A couple of days ago I came across this great prezi presentation by Peter Morville. We all know Peter from writing books like ‘Ambient Findability’ and ‘Information Architecture’. In this Prezi, Peter describes how the actvitivities of an information architect have changed over the course of time. Recent developments in search and SEO have turned the web upside down. Attention has moved from homepages to more ‘social objects’. This means we design for several entrances and not one homepage that reigns them all.

Photograph by UXPeople

We’re not good at absolute decision-making

Besides all the kinds of normal-priced dishes, many restaurants have one or two extremely expensive meals on top of their menu. Not many people will order those meals and the restaurant owner won’t mind either… There’s only one real reason for putting such a meal on the menu. By putting an $80 meal on the menu, the $30 dishes won’t feel that expensive anymore.

Anchoring

This is typically an example of ‘anchoring’. We place a little ‘anchor’ in our mind, all following information will be compared to that ‘anchor’. That’s why many shops always have all their products on sale – ‘From $12.99, Now $9.50′… The example below shows how ProFlowers makes use of this principle by starting a line of products with a really good deal, this not only affects the price-perception of the first product, but the whole line of products.

Food for thought

What if we not only use this principle to anchor the price, but other product specifications as well? Perhaps your webshop isn’t built to easily compare products. Imagine you sell computer hardware, why not add a little extra line to a harddisk page: ‘Most harddisks these days have 500GB capacity’. People can base their decision on that information from then on.

Comparison by numbers

In order to be able place that little ‘anchor’ in our own memory, we need information that can be quantified. Jonah Lehrer refers to this in one of his columns on Grantland, he calls it the horsepower mistake.

Choosing which car to buy is a tough decision, there’s many facts and features to keep in mind. Not all options can be quantified, but horsepower and fuel usage can. Research shows that we focus on the information that can be quantified. For us, this changes a tough decision into a simple calculation. Unfortunately, after a while you figure that you don’t like the dashboard that much and the seats hurt your back.

It’s a really great challenge to find a way to display and quantify product features that can not be quantified by them themself. I think Buzzillions did a really great job with this. They ask product reviewers to select the five best and five worst features. The advanced compare functionality enables people to place this information next to one another and shows which product scores best with which feature.

Framing

Decisions people make are for a large part influenced by the way we communicate the information. For example: People will buy meat more often when the packaging says ’85% lean meat’ instead of ’15% fat’. Patients are more likely to consider an operation when there’s an 80% chance of surviving instead of a 20% chance of dying…

Dan Ariely did an experiment on this. He asked 100 students to subscribe for a magazine ‘The Economist’. The possibilities we distributed as follows:

This seems completely logical. Students had a feeling they would have a nice benefit when going for the 3rd option instead of the second. This made them neglect the first option. Ariely proved it by taking a second test without the 2nd option (Paper only).

Where anchoring sets a certain value as a reference point, framing concerns the way the message itself is formulated.

Help customers make satisfying decisions

As an interaction designer for websites and mobile I try to help people make the right decisions. In case of a webshop this be choosing the products that suits their needs best. This is really nice challenge and make me consider this:

• What’s the anchor (reference point) people will enter the site with?
• How do I present all possible options?
• Can website visitors quantify the information they see?
• When quantification is not possible, are the other ways to visualize or explain them?

Principle like these should always be considered with great care, as a designer or marketeer it’s your duty to do good and no harm. By designing for decision moments you the chance to stimulate decisions which do both good people and business.

Sources

Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences door Stephen P. Anderson
Power of Comparison
Paradox of Choice: Why more is less door Barry Schwartz
Nudge: Improving decisions about health wealth and happiness door Richard H. Thaler en Cass R. Sunstein
Photograph by Garry Knight.

We decided to plan kick-off sessions with each of these companies in order to report to the board of directors right after. We planned 6 sessions (8 persons each), which actually ment we would talk to 48 stakeholders (+ 3 directors). You can imagine what happened after we tried to unravel all the information we gained after only two sessions. We got overwhelmed by all the information fired at us.

Visualize your ideas quickly

Instead of waiting for more information (with the risk of getting even more confused) We decided to sketch possible solutions in this early phase. The moment we started sketching we found to understand the problems and information better than we did before. Although we feel not having found the holy grail yet, we do have the feeling to have regained grip.

