A short recap of the London IA night. Definitely worthwhile!
The first talk by Joe Leech (@mrjoe)was an introduction into neuroscience, neurons, synapses and more. Then taking us to good old Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. One of the points made was, what really motivates us is both dopamine and serotonine. Which can be related to not only sports, food and drug addiction but also internet addiction, such as checking your Facebook messages. He also touched on the topic of memory, the myth of 7+2 (as the amount of choices people can remember) and that it is better not to innovate unless it’s really necessary (people rely on their memory!)
As I am still new to London I though it was about time to dive into the local internet and tech scene. Luck has it that I live only 2 mins away from the so called Sillicon Roundabout at Old Street. Which indeed means there’s a lot of creativity and technology here. Wednesday night the TechHub invited Google’s Obi Felten to talk about Marketing for startups. Obi is Director of Consumer Marketing at Google, and that makes her resonsible for marketing Google’s products such as Search, Chrome, Maps to name a few. Quite a big job to have. She presented her scrappiness principles, I guess in other words a Quick and Dirty approach, although I missed her introduction.
Obi’s scrappiness principles
Use your biggest asset
Let others speak for you
Make things people want to share
Make things people care about
Make a model (scrappy) Make it scale (Epic)
Repeat. Steal with pride.
Obi gave plenty of examples of marketing done by Google. Even though she doesn’t like the word viral, when talking about things people want to share she refered to Google’s April Fools Day jokes. Such as Google Translate for Animals. Looking at what people care about, these would be events that have a big impact such as elections, or the Eurovision festival. The Royal Wedding was also big in the UK, and Google responded to that with a fairytale logo and some Google Maps specials. For example, dragging the Street View icon on a wedding lated location would turn this into a bride and groom.
When it comes to make a model (scrappy) and make it scale (epic) her advice was to pick either one, but nothing in between.
Last Wednesday I went to the Agile UX Meetup Group to hear James O’Brien (@sparrk) talk about his secrets of agile UX. It was a very interesting talk based on lots of work experience. Even though I don’t work in a fully agile environment at the moment, I felt there were lots of little tricks and processes that can make UX life easier. James’ presentation right here on Slideshare:
Prepare to refactor Organise your files for change, use patterns. There are many ways to do this, differing on the tools you use. Eg, if you’re using Fireworks, symbols are great, and most software will have similar tricks to use. Update the symbol document and all your instances will update automatically.
At UNITiD I’ve recently worked on a project for BlackBerry — the original blogpost can be find on the UNITiD blog.
BlackBerry has started a serious competition with iPhone and Google Android, after reports on decreasing customer satisfaction in 2010. Competitors offer easy to use touchscreen devices, good browsing and great 3rd party apps. With recently launched BlackBerry 6 OS, new devices like Torch and announced releases of Torch 2 and Dakota, BlackBerry seems to be taking big steps to catch up. We’ll be curious to see what the future holds for BlackBerry.
For all interaction designers who will be designing apps for the BlackBerry platform, we’d like to share our Fireworks template. The template is made for BlackBerry devices with resolution 640×480 but as all UI elements are vector images they can easily be resized.
Natural User Interfaces, de nieuwe ontwikkeling in de wereld van interaction design. Touchscreen producten zoals iPhone en de Microsoft Surface zijn voorbeelden van een meer natuurlijke interactie; met de vingers, met beide handen. Natural User Interfaces was ook het onderwerp van de Design by Fire editie 2010, afgelopen woensdag in Pakhuis De Zwijger in Amsterdam. Hier verzamelden zich vele interaction designers voor een dag van nieuwe inzichten en inspiratie.
Bill Buxton presents at Design by Fire
Bill Buxton van Microsoft Research startte de dag voor een wakker en fris publiek en vertelde over de eerste smartphone, the long nose, de auto van nu en het huis van de toekomst. Zijn ontwikkelingen zoals touchscreen technologie echt zo nieuw als ze lijken? En hoe kunnen we leren van onderzoek en productontwep uit het verleden? Bill Buxton deelde zijn visie hierover.
Afgelopen vrijdag was het weer tijd voor Acht Uur Overwerken Voor Het Goede Doel, het jaarlijkse evenement van Nieuwe Garde. Het was een mooie avond in MixTup op de Vijzelstraat! Hier alle eindpresentaties en de foto’s op deFlickr Photostream!
Maandag 25 januari presenteer ik bij het Design by Fire cafe in Utrecht over interactie ontwerp voor Android. Daarbij vergelijk ik, hoe kan het ook anders, met ontwerpen voor de iPhone. Oftewel:
‘Ontwerpen voor mobiel is anders dan ontwerpen voor het web. Ontwerpen voor mobiel betekent ontwerpen voor kleine schermen, wisselende context, location based. Tussen mobiele toestellen onderling bestaan ook weer grote verschillen. In haar presentatie vertelt Inge Kuijper over het ontwerpen van applicaties voor Android, en gaat daarbij in op de verschillen tussen Android en iPhone en de betekenis van fragmentatie voor het Android platform.’
Are you starting with interaction design for Android – like we are at UNITiD – then there are a number of useful resources to help you out. I couldn’t yet find a Fireworks template, so I have made one myself and posted it on the UNITiD blog. In the Fireworks template the Android user interface elements have been redrawn as vector images. In the folders the elements have been mostly labeled according to the Android vocabulary.
The 1%club is a platform for small charities that want to raise money for their specific cause, asking everyone to invest 1% of their time. projects range from theatre by street kids in Namibia, to building water wells in India. The 1%club is different because it is a platform for other charities, and mostly because it uses social media features to reach the younger web savvy people, who spend a lot of their time online. The 1%club takes the community offline by having drinks with members and project owners on the occasional friday, organizing the 1%event, and now also the Co Creation Friday.
The first Co Creation Friday of the 1%club took place last Friday at Accenture. The main question on Co Creation Friday: how can 1%club grow faster? Read more…
A quality customer experience makes consumers happy. And satisfied consumers positively influence brand experience and revenue, we can be quite sure of that. But thankfully Forrester Research has now published a research report in which this can be proven with statistics. A good customer experience results in loyalty, and that means more revenue. How do we create a quality customer experience? Consumers have high expectations of services. The expectations consumers have are influenced by online services. When Amazon can remember my last purchases and my wishlist, why doesn’t the bookshop around the corner do that for me?
Loyal customers lead to more revenue
A good customer experience leads to loyal consumers, and those are valuable! The Forrester Customer Experience Index measures the customer experience by looking at usefulness, ease of use and enjoyability.
designforinteraction 