Aral shares some interesting insights into how he is encouraging emotional engagement in his app.

Aarron: How does great design impact a user’s propensity to forgive usability shortcomings, or technical snafus?

Aral: I reject the premise of the question. Great design is design that has few usability shortcomings and technical snafus. Delighters can very easily become a mocking of the user if the base features of the app do not function properly. It’s wrong to see design as separate from usability. We fall into this trap often in our industry because we call everything “design”. What we’re really talking about is interaction design here. It includes elements of graphic design, to be sure, but there is an all-important non-linear, interactive core to interaction design that includes usability. It’s far closer to product design. It includes technical competence. Good user experience is a function of all these elements.

Before your application can create an emotional relationship with the user it must get the basics right. The emotional relationship, the delight, is what you layer on top of this base usability and technical competency.

So yes, if you can create a positive emotional relationship with your users, they may be more forgiving if something goes wrong. But maybe once, maybe twice… if the core of your application isn’t competent you will soon erode that relationship and it may even backfire. Make sure your app competent before considering adding delight to it. Competency is a prerequisite to delight.

Aarron: How does design impact a user’s trust?

Aral:We do judge a book by its cover; it’s an evolutionary trait. We make split second judgements everyday about whether something is friend is foe. In the past, this meant the difference between life and death (and can still do so today, in a dimly lit alleyway, for instance). It’s no surprise that we apply the same, unconscious categorization to designed objects.

However, design is a marriage of form and function. The latter is usually forgotten. Apple’s products are not successful just because they are shiny and beautiful but because they are a joy to use also. So, while looks may initially affect trust, it is function (or rather, the marriage of form and function) that will affect the long-term health of a product.

Aarron: Do you consciously consider emotion in your design work?

Aral:Definitely. My apps are an extension of my character. I see them as authored works; as a conversation. There is a lot of myself in there and I want to have pleasurable, fun conversations with my users. Most of our industry is still talking about features this and features that – the age of features is dead, we’re living in the age of user experience; _execution_ is everything. We should be talking about building empathy into apps – does the app try to understand what the user is feeling and react accordingly? In ‘Avit, for example, if you have a slow internet connection, the little Manto blob gets ashamed, apologizes, even bursts into tears if it takes to long. Even though the problem isn’t with the app itself (slow Internet connection), the app tries to emphatize with the user. It doesn’t just display an indeterminate progress indicator that is emotionless and uncaring.

The bit about how _your_ character is reflected in your apps is important because if your character is a dry, corporate one than that’s what will come across. You have to be genuine. Take the Microsoft Office paperclip as an example. There’s a perfect example of emotional design gone wrong. Why? You have to ask yourself: whose emotions? Whose character? When I see the paperclip, I see Steve Ballmer in paperclip form – it’s everything that people hate about Microsoft (the arrogance, etc.)

Aarron: Feathers has a uniquely cute interface that is atypical of most iPhone apps. Why is that? How does the bird character impact user experience?

Aral:It’s partly because of the target audience – a younger crowd (young at heart?) :) Partly, because the app itself is meant to be fun. Feathers isn’t going to cure world hunger, but it might make Twitter more fun for you. It might help you put a smile on someone’s face with a tweet. And I wanted the interface – and everything about it; the site, the screencast; etc. – to reflect that light, fun, tone. I smile a lot when speaking to people (which really sucks when you have something stuck in your teeth); I wanted the interface to smile too. I tried to translate my smile into a UI.

On the bird character, here are a few tweets I got within hours of Feathers’ launch – you decide :)

@aral I really *LOVE* the singing bird when you send a tweet, twitter is fun all of a sudden!

Very cool feedback via the feathers bird to let you know your char limit. Excellent job @aral

Confession: Sometimes I make too long Feathers-tweets, just to watch the bird turn red. (@feathers_app) :D

Aarron: You’ve show a lot of emotion in ‘Avit as well. Can you talk a little about why that is and how you are trying to shape the user experience?

Aral:Think about how much time we spend interacting with virtual experiences today; on our notebooks, mobile phones, TV sets… User Experience today affects such a large proportion of our lives that we might soon drop the “user” altogether: The stuff we’re designing today affects people’s experiences; their lives. A good user experience today may mean the difference between someone having a good day or a bad day. And there are a lot of bad experiences today. They affect people’s lives negatively. They affect _my life_ negatively. I’m cognisant that, in some small way, the experiences I create can make people happy or they can make them frustrated, angry, and upset. That’s why I spend so much time on – and focus so heavily on – designing the interaction of my apps: I want my apps to make people happy. I want them to get joy out of using them. These are words that we should be using every day when discussing what we’re trying to build – we’re in the business of manufacturing joy and delight, making people’s lives better in small ways; building emphatetic apps.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

I spoke with Mark about the design work he is doing. Below is the transcript from our conversation:

Aarron: Convertbot and Weightbot have been successful in a large part because of the engaging design. The interfaces use personification to build emotional connections with users. Can you talk a bit about your design strategy with these apps, and how personality in interface design has impacted the success of Tapbots apps?

