren’t bullshitting you. People who’ve taken our advice have profited from it. But design resists minute analysis—break it into its constituent parts and it crumbles into dust.
So, reluctantly, we lie. We lie because otherwise nothing would happen. We lie because we don’t have the words. We lie because we’re human. And being human is what it’s all about.
(Source: 52weeksofux.com)
So many design articles today seem content to throw the intuitive core of design under the train of its more rational self. They imply, by varying degrees that design fits neatly into two camps: aesthetic pursuit and intellectual analysis. Just as prevalent are the pieces that chastise design for purporting to own creativity. From where this perception arose—I have no clue. Perhaps it’s the unintended consequence of selling design process (aka creativity) detached from the pedestrian world of results. Design and designers may have a lot to apologize for, but their advocacy of creativity is surely not one of them. If design is guilty of annexing creativity more effectively than other professions, so be it. There are worse accusations I can imagine.
Where did all this noise begin? Why is it that design, all these years on, consistently finds itself on the defensive? Compulsively seeking to legitimize itself? The reasons are numerous. In part, this state of affairs stems from the fact that, unlike engineering or architecture, there is no process for professional qualification in design. While the pros and cons of this have been debated to the point of boredom, it’s clear that the lack of standardization informs design as much as it limits it. Having gone back and forth on this issue any number of times, I cast my vote squarely for the loose structure that has come to define the profession. Why? Because design thrives on ambiguity, and this less than perfect pedigree endows design with the flexibility it needs to steer clear of institutional thinking—a competency increasingly as in demand as creativity itself.
But ambiguity is hard to sell, and this brings us to the second culprit behind design’s perennial posturing: entrepreneurialism. Anyone who has spent time in design consulting knows that the mechanics of the business require you to identify some readily understood value proposition; the elevator pitch. Something you can present to your clients (potential or otherwise) as the thing that distinguishes your organization from the other guy. This is natural enough, and if you’re successful at this, and your results align reasonably well with what you’re selling—you can indeed run a nice business (2008 - 2009 notwithstanding). But what happens when your value proposition becomes the same or similar to that of your competition? Well, then you need to reposition that offering. So it is that the ‘black-box’ of design is disassembled and demystified obsessively into narrower and narrower spaces. Likewise this constant revisionism can just as easily lead in the opposite direction, toward abstraction; blithely driving design into territory where it is invariably exposed as naive and unwelcomed (see Kevin McCullagh’s recent post). To me, both paths are corrosive because they deform the practice of design into a coalition of sorts; one that ultimately weakens the profession by distorting it beyond recognition.
To be fair, design thinking and the rest of the vocabulary we’ve created for design hasn’t been without purpose. It’s helped. Design today has entrée to a range of audiences it might otherwise never have had access to. But enough’s enough. Let’s claim our messy bits. Design IS thinking. Pure and simple. It may not be as ready for the boardroom as design thinking, but it’s the truth. Design derives its power and ultimate relevance by the way in which it artfully blends logic and intuition. The enduring truth of this fact is brought home to me every day when I enter our offices at TEAGUE. Here is a design organization founded 84 years ago by a man who paved his own course from commercial illustration to product design before arriving at the nascent field of aviation design. Was he selling design thinking, user-centric design, or universal design? I doubt it. What he was doing was employing his curiosity, talent, and intelligence to explore an ever-expanding range of problems. And Walter Dorwin Teague wasn’t unique. Dreyfuss, the Eames’, Buckminster Fuller, Achille Castiglioni and a host of other giants achieved their impressive results by employing the same dogged pursuit of opportunity through design—the intuitive as well as the rational; not by making excuses for it.
Design IS thinking. If we as a profession can’t muster up the confidence to sell that with conviction - who can?
(Source: core77.com)
What is the real game, then?
‘Gamification’, the internet will tell you, is the future. It’s coming soon to your bank, your gym, your job, your government and your gynaecologist. All human activity will be gamified, we are promised, because gamifying guarantees a whole bunch of other buzz-words like Immersion! and Emotional Engagement! and Socialised Monestisation! You’ll be able to tell when something’s been gamified because it will have points and badges. And this is the nub of the problem.
That problem being that gamification isn’t gamification at all. What we’re currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience. Points and badges have no closer a relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and loyalty cards. They’re great tools for communicating progress and acknowledging effort, but neither points nor badges in any way constitute a game. Games just use them – as primary school teachers, military hierarchies and coffee shops have for centuries – to help people visualise things they might otherwise lose track of. They are the least important bit of a game, the bit that has the least to do with all of the rich cognitive, emotional and social drivers which gamifiers are intending to connect with.
Google Instant Proves Google’s Design Process is Broken
Interesting perspective from Fast Company’s design blog:
What’s baffling about the whole thing is that Google’s “solution” to providing instant results still seems so primitive and ugly. In the name of shaving a second off of a user’s search, is it really worth it to make them go through the pain of scanning five to seven different results pages as they type?
What’s your take? Is Google doing it right, or wrong?
“The Desk”
A short film about designers’ desks.
“With a designer’s desk…the tools, sketches, reference images, Japanese packaging, type samples and printouts provide a more logical cognitive path from initial brief to the final design,” writes Twemlow, who goes on to illuminate how Vignelli’s desk philosophy tracks with both his work style and design style.
A contentious article that discusses a designer’s role in the “future” of the Internet.
If there’s a definite winner in this possible future Internet, it is the content creators. If the only thing that sets one company or organization apart from their competition, then those who can create high-quality content will be in high demand. The thousands of dollars that a company used to be spent on website design will be funneled into website content instead.
Users will also benefit as they’ll have a more integrated, customized experience. Their version of the Internet will be tailored specifically to them, based on their own wants and needs. They’ll get content in the manner they prefer and find most usable.
Application developers will also likely win in all this. While the APIs and the data available will be pretty standardized, the manner in which it’s displayed will become a battleground of creativity. Innovation here will be key, doing something different and better than what everyone else is doing is the only way an app will stand out.
As a designer, does your role include content creation?
On Interfaces and Intuition
Whether you are designing simple web forms, complex applications or even real world products that require some level of user interaction, always remember that your job is to close the knowledge gap, by designing the most intuitive and useable interfaces that you possibly can.
The searing rebuttal to “Does the Future of the Internet Have Room for Web Designers?“
One of the biggest misconceptions about designers (and usually Web designers) is that we’re just Web designers — that the scope of our skills begins with Lorem ipsum and ends with HTML emails. This is ridiculous.
Everyone in this industry fills dozens of roles throughout a given day. On a call with a prospective client, we take the role of salesperson. After the contract is sorted, we become researchers, combing through the client’s outdated website, looking at analytics and identifying breakdowns and room for improvement. Soon after, we become content curators, wading through the piles of content in PDF format sent by the client, identifying what works and what doesn’t.
Then we’re architects, laying out content to get the most important messages across, while ensuring that everything in our layouts remains findable. We design the website itself. We manage client expectations and work through revisions. We write code. We introduce a content management system. We carefully insert and style content. We create and update the brand’s presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We help to create an editorial calendar to keep content fresh and accurate. We check in on the analytics and metrics to see how the website is performing.
Notice that “design” is mentioned only once in all of that work.
A thoughtful discussion from design luminary Don Norman on why “great ideas” alone are not sufficient for success.
Designers are proud of their ability to innovate, to think outside the box, to develop creative, powerful ideas for their clients. Sometimes these ideas win design prizes. However, the rate at which these ideas achieve commercial success is low. Many of the ideas die within the companies, never becoming a product. Among those that become products, a good number never reach commercial success.
|#