Dom Murphy : SXSWi 2008: Sunday Schoolin’
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04:35:10 pm on March 11, 2008 | # |
A late start to Sunday put me in a grotty mood but as the day panned out it turned into be one of the most inspirational days I've had in a long time. Here goes…
Down to the convention centre and straight into a talk by Jared Spool — the founding principal of UIE. His talk — Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs really offered up several golden nuggets about the theory of interface design. This is the kind of stuff which I've picked up along the way through trial and error, gut feeling and some research. So to hear someone so knowledgeable explain the whys and how's really made me realise and understand some of the decisions I sometimes make (& don't make) when designing interfaces. His talk was very visual. His genral theme was about using illusionary tricks to make the user experience better. I joined as he was explaining how 20 years ago he was asked to create the user experience for reformatting a 5mb hard drive something which back then took 20 minutes. Even though the developers questioned the need — he proposed the use of a progress bar even though by displaying such a device it would further slow down the computer and therefore take slightly longer to do the overall task of formatting the drive. But, the end result when compared to a blank screen was of a quicker overall perceived time in completing the task. Common sense today, but radical at the time. He then compared that with a series of tests he conducted around the Kano Model — where perception affects the experience. In his tests, users perceived Amazon to be quicker than other sites when in reality it was by far the slowest site to use. The reason for this was that Amazon answered direct user expectations quicker than the other sites, so the overall user experience was one full of rewarding moments. This experience seemed to make the overall user's time faster even though it was 3 times slower than the fastest site on the list, About.com which funnily enough was perceived as the slowest.
In between doing quite a cool 3 step magic trick on stage, he shared the knowledge he referred to as Delight. He explained the importance of delight in the user experience — making people love something is the most influential way to improve perception. This can be achieved through quirky humour; the twitter downtime cat fixing their servers. Through attention to detail; Apple dedicating a small amount of valuable ROM space on the iPod to encode the colour of your iPod so when you use iTunes the same colour (ie: your personal) iPod appears. He also referred to the Flickr members homepage; personalised sets of photos. And finally through functionality; online flight booking system Farecast uses it's vast data mining abilities to recommend to you to hold off buying a flight ticket until tomorrow as (statistically) it'll be cheaper then — a kind of 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink' secret tip.
He also explained how the reverse is also true; he retold a story on how he wanted to get an alarm clock with an iPod dock and speakers so he could wake up to his own music. He spent a long time finding a unit which had a great, full sound. After doing a lot of reading and listening, he bought a device which sounded great. The only problem was, it lost 5 minutes of time each week and so, as an alarm clock it was useless. Even though delight is important, basic expectations are paramount. Additionally also added that what is delight today, becomes basic expectation tomorrow.
What I got from all this was to always try and improve the experience. Go that little bit further. This can be from every perspective — usability, visually and functionally. This talk made me realise that the extra work in doing this is always worth it.
Inspiring stuff………… and that was just the 1st talk of the day!
design education: tradition and the new open source « graphiquillan | 10:03 pm on March 11, 2008 | #
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