Buy a Coke with a hug.
Aarron Walter
The Hug Machine
Allan Cooper on Product Design
There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product. The problem is one of culture, training, and attitude of the people who make them. [...] We are deficient in our development process, not in our development tools.
Allen Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Jonathan Ive On Simplicity
Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
Jonathan Ive, from the book, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
Video of Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface Design
In September of this year I delivered at talk about emotional interface design at Webdagene, an amazing conference in Oslo, Norway. The conference organizers were kind enough to record the talk, which can view on their website in case you missed it in Norway.
Emotional Design Reading List
There are a host of interesting books about psychology, design, emotion, and how our brains work that informed my book, Designing for Emotion. Here’s a list of essential books for the shelves of any user experience designer, web designer, or content strategist interested in the topic of emotional design.
Designing for Emotion: Book 5 from A Book Apart
Nearly four years ago I stumbled onto a topic that I just can’t get off my mind. As we’ve started to share more of our personal lives online and the barriers of our public personas have begun to crumble, we’ve started speaking with a more authentic voice. The blurred line between personal and professional is starting to influence our expectations of the products and services we seek.
.net Magazine Interview about Designing for Emotion
I recently spoke with A Book Apart editor Mandy Brown (@aworkinglibrary) about design, psychology, branding, and finding a place for emotional design in our professional workflow. Our conversation has been published in .net Magazine.
Easter Egg in Kickstarter Footer
Click the scissors three times in the footer at Kickstarter.com, and watch as the bottom of the page falls off.
Robert Plutchik’s Matrix of Emotions
Psychologist Robert Plutchik’s research on emotion and its evolutionary origins provides fascinating insights and foundational theory for those of us exploring emotional design.
Online Travel Booking Sucks. Hipmunk to the Rescue
I travel a lot, so I end up spending more time on travel booking sites than I’d like. When you’re planning for a trip there’s just so much on your mind. You’ve got to figure out your schedule, who’s going to pick you up at the airport, what the weather’s going to be like, and you have to make plans with people at your destination. All of these things have some bearing on the flight you need to book. If you’re like me, you wait until the last minute to book your flight because it’s just such a hassle to figure it all out. It’s a lot of stress. When I go to book a flight, I just want to find one that is going to inflict the least amount of pain.
The UX Sketchbook in Action at Future of Web Design
I ran a day long workshop at Future of Web Design called “Interface Design Bootcamp“. In the workshop we learned how to conceptualize an app to connect people at an event like the Future of Web Design Conference using design personas and sketchboards. Ryan Carson sat in on my workshop and wrote a nice post on Think Vitamin about the sketchboarding process.
The workshop was so perfectly timed as the UX Sketchbook I’ve been working on had just rolled off the presses, and it was time to take it for a serious test drive. As I mentioned earlier here, the UX Sketchbook was really designed to support quick ideation, and specifically, sketchboarding.
I snapped a few pics from the conference to document the fun we were having with the new sketchbooks. You can view all of the workshop photos on Flickr.
On UXMag.com: The Expanding Role of User Experience Design
I’ve noticed a trend happening not only in my day to day work as a user experience designer, but throughout our industry. UX work requires a great deal of diplomacy, and a mastery of the languages spoken in many sub-disciplines of web design and business teams. UX designers are becoming translators, and diplomats as well as designers.
I’ve written a short article on UXMag.com about this issue. An excerpt follows:
As UX designers, our role in our industry is more important today than ever. Our medium is maturing into a broad, multiple-platform, always on, multi-context, center-of-our-universe conduit for information. Our clients and customers are demanding more of us. We’re not just designing web experiences anymore. Our designs have to adapt and respond to a variety of devices with different input methods that are used under very different circumstances where user goals and expectations change as well.
