HUMAN Experience Design

It’s estimated that people in the US are exposed to somewhere between 1500-6000 advertising messages a day. This includes signs, commercials, packaging, banner ads, logos, etc. What’s an over-saturated brain to do? Shut it out.

Current web research shows that people not only ingore most advertising, but they ignore anything that even resembles advertising. In fact, they pretty much ingore anything advertisery - with the exception of text-based, highly targeted ads which are integrated into the design.

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There’s a great article in the New Yorker about complicating technology with features that nobody ends up using. Author James Surowiecki makes some great points that are backed up with research.

Did you know that product returns in the U.S. cost companies 100 billion dollars a year? At least half of those returns have nothing wrong with them, customers can’t figure out how to use them. Also, the average customer spends only 20 minutes with a product before he or she decides to return it. Ghastly.

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My local alderman dropped by the other day, it seems he’s running for Mayor. He handed me a little postcard with his campaign slogan on one side and a calendar on the other side - how nice. When I got it inside the house and looked at it - the calendar was a mashup (to use a virtual term in the analog world) of election dates and the Red Sox game schedule.

Red Sox Game schedule?!!! Hold the phone! What has that got to do with anything?

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I was on a web site today looking at an office phone system that included music on hold and other cool features. I like to entertain people when I put them on hold so I can go make a sandwich. The site was very informative and behold a link on the main navigation to pricing. beautiful.

So I click on the pricing link and what do I get…

If you have a specific question about ***** services, or would just like some additional information, please complete the following form. You will be promptly contacted by ****.

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As her MFA thesis, Jenova Chen created a flash Game called Flow, which has received a lot of attention in the gaming world. I encourage you to go play with it.

 Video games, the popular ones anyway, tend to be very immersive experiences. That is, while playing them you tend to lose touch with your personal identity  for a time - you are less aware of being you.

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I love movies and watch several a week on cable or DVD. I don’t get to the theater much now that we have infant twins. One thing I absolutely hate about the DVD experience is the junk I have to get through at the beginning of the DVD to get to the movie.

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One way to measure usability today is with time. How much time does it take someone to find a link on your web site? How much time does it take for a person to figure out how to send a text message with your new cellphone?

Every person has, to some degree, a perception of time as a limited resource. As we know, resources that are limited tend to become more valuable. Although the perception of time is flexible, people place a value on their time. At least unconsciously, people will try to weigh spending time on your user interface vs. the perceived potential benefit.

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As human beings, without even realizing it, we are constantly creating generalizations as devices of cognitive efficiency.

For example, you probably know that this is a blog even though it’s content and design are completely unique. However, it has enough blog-like characteristics for you to stick it into the blog “bucket” in your brain. It lights up enough neurons that you have associated with blogs that you can say to some degree of certainty it is a blog.

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Are pretty things easier (thus more likely) to be used. Current research seems to indicate that they are. If you actually care about people using your products / web sites - it bears paying attention to how things look.

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