But to all good things come an end. Johnny is doing a good job and we could go on like this for some more years, but for Johnny that simply isn’t good enough. We want to make a difference, an impact in the community. Not just be ‘another source.’ So for now we will step aside until we’ve found a way to make a difference again.

I want to thank everybody who contributed to Johnny, by writing, editing or commenting. I have a learned a lot from you.

So long, and thanks for all the fish…

The project was announced in Google style, by placing a short post and video on Google+: “A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input.”

Taking steps

It’s interesting to see that a technology driven company like Google is capable of moving augmented reality goggles beyond ugly machines on your nose. They’ve managed to create appealing devices that look a like jewelry. The New York Times states that “Project Glass could hypothetically become Project Contact Lens. Mr. Parviz, who is also an associate professor at the University of Washington [...] recently built a tiny contact lens that has embedded electronics and can display pixels to a person’s eye.”

Service

The video shows how the device is integrated into the tools Google offers us, ranging from Gmail to Google Chat and Google+. Of course this is a logical step, but it’s also the opportunity for Google to once again become a game changer. This time it’s not a battle with Yahoo! and Altavista, but a direct assault on Apple. Google started with their own phone and OS, and are now moving further into the hardware world. They’ve understood that the battle isn’t fought and won over just a lot of software users, but about the importance of delivering a high quality service on all touchpoints.

Google is open, Apple not

And Google has one other benefit: they are open. In contrast to Apple they are launching a lot of products and services and are constantly testing them. They are very open to the community and want to get their thoughts and insights. See how they use their own products to get in touch with us. And it’s not a corporate voice, but it’s the actual people in the design teams that are interested in connecting with us. Google wants to start a conversation, where Apple has taken the position of a messiah. And that for me is the most interesting thing to observe when I see Project Glass getting announced.

Each year, when the new version of Encarta was finished, Microsoft would hire an agency to design the box. Looking at the finished product, they’d try to figure out how to convince people to buy the darned thing. It wasn’t pretty. Feature checklists and yellow stickers abounded. Imagine our chagrin when the features promoted on the box didn’t match up with where we’d put the most effort. Why had we bothered to build them in the first place?

For all the details on the excercise you’ll have to read the article itself, but here are the main steps:

1. Create a marketing launch page templatee with one headline and three subheads (12 words each);
2. Gather examples of launch pages;
3. Get others to help and include product managers, engineers, and anyone else who’s opinionated;
4. Set the stage, show the examples, and give people 15 minutes to individually brainstorm or mind-map their ideas;
5. Write the headlines by givinge veryone two or three blank templates;
6. Silent critique the work, because launch pages have to stand on their own in the real world;
7. Start designing.

Read the entire article and excercise at Design Staff.

Gross starts the article ‘Redefining Hick’s Law‘ by stating that our view of Hick’s Law is strongly oversimplified and incomplete. He states that we’ve been focusing to much on links and clicks, which isn’t everything that’s important. The essence that he tries to grasp focuses mainly on eliminating choices, which will make the overall experience more enjoyable.

Hick’s Law has always been a popular reference point for designers. You’ll find it cited in the endless lists of basic laws and principles that all designers should be familiar with. Given our assumed comfort level with this design cornerstone, I am surprised to see so many people getting it wrong.

[...]

In order to properly apply Hick’s Law to Web design, we must approach a design the way our users do: in phases. The first phase occurs before the website even launches. While we would never want to design based on an assumption of what our user base is looking for, visitor will rarely happen upon your website without some sort of preconception of what they are going to see.

Read Jason Gross’ article on Smashing Magazine.

The e-book is called Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving. It can be read online for free or you can order a solid copy. Jon Kolko talks about the idea behind this book in the video below:

Designers can change culture, change behavior, and advance a system of values, and social entrepreneurship provides the economic vehicle in which designers can tackle wicked problems. For example, looking at a problem such as obesity, let’s compare a scientific approach with a designerly one.

One quickly learns that wicked problems such as obesity demand both a scientific approach and a designerly approach. Because “every wicked problem is a symptom of another problem,” any wicked problem is too big for a single-tiered approach. Poor people in the targeted communities don’t have fresh vegetables because their neighborhoods don’t have stores that sell them. That’s an economic problem.

View the book at the Wicked Problems website.

In the article Cossey makes some valid points and shows great examples. It proves once again that designing great interfaces can’t be achieved by just sketching and wireframing, but also by prototyping.

