What 3Sixty Knows…

It appears that it is. This phone arrives in a book with cutouts. As you turn the pages, you get given enough information and the right bits of the phone to progress to the next step. Nice bit of design!

Joshua Porter – Designing for the usage lifecycle

Joshua had a few interesting websites to share:

• Flickr microcopy group: where Joshua keeps interesting bits of microcopy he’s come across
• 52weeksofUX blog: a blog co-authored with another Josh
• ABtests.com where people can upload their results from split-testing

And here are a few interesting thoughts I noted down:

Focus on the small things, a ton of little changes can make your design significantly better / can increase conversions considerably.

The only data that matters is your own – don’t rely on other people’s testing to make your decisions.

Usability used to be about “Is your software usable”, now it’s increasingly about convincing users “Why should I use this / What can it do for me?” This is a shift from a tool problem to a cognitive / domain problem.

The usage lifecycle goes like this

• Unaware of the service
• Aware of the service (interested) – acquisition
• First time user (signed up) – activation
• Regular user (finds the service useful) – retention
• Passionate user (engaged) – referral

It’s more important to know where a user is in the usage lifecycle than to know who they are, because that tells us what their immediate problem is.

Usability of form design (reducing friction) is not the major hurdle to getting users to sign-up, the biggest challenge is giving them a reason to sign-up. Once users are motivated they’ll battle through relatively unusable interfaces to get what they’ve been promised.

Design strategies for increasing sign-up

• Immediate engagement (lazy registration)
• Write to reduce commitment (answer the immediate questions and concerns might have around sign-up)
• Have different levels of descriptions for different levels of users’ commitment
  • I know I want to sign up
  • I want to make sure this is for me
  • I’m skeptical
• Leverage social influence (let undecideds observe the actions of current users)

Our goal is user happiness!

Dan Lockton – Designing with intent: How to influence behaviour online

Dan’s research was interesting as it transpires he’s read my wife’s PhD and I think he might have used some of it as the basis for his own! It’s a small world…

His talk was all about designing with intent, that is design that’s intended to influence, to change users’ behaviour.

He’s catalogued his findings as cards that can be found on designwithintent.co.uk. The cards can be used as a source for inspiration when generating ideas, much like Stephen P. Anderson’s getmentalnotes.com.

I thought Dan’s workshop was particularly interesting because he was one of the more leftfield speakers at the conference. His background is very much in industrial design and a lot of his example are from the world of product and industrial design.

The first workshop I went to today was Good Design Faster by Leah Buley, and it was awesome. I’ve noted down the gist of the workshop:

Clients want great user experiences and they want them faster.

Wireframes are good for documentation, but not for exploring possibilities, they don’t show any flow or journey.

The danger of wireframes is to fall in love with 1 idea and to design yourself into a corner.

The answer to this is to generate lots of ideas to a very low fidelity, to exhaust the different options before you settle on one that you choose to refine.

You can then put together these lots of ideas on a sketchboard – which shows all ideas next to each other at the same time, and within the user journey. This makes it an ideal tool to discuss and critique with others, including the client.

The second workshop was How to think with pretty pictures (demystifying concept models) by Stephen P. Anderson. Again, the gist of the workshop is below:

Concept models are used to make sense of complex stuff

The process flow for creating a concept model is to first get the data together through research. Wikipedia is a great source of information.

The second step is to see where the patterns and similarities in the data are.

The third step is to see which shapes can support those patterns.

The fourth and final step is to come up with a metaphor that brings the concept model to life.

After the first day of UX London, I thought I’d summarise the talks that really resonated in as few words as possible.

User Experience design only has meaning when someone actually uses what we’ve designed (Jesse James Garrett)

Search is an interactive and iterative activity, queries evolve (Peter Morville)

The biggest problem to solve in UX design are the steps we need to take to move users along to the next stage in the UX lifecycle (Joshua Porter)

If we increase users’ motivation to do something they will usually muddle through even if usability is very poor. Therefore we need to use what we know about human behaviour to get users motivated. (Stephen Anderson)

(Stephen has kindly summarised what he knows about human behaviour on 52 cards: getmentalnotes.com. Sadly they are not available yet. Happily he gave everybody a quarter of the cards at the conference). Stephen’s talk was by far and away the best one of the day, even if he got the graveyard shift.

Make users look good (Michael B. Johnson). Pixar sounds like a great company to work for.

Looking forward to tomorrow’s workshops!