BetaBrand makes hipster clothing, each piece with its own story and witty micro-brand. The interaction patterns on their ecommerce site are equally as clever. Add something to the shopping cart and watch it peel out in a flaming blaze of glory.
BetaBrand has obviously been checking out Photojojo. Would love to hear from BetaBrand about how emotional design has influenced sales and marketing figures.
I’m a big fan of prototyping over wireframing because there’s just so much of an interface you can miss if you don’t actually use it as you design it. I typically use simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for higher fidelity prototypes, and for lower fidelity stuff I use Keynote.
InVision offers a clever new way to create prototypes quickly. Design individual screens in your favorite app like Photoshop or Omnigraffle, then upload the entire batch to InVision to add hot spots to create functional workflows. It’s simple, and really fast to use.
Links and resource came fast and furious in my talk at An Event Apart Boston. To make your life easier, I’ve assembled all of the resources I mentioned into a handy little list. Feel free to share this with your colleagues.
Denis Dutton at TED exposes the connections between our biology and a common sense of beauty.
I sat down the with folks from Unmatched Style recently to talk about Emotional Design and some of the ideas I’m exploring in my newest book, Designing for Emotion which will be released in May 2011 by A Book Apart.
Though we like to think of ourselves as masters of logic, making each decision in life through careful reasoning, the brute reality is that emotion is at the heart of every decision we make. Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has studied the behavior of people who have sustained brain injuries that impact emotion. In his interview with New York Times writer David Brooks, Damasio describes the devastating effects such injuries have on day-to-day life.
Whether working alone or in a team sketchboards are a handy tool that will help you work through ideas for an interface quickly, and spark conversation. Adaptive Path shows you how to create a sketchboard in this quick little video.
Dan Mall talking about Emotional Interface Design on the SoDA blog.
UPDATE 11/29/10: Dan Mall explores emotional design further on the Big Spaceship blog.
I recently conducted a day long “Interface Design Bootcamp” workshop in New York at the Future of Web Design. We covered a lot of territory including user research, personas, wireframes, sketchboards, prototypes, and usability testing. There are so many useful resources freely available on the Web that make the job of a user experience designer easier. Here are a few of the UX resources discussed and the slides from the workshop.
It’s been a busy year. I’ve been traveling an awful lot talking at some great conferences like An Event Apart, Future of Web Design, Future of Web Apps, and Web Directions US. The talk I’ve been giving is entitled “Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface Design”, and it explores how emotion in design can help you build a devout following, foster good will that will come in handy should something go awry with your app or site, and encourages evangelism.
As the field of user experience grows and evolves, UX practitioners find themselves having to master new techniques to take on new challenges. Adaptive Path’s Jesse James Garrett takes a look at where user experience has been and where it’s going.