A transition that has been designed to be slow can feel awful. When designing an application, an interface or any type of structured content, we must ensure that users understand where they have come from as they arrive at the new page or state. The transition from one screen or group of content to another should feel natural and should be tested on devices of varying power and speed to get a wider view of how the transition feels. Too fast, and it may appear broken or jumpy; too slow, and it will be frustrating to use.

There are plenty of ways to incorporate transitions into a design. Here are some suggestions Cossey gives:

• Avoid any pause at the point of clicking, touching or swiping;
• Test in the real world – “Load a prototype of your design in a supermarket or on the train, and test it to see how it performs under pressure”;
• Don’t reinvent the wheel – “In general, follow the conventions of the operating system you are designing for”;
• Mind the future.

Read the entire article on UX Magazine.

Some examples

The article on UX Magazine is from 2010 and was related to Weinschenk‘s book Neuro Web Design: What Makes them Click. She shares several insights:

1. People Don’t Want to Work: they will do the least amount of work possible to get a task done;
2. People Have Limitations: they can only look at so much information or read so much text on a screen without losing interest;
3. People Make Mistakes: Assume people will make mistakes. Anticipate what they will be and try to prevent them;
4. Human Memory Is Complicated: People reconstruct memories, which means they are always changing;
5. People are Social: they will always try to use technology to be social. This has been true for thousands of years;
6. Attention: Grabbing and holding onto attention, and not distracting someone when they are paying attention to something, are key concerns;
7. People Crave Information: Learning is dopaminergic—we can’t help but want more information;
8. Unconscious Processing: Most mental processing occurs unconsciously;
9. People Create Mental Models: People always have a mental model in place about a certain object or task (paying my bills, reading a book, using a remote control);
10. Use Visual Systems to help people.

Read the entire article on UX Magazine.

Helen Waters was one of the jurors for the Interaction Design Awards 2012. During the reviewing process she discovered what actually defines a great user experience. It’s something that leaves tech behind and address larger systems of interaction. In an article for Co.Design she defines four elements: building platforms, moving beyond the screen, seamlessly integrating data and empowering the user.

As it happens, some clues about the future of the discipline lay among the category winners in the awards program (of which I was a juror). Many of these winners were clearly an integral part of a deeper product strategy. Many also reflected the wider shift away from command-and-control, marketing-driven design projects toward a more symbiotic relationship between design and outcome that’s becoming more common in the world at large. That’s a good thing, though it does make the job of teasing apart and assessing design’s role and impact infinitely tricky. And while “gamification” is such a horrid word that anyone saying it out loud should immediately subtract five points from their personal life score, it’s clear that fun and play are now serious business.

Read the entire article at Co.Design.

Our field is moving slowly but steadily into the world of behavioral psychology. We’ve started to realize that it’s not just about designing good-looking products with usable interfaces, but about a deeper level of involvement. Dan Lockton has been thinking about that area for quite some time, with his Design with Intent toolkit as the highlight. In his most recent article he explores a new approach: behavioral heuristics, where “asking users questions about how and why they behaved in certain ways with technology [leads] to answers which [are] resolvable into something like rules.”

In the article Lockton explores his own thoughts on behavioral heuristics. He shows examples from a recent workshop he did at Interaction 12 and how this worked out. As an example he takes apart an example from Amazon, where social proof is a way of persuading people. What were the assumptions made and how do these translate into heuristics?

Screenshot taken from danlockton.co.uk

Behavioral heuristics - Image from danlockton.co.uk

There are lots of models of human behaviour, and as the design of systems becomes increasingly focused on people, modelling behaviour has become more important for designers.

The aim, really, is ultimately to provide a way of helping designers choose the most appropriate methods for influencing user behaviour in particular contexts, for particular people.

Read the entire article ‘If…’ here

Design has never been more accessible than at this moment, and design is getting more and more accessible. Not only are design tools more user friendly, design thinking is a skill-set that is used from call agents to CEO’s.

…what is this unique element that separates the designer from the marketeer, copywriter, programmer and the rest of the world? I believe that design ethics separate the designers from the rest of the world. In fact, the stronger the design(ers) ethics are, the better of a designer he is.

Designers naturally have the urge to do the right thing. Historically, this was to make things look pretty rather than ugly. Today, I think the right thing to do is to make things good, rather than bad.

Read Anyone Can Design, Only a Few Can Be Good