We expect the remaining 4 sessions to be more effective now that we’ve visualized our ideas. Our lesson of last week, start visualizing as soon as possible. It will not only help finding a solution for your problem, but also help understanding the problem itself.

‘When a design problem is so overwhelming as to be nearly paralyzing, don’t wait for clarity to arrive before beginning to draw. Drawing is not simply a way of depicting a design solution; it is itself a way of learning about the problem you are trying to solve.’
Matthew Frederick – 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

During the afternoon I answered a few questions that may rise when discussing this topic.

• Are we being influenced?
• How do we decide?
• What are Persuasion Tactics?
• How can we as designers make use of this?
• How far can we go?

Are we being influenced?

Smells like clean spirit

In their study on ‘The Nonconscious Effects of Scent on Cognition and Behavior’, Rob Holland, Merel Hendriks and Henk Aarts at Radboud University and Utrecht University discovered we can indeed be influenced.

They discovered that the mere exposure to the scent of all-purpose cleaner can cause people to keep their direct environment more clean than they would when they hadn’t smelled the citrus odor. When people were asked afterwards why they kept their environment that clean, no one had a clue why they did.

Fast food logos unconsciously trigger fast behaviour

Chen-Bo Zhong and Sanford DeVoe proved it. Subliminal exposure to fast food logos stimulate haste and impatience, even when there is nu actual food around. Zhong and DeVoe did an experiment with 57 students who were asked to stare at the center of a computer sceen.

There would appear a stream of flashing objects At the corner of the screen. Students were asked to ignore these flashing symbols (only shown 12 milliseconds per object). Some of the students were shown logos of McDonald’s, KFC, Subway, Burger King and other fast food companies as part of the stream of symbols. Afterwards none of the students could tell what kind of symbols had appeared.

Then all participants were asked to read out a 320-word text about Toronto. Those who had fast food logos appear in the corner of their screens read the text in only 70 seconds while it took the others 84 seconds.

How do we decide?

In order to be able to influence people’s decision making process we should first know how people decide. How does one decide to take a persuasive message for granted or when does one reject a persuasive message.

Elaboration Likelihood Model

This model by Petty and Cacioppo (1979) distinguishes two possible routes to persuasion. The central route is used when someone considers a message logically. The peripheral route when someone considers a message by using preexisting ideas and superficial qualities. Which route is used depends on both motivation as ability for someone to process the persuasive message.

Persuasive messages that go through the central route require a great deal of thought and consciousness, and therefore are likely to predominate under conditions that promote high elaboration. Someone has to be really motivated to process the message on its logical grounds through this route. Someone has to be able to process the message on these logical grounds (needs a certain educational level or knowledge of the specific topic).

Messages may be accepted through the peripheral route when someone isn’t motivated or able to process the message on logical grounds. Therefore the message needs to contain a peripheral cue. This peripheral cue needs to be accepted (motivation) and come through (ability) as well. An example of a peripheral cue could be the perceived credibility or the attractivenes of the source.

Persuasive messages which are processed through the peripheral route are not likely to change attitudes or habits. They only cause short-term behaviour changes. Most of the tactics I spoke about are peripheral cues.

What are Persuasion Tactics?

At Concept7 we developed a model that decribes how we see the web. The whole thing started because technology was ready for it, but these days it is more and more designed to meet human needs.

Persuasion tactics are meant to encourage certain behaviour (often by taking away barriers). These tactics alone can change a specific behaviour. But to change an attitude or habit you would need a (persuasion) strategy.

‘Persuasion is an attempt to change attitudes or behaviors or both (without using coercion or deception).’
B.J. Fogg, Stanford University

Behavior model

In order to give more insight into how certain behaviours occur, I explained B.J. Fogg’s Behavior Model. The model describes three required elements for behaviour to take place: Motivation, Ability (Simplicity) and a Trigger.

B.J. Fogg about Simplicity Factors

How can we as designers for the web make use of Persuasion Tactics?

There’s lots of resources on the internet about utilizing Persuasion Tactics on websites. Below you’ll find some examples, lots more in the slides at the bottom of this presentation.

Credeble takes away barrier of time

Let’s imagine you’re motivated to make use of Credeble’s online service. The only problem is, you’re fed up with endless regsitration processes. By emphasizing the factor of time right below the call-to-action you may be triggered to register after all. ‘It’s free and only takes 20 seconds’ would influence your decision-making process.