Mark: The whole UI concept was really inspired by the movie, Wall•e. They were designed in a way that you could practically guess their function by the way they looked. I really loved that. So when we set out to design Weightbot, I wanted it to resemble a typical weight scale. With Convertbot, we wanted it to feel like it was in the same robot family, yet was designed specifically for the purpose of converting units.

Our concept for the first 2 apps was selling our apps as if they were physical robots. That’s why the icons resemble the interface. We also gave the icons eyes to humanize them a bit. But we use this idea as a selling point and not to distract the user in the actual app. We want our apps to be used seriously, but also give the sense that they are more than just a piece of software.

We did want our users to have an emotional connection to our apps. Most people don’t have a love/joy for software like geeks do. When I switched to the Mac (from Windows), I began to appreciate software design and found great joy in using software that was carefully crafted. Our goal was for everyone to be able to feel like that about software.

Aarron: Some of the interactions in your apps are a bit atypical for iPhone apps. For example, the spin to select interaction pattern in Convertbot could have easily been a series of simple buttons instead. How do the slightly more sophisticated interaction patterns you design influence user experience?

Mark: Again, the goal for this was to make it feel more like interacting with a physical device rather than just software. We wanted to create an experience around what’s normally just a mundane utility.

Aarron: The Tapbots brand experience is cute, informal, yet elegant, which I think creates a sense of fun and joy around your products. Can you talk about how intentional that outcome is, and maybe point out some specific examples of how you shape your brand experience?

Mark: A lot of the look and feel of the brand comes from my art style in general. But our goal was to create a brand with a positive vibe to it. Even our interface has somewhat of a cartoony feel to it. Our goal wasn’t to make it LOOK as realistic as possible. We really wanted it to FEEL real.

The paragraph on our About page really says it all about our company:

“Tapbots are utility robots designed and engineered for your iPhone and iPod touch. Our applications are easy to use, focused, and lots of fun. These amazing little robots are dreamed up and brought to life by Paul Haddad and Mark Jardine. We slave the night away creating—not to make a quick buck, but because we love software. We hope our robots will create the same love for software that we have.”

We wrote that early on and keep it in mind with each app we release.

I should note that our 3rd app Pastebot is a slight departure in the sense that it follows more of the UI guidelines provided by Apple. This is mainly because of the type of app it is. It’s mainly driven by user-generated content and can get quite complex so trying to create a completely new experience wasn’t ideal. We also wanted to take a risk and see how it would work out.

I recently ran across a wonderful video on YouTube in which Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Wold Wide Web, speaks about the idea of the Semantic Web. It’s a simple, yet elegant concept that has yet to come to fruition as Berners-Lee had originally dreamed.

The Semantic Web is all about expressing the meaning of our content through standardized markup, which is the mantra of any standardista. It’s more than communicating information hierarchy with heading tags. Semantics help us communicate the logic, context, and relationships of our data to computers so they can automate tasks or find important patterns that humans may have missed. On the Semantic Web a simple program could help employers locate the right talent for a project by search keywords in resumes of people near the company. It would also make it possible to automate the coordination of a complex event like a family reunion. If data such as personal schedules, contact information, and venue locations are presented in a standardized way, a program could read the data to identify the best date and location for the event then handle all of the invitations and RSPVs.

Beyond simplifying basic tasks, The Semantic Web could one day save millions of lives. Imagine a search spider that crawls the Web discovering medical ailments that are marked up in a standardized format. Common symptoms in a particular location could be identified and reported to medical experts who could immediately determine if the pattern is actually a dangerous pandemic. It would make it possible to irradiate deadly diseases before they spreads. The same technology could be turned on poverty, violence, genocide, and most any other major issue that plagues humanity.

It’s tragic that Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a Semantic Web is still so far off. The vast majority of content that is published online lacks structure or meaning, which makes it very difficult to find and even more difficult to elicit its meaning. Achieving the goal requires massive buy in from individuals, organizations, governments, and corporations. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s actually quite easy to publish your content semantically, and the idea is gaining some momentum. To learn more about the big ideas of the Semantic Web and what you can do to make your content semantically meaningful to computers check out this brilliant video: Intro to the Semantic Web.

Recently Jason Beaird, author of SitePoint’s all time best selling book The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, recently visited my User-Centered Interface Design class at The Art Institute of Atlanta to share some design wisdom. Jason’s design talent and amiable personality are present in his book, making it as fun as it is interesting to read.

Jason’s talk drew upon the core design principles he discusses in his book, and provided students with some practical advice on what to expect in an agency environment. After the talk Jason joined a class critique of a redesign project students had been working on. I think students were a little nervous about being critiqued by the guy who wrote a best selling book on design, but once they realized how down to earth Jason is, they gained their confidence back.

Below you’ll find a podcast of the talk along with Jason’s slide deck for your learning pleasure.

Jason Beaird’s Guest Lecture Podcast | Jason Beaird’s Presentation Slides

• Jason Santa Maria and Greg Storey
• Cameron Moll
• Dan Cederholm
• Shaun Inman
• Paula Scher
• John Maeda
• Milton Glaser
• Stefan Sagmeister
• Hillman Curtis