Tags to Richness

In 2005 I had the privilege of attending a three day workshop by the D.M.A. (Direct Marketing Association).  I recently dug up my notes for a project I’m working on and came across this great list I had put together based on that workshop.  The list is still applicable today as I design UX that sells:

1. Multiple offers in one promotion equals lesser sales.
2. Direct marketing leads the customer to take an action.  Advertising is solely for building brand awareness.
3. Broad based media like TV, Radio and Print are best used to find new customers.
4. 40/40/20 rule:  Direct marketing success depends on 40% on reaching the right audience, 40% on the offer or promotion and only 20% on the creative execution.
5. Features are all about the product.  Benefits are all about the customer.  Benefits are more likely to sell the customer.
6. The direct marketing industry is highly prone to mistakes.  Expect to make a lot of mistakes.
7. Find out what products your customers want to buy and make those, rather then developing a product and then try to find a market for it.
8. Average creative can sell a great offer.
9. Testing equals what, research answers why.

1. Interaction design is about designing choose your own adventure stories.  It’s simply a non-linear movie that allows your audience to choose their own path along the way.
2. Understand the difference between designing applications and games.  They are the same thing, they are just on opposite sides of the “purpose” spectrum.  Applications are for getting something done as fast as possible, games are for challenging goals.  Both create happiness and joy.  There is a lot of gray area in-between applications and games, and the best interaction design includes some blend of both purposes depending on what your interactions are for.
3. Understand and force yourself to think separately about Graphic Design, UI Design and Interaction Design.  They are not the same, but they encompass each other.  Graphic Design is fine art with a functional purpose, UI Design includes Graphic Design and is about creating an eye path.  Interaction Design includes both UI and Graphic Design and is about a successive series of UIs that take users to end goals.
4. Before anything else, read about the human brain.  Start with the book Brain Rules by John Medina.  Design is about communicating to brains and though we don’t have the human brain completely mapped out, it is still a machine with a simple set of rules.
5. Understand that what makes a human brain happy is simply choosing goals that matter to the individual, working towards them and then accomplishing them.  This is the basic formula to that chemical reaction we call joy and happiness.
6. Once you understand the human brain machine, study the computer machine.  Your whole purpose in life is to get the computer to talk to a human and guide that human towards a goal.  Someday computers will be humanoid in behavior but until then we have to fake it as best we can.
7. As a general rule, developers have spent more time coding than designing.  They default to thinking more like a computer, and less like a human.   The problem is that the scope of creating software is simply beyond your capacity to build alone.  You have to rely on developers so you must learn how to persuade the developers to do things that benefit humans more than things that benefit them and the computer systems they create.
8. The best way to understand developers is to be one for some period of time.  Most designers hate development, which is natural, but if you don’t do development yourself for a time so you can “get it”, you’ll always be at the mercy of what you don’t know.  Here’s another way to put it, who do you think is going to make a better building architect, the guy who has actually put up dry wall or the guy who hasn’t?
9. HTML is not development, it’s simply a gateway drug.  You must do PHP and MySQL (or something similar) or you’re wasting your time.  When you’ve written your first class from scratch, and you understand how it’s a beautiful thing to write classes then you can stop :)
10. Good interaction design comes from understanding and learning processes, patterns and standards.  In my experience artists tend to avoid this kind of thing.  But interaction design is so complex that these things are the only way to give yourself the necessary constraints to be creative in.  Otherwise you’ll get lost in the complexity and never finish anything.   The good news is that interaction is much more creative and fulfilling than graphic design or UI design alone so it’s worth the time to learn “the rules.”
11. Fine art is about expressing whatever the hell you want.  Interaction design is about what other people want, not what you want.  This was critical for me in my own career development.  Interaction design was not about what I wanted, I had to be able to put my user first.  This is much harder than you might think.  Everyone, even Alan Cooper, struggles with this.  The best way to put your user first is lots of continual research and testing.  “Research and testing,” I thought, “What? I’m an artist.”  Interaction design is about getting inside someone else’s head, understanding how they think and helping them accomplish something they want to do.  Research and testing is the most common way to accomplish this.
12. You’ll also want to study game design because  game designers have been doing interaction design with tons more time, money and resources than the web or software industry.  Companies like EA have been designing interactions much bigger in scale and much more complex than any computer company.  The game industry has found ways to solve problems the software industry hasn’t gotten to yet.
13. Interaction design is about logic and impulse, you have to be a master of both to be successful.  You’ll always fail at interaction design until you can start and stop your impulsive artist side at will.

Last week’s post really got the gears in my head moving.  I’ve always thought of myself as a designer who gets business, but I really reached an epiphany this week on the topic.  To put it bluntly, when it comes to sales the principles of good usability go out the window and are trumped by the principles of sales.

Where good usability principles do fit though, are after you’ve got the user inside your application and you want them to stay.  Once you’ve got ‘em you want the design to get out of their way and let them do what they came to do.  When you’re trying to sell them though, you need to get in their way, which is to say your design needs to nudge them towards what you want them to do.

This deserves a more robust and lengthy post at a future date, but it’s worth a quick mention here.  When you boil it down UX is about simply about making computers talk to humans.  And there is arguably no better manual for communicating with humans than Dale Carnegie’s timeless book How To Win Friends and Influence People.

So the trick as a UX Designer is to apply Carnegie’s principles to UX design.  If you haven’t read his book, or haven’t read it for a while I highly recommend reading it again and think about it in terms of designing apps.  Following are five sample principles from the book:

Fundamental Techniques in Handling People

Principle 1 - Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.

Principle 2 - Give honest and sincere appreciation.

Six Ways to Make People Like You

Principle 1 - Become genuinely interested in other people.

Principle 2 - Smile.

Principle 3 - Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

Read the full book for more

In the UX community we throw around terms like delight and desirability as our design goal after usability.  I personally feel like those are just the tip of the iceberg of design potential.  Truly great product design is one that is addictive.  Something that users feel such a need for that the absence of the product creates a level of pain.

I’m definitely not advocating socially irresponsible addiction, I’m advocating the kind addiction that is more in line with “oh shit! I left my iPhone at home, grrrr” kind of pain.  Isn’t that what we’re all really trying to achieve?  Products that no matter the industry and task they are for they create in our users the same kind of product love and loyalty that the iPhone, World of Warcraft or Farmville create for their users?  That level of fervor isn’t created by just delight, it’s created by socially responsible addiction.