Dropfabriek reframes stock context

Dropfabriek (liquorice factory) uses the principle of framing to influence people’s behaviour on their website. By controlling the context they influence the meaning of the message. By placing a sold-out product in their line of products they suggest the products on their website are highly demanded. By showing the stock status of the other products, people are more likely to buy similar products. Professor Paul Messinger did a study on the influence of sold-out products on consumer choice.

Check the slides at the bottom of this post for loads of other examples.

How far can we go?

Coercion and deception

There’s quite some discussions going on about ethical neutrality of persuasion tactics. I very much like Joshua Porter’s response on Twitter:’UCD is ethically neutral, while persuasion design is not? Not so. Ethics rests with the designer, not the method.’. Another great one by Arjan Haring:’The first rule of Persuasion Design is that every design is persuasive in some ways. There is no neutral way of designing something.’.

My colleague Stefan Wobben spotted some great examples of deception some months ago. Het wrote a post called Persuasion or Deception. Whether or not these examples were designed on purpose or not, they influence people’s behaviour in a way that can be argued…

You know very well when you use coercion or deception when utilizing persuasion tactics. In the end you’ll lose.

Persuasion Tactics 101 slides

Sources

The Nonconscious Effects of Scent on Cognition and Behavior – Rob Holland
Fast food logos trigger fast behaviour – Chen-Bo Zhong and Sanford DeVoe
Wikipedia on Elaboration Likelihood Model
Sold-out Products Influence Consumer Choice – Prof. P. Messinger
Persuasion or deception – Stefan Wobben
Main photo is a picture I took of last month’s Scientific American Mind

Games in our lives

Last year the Entertainment Software Association reported that 65% of U.S. households play video games today and that the average age of a game player is 35 years old. In the United Kingdom BBC reports that 59% of 6- to 65-year old play one form of video game or another.

These numbers are growing and are very likely to continue to grow: a recent report shows that a staggering 97% of the 12-17 age group in the United States play one form of video games or another.

To play video games has become the norm; to not play video games has become the exception – Jesper Juul 2010.

Why not do something serious with this?

On a rather irregular basis, we at Concept7 organize an open podium at our office in Paterswolde. Usually one of the employees prepares a story to tell, goal is to share some specific knowledge.

This time we invited guest-speaker Rob Willems. Rob is currently self-employed as innovation coach and lecturer at Hanze Hogeschool in Groningen. He did a great talk about serious games.

Why design a serious game

Whereas most games are designed to be entertaining and fun, a serious game is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. These purposes can vary a lot depending on the strategy they are part of.

Purposes and goals of serious games can be abstracted. Serious games are ment:

• to inform;
• to train and educate;
• to change attitude and behavior.

Known industries that make use of serious gaming as part of their strategies are defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, religion, and politics.

Did you know the US Army has been designing serious games for centuries already to train military personel? Actually, the first serious game is often considered Army Battlezone, an abortive project headed by Atari in 1980. These days the US Army uses this kind of games to train a soldier’s tactical approach in conversations during war time.

Serious games for blind and sighted kids

Rob told about a project he’s working on at this very moment. Together with his team, he’s designing a Wii game for blind and sighted children . Goal of the game is to improve the children’s physical skills and make it more fun to play video games with friends and family.

During their research they were often amazed by the skills these blind kids do have. In some occasions they just can’t keep up with their friends who are not visually impaired. An often heard critique: ‘My friends let me win now and then, but I want to really win, by myself.‘. Their research resulted in a few objectives:

• The game has to be challenging and engaging, both for blind and sighted kids;
• it needs to have a positive effect on a blind kid’s physical skills;
• they must play it together.

During the project they held design and brainstorm sessions at four families in The Netherlands. Both blind and sighted kids took part during these sessions. It was amazing how many great ideas these kids themselves came up with. Ideas varied from medieval hide-and-seek games to sports related ideas.

The overall conclusion was that sound would play an important role in these games. They did several experiments with sound and found that there had to be sound all the time. Otherwise the blind kid would think the game had broken or ended.

One of the big challenges would be to keep the sighted kid just as excited about the game as the blind kid. They found that perhaps they could give the sighted kid visual cues (which the blind kid doesn’t see) and give the blind kid auditive cues (which the sighted kid doesn’t hear). The project is still running and will be finished this summer.

Serious games in healthcare

Also in healthcare, serious games are used to train personnel. Head2Head developed software which let’s doctors virtually perform surgery. Tasks vary from picking up tiny things alone, but also working together on tasks.

Serious games are sometimes used to distract patients during painful moments. We saw an example of a soldier who had serious burning injuries. Every time the bandages had to be replaced, nurses let him wear a virtual reality helmet. The patient was distracted but also when measuring brain activity, they found that the patient actually felt less pain…

In The Netherlands there’s a project called CAREN (Computer Assisted Rehabilitation ENvironment). A lot of boundaries during revalidation of a patient, are mental problems. Anxiety prevent a patient from doing certain things.

The projects involves a virtual environment in which a patient is asked to perform tasks in a gaming environment, the game involves full-body movement. They found that people are much more likely to do certain movements in a gaming environment than they would in the real world.

Below you’ll find a video about the CAREN project, it’s spoken in Dutch but the visuals say a lot so go ahead and watch it.

Great talk

We had a great afternoon filled with great examples and insights. Whenever you’re interested in Rob’s talk, you can invite him for your company as well. You can contact him through his company’s website.

Sources

Wikipedia
A casual revolution – Jesper Juul

Abstract

Sustainability is a broad term. In this post I talk about environmental sustainability issues. We as designers can play a large role in creating an eco-friendlier world.

When people think of design, they tend to think of artifacts. I think these artifacts are important, but merely a result.

We need to design the design process, production process and people’s behavior. This post is about the processes and artifacts. I’ll talk about behavior change in another post.

As a soon-to-be father I have enough reason to worry every now and then. Not only do I worry about my girlfriend and son’s health during birth. I also ponder about the consequences of my generation’s consumerism behavior and how that will affect the circumstances in which my son will live the latter part of his life.

These days, people in well developed countries together use more energy than is sustainable for the world’s entire population. Only when we manage to innovate our solutions in a greener and more eco-friendly way, this climate crisis can be solved before it will show its darkest side. Energy usage is not the only problem. Other subjects like pollution and excessive resource consumption need to be tamed as well.

Environmental problems

In the introduction above I addressed three problems that need to be tackled. Speaking of environmental problems, these are the main causes of the non-circular system.

We designed this straight-line growth model

Designers played a responsible role in these causes and effects. We created this consumerism world ourselves. Annie Leonard talks about this in The story stuff, a viral 20-minute talk which I’ve pasted below.

Annie’s point is simple and straightforward: the world economy follows a straight-line growth model based on planned obsolescence, while the world itself prefers to work in a circular symbiotic relationship.

‘Our enormously productive economy…demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.’
Victor Lebow, Retail Analyst (Price Competition in 1955)

Designing sustainable solutions

In order to design and build sustainable solutions we need to keep in mind a few markers that can help us bring structure in the process. We should:

• build products that last;
• create things that can be repaired;
• make stuff that can be recycled or reused;
• not use toxics during our production process;
• use green energy since natural resources are scarce.

Build to last

We’re talking about sustainability here, and how we can make people behave sustainable. Did you know that for years (and even now) many companies deliberately create products that have a short lifetime? Personal computers have long been deliberately designed for replacement every eighteen months.

Planned obsolescence

Bruce Sterling wrote a great piece about this in his book ‘Tomorrow now’. He explains that the short lifetime was not only in the interest of the people who make them, but also the managerial and programming classes that use them. If computers lasted forever and were simple to use, the high-paying jobs in e-commerce would immediately migrate to India (that’s actually happening right now, and computers do last longer).

Websites die even faster than computers do, the average life span for a website on the internet lasts 40 days. Did you know that these websites are saved on servers all over the world sometimes for years? We often think that information on the internet is clean, but these websites are stored in server parks that are run by stinking diesel engines.

Repair instead of replace

This reminds me of a great story that I heard at the awesome design for conversion conference last year in Amsterdam. Paul Hughes told and sketched a story about a 150 year old architectural design solution on the Oxford University grounds.

Oxford University sustainable design solution

On the terrain of the Oxford University in England you can find numerous beautiful monumental buildings. One of these buildings, a 150 year old hall needed to have its ceilings renovated. The ceilings contain huge oak beams, about 100 in total. These oak beams would cost the University more than 100.000 British Pounds each!

There seemed no solution at hand, nobody knew what to do. The complete investment, including the renovation itself would be much too costly to do.

During one of their housing counsel meetings, which also includes gardening and forestry issues, one of the foresters started to grin. The counsel listened to his story. He explained that the architect of the huge 150 year old hall had also designed a huge oak forest not too far from the Oxford University terrain. These oaks were planted to actually replace the oaks in the ceiling of the Oxford University hall.

A beautiful example of sustainable design.

Recycle and reuse

When a product’s lifetime has come to an end in it’s normal intended form we can find new purposes. As a designer we can think about that second lifetime already when designing for it’s intended first lifetime. This second lifetime can go for the product as a whole but also as seperate parts. Just like the Oxford architect did.

We can design products that give purpose to products that ran out of time. Ubuntu, for example, is designed to endow older less powerful machines with a modern operating system.

A great example of repairing instead of replacing would be a mobile device that allows the market to move from changing old devices (throwing them away) to simply replacing their skins and parts. Did you know that 426.000 mobile phones retire from a really short life only in the USA?

Nokia’s Homegrown project

One of Nokia’s advanced design teams today called ‘Homegrown’ tries to change this with their Remade project. This is long term research project looking at how Nokia can help people make more sustainable choices. The team is exploring specific environmental and social issues including recycling, energy and how to make the benefits of mobile technology available to more people.

Remade’s father and Homegrown’s project leader Andrew Gartrell pushed design beyond just aesthetics. He considered covers, key mats, and displays but also engine, connectors, and other components. They discovered that a typical mobile phone contains around 44 of the 117 elements currently known to science. Andrew’s approach was to de-construct everything and rebuild it from scratch using recycled materials and sustainable technologies.

It’s made entirely from nothing new, using a cleaner engine, and made to last. They call it ‘Waste turned into a thing of beauty’.

Think outside the toxic box

Many companies promise green and toxic-free products. Greenpeace released a new list of electronic manufacturers and their green habits. Nokia, Apple and Sony Ericsson are in a so-called green zone. These companies scored best in terms of energy, avoiding poison and taking responsibility for their waste collection and processing equipment.

How green are electonics companies?

Apple excels in the elimination of toxins. All units of the company are already free from the harmful materials, PVC and brominated flame retardants. These toxins provide much pollution as the devices are discarded, especially in many developing countries where electronic waste is dumped.

HP produced a laptop that is substantially free of toxins and presented two new laptops and a desktop without PVC and brominated flame retardants.

These companies show that it is actually possible to create toxic-free products. It’s only a matter of thinking differently and investing in their design and production process.

Natural resources are scarce, use green energy

During a regular design project lots of e-mails and documents go from one to another. For years now I see e-mail footers with messages like ‘Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail’, I had one for a very long time. I like these footers, a simple reminder and not disturbing at all.

It’s not that we shouldn’t print our e-mails at all, sometimes it’s just handy to print them. You can easily change your printer setting to economy, which means 2-sided printing with two sheets on each side.

Designers should inform

We as designers (in my case of digital products) can play a role in informing our clients about their responsibilities. Not many clients think of energy usage of the hosting servers which their website uses.

There’s quite a lot of green hosting providers around that use green energy and use toxic free servers in their server parks. From my own experience I know that not many hosting companies are open about their energy usage. I consider they may actually have something to hide.

Placing high quality images on your web servers take an enormous amount of rack space. Keeping these racks running takes a lot of energy (and more racks as well). Sometimes it’s not a bad thing to downscale images a bit, (most of the times images are downscaled by the server when loading the web page which makes the high resolution file useless anyway).

Sources

Environmental Sustainability and Interaction – CHI 2007, April 28 – May 3, 2007, San Jose, California, USA.
Main photo by Gaetan Lee on Flickr.com
The wasted years by Jill Ettinger
The story of stuff by Annie Leonard
Tomorrow now – Bruce Sterling, 2002
Ecomama
Webanalisten.nl for refreshing my memory on the Oxford oak story
Near Future Laboratory about Nokia Homegrown

Sketching tools for iPhone applications

Sketching is not necessarily done on paper, but most of the tools I found are for paper sketching purposes. I must say most of them work well, for me there’s not much reason to buy sketchbooks and stencils since the free printable stuff is just as good or even better. Go see for yourself which suits you best.

iPhone Application Sketch Template by Oliver Waters

My favourite iPhone sketching paper, because of it’s simplicity. Grid squares are equivalent to 10px, and tick marks indicate the heights of the status bar, nav bar, keyboard, tab bar and toolbar. Oliver put it on Flickr, it’s a downloadable jpg and it’s totally free.

NotePod iPhone sketchbook by Jacky Winter and Inventive Labs

A sketchbook which is the size of a real iPhone. While sketching I don’t find these really useful because of it’s size. It’s really hard to get a nice grip on this paper and there’s hardly any space for annotations. It’s size could come in handy when you’re performing a paper prototyping user test since you don’t have to slice all the different screens out of a bigger paper. But for sketching ideas I don’t think it’s really practical. Costs: $17.95 (3 sketchbooks).

iPhone UI Stencil kit stencil by Design Commission

This stainless steel stencil and mechanical pencil do come in handy when you want to draw an iPhone shape on blank paper. The stencil is made of stainless steel and is thick enough to draw pretty accurate. I’m sure you won’t use most of the icons and symbols and you’ll be missing quite a lot which you DO want to use. Most of the sketching I do myself is freehand anyway, using the template for icons and symbols slows you down in many occasions. Only when you need to draw something really accurately this tool will help you out. Costs: $17.95 (stainless steel stencil, zebra mechanical pencil and free downloadable templates.

iPhone Sketch Pad sketchbook by Design Commission

This SketchPad goes really well with Design Comission’s iPhone UI Stencil kit. But the templates are downloadable on their website as well, which allows you to print them by yourself. $7.95 (50 sheets, 70 lb paper).

App SketchBook sketchbook by Stephen Martin

These sketchbooks are pretty simple, and that’s what I like about them. Every page has 3 real-size templates on it, they’re printed double-sided and the book contains 50 pages. Costs: $9,95.

iPhone Mockup online sketching tool by Lukas Mathis

This is quite a nice tool, you can choose to use a sketchy or a solid template to design your iPhone mockups. The engine contains most standard iPhone widgets and you can upload your own. This sounds pretty cool, but uploading is quite a job because you will have to sketch or design your widget in another tool. This tool is only usable when you use standard iPhone widgets and share them online. There is no way (yet, they’re still in Alpha) to export or print images unless you draft your own screenshot. It’s free and it works smoothly. Thanks to Timothy van Sas for spotting this one.

Wireframing tools for iPhone apps

There’s some really neat wireframing tools around for iPhone. Honestly I don’t use these very much since I prefer using digital prototyping tools in which I can create my annotations on-the-fly. I found that a digital prototype is great tool to both test a tool, but also communicate my intentions with it to developers and stakeholders.

Ultimate iPhone Stencil for Omnigraffle by Patrick Crowley

A rather high-fidelity stencil for OmniGraffle to wireframe your iPhone applications. Great stuff when you need to present a new app to your client. It’s easy to make the application look visually appealing with only a bit of effort. In Omnigraffle it’s easy to import or create your custom widgets.

iPhone 3G Stencil for Omnigraffle by Theresa Neil

Also a high-fidelity stencil for Omnigraffle. It’s updated up-to iPhone 3GS and iPhone OS 3.0. I’ve used these stencils for a while but I feel I have to start over when I want to make a decent prototype out of it.

Visual design templates for iPhone apps

Apple’s iPhone SDK makes it really easy to play around with all standard iPhone widgets but in order to visualize your interactions and be able to quickly add or remove some custom stuff it really handy to work in Photoshop or Fireworks. Below you find the tools that I found during my short search a while ago.

iPhone GUI PSD 3.0 Photoshop Template by Geoff Teehan

This is an awesome PSD when you need to pitch for a client and you want to mockup something really quick which looks slick anyhow. Geoff did a great job on this one. The whole PSD has vectorbased elements which are neatly layered and organized. I’ve used this one for two projects now (including Usabiltyweb’s new iPhone app) and it helped me ot greatly.

iPhone interface PSD file Photoshop template by ThreeTwentyFourEighty

I came across this one while writing this post. I’m not sure about the quality of it. Perhaps when Geoff’s PSD isn’t sufficient for your needs you want to check this one out. Let me know what you thought of it.

Fireworks toolkit for creating iPhone mockups Fireworks template by MetaSpark

I usually design my apps in Photoshop but I decided to check this one out. It’s great tool when you are used to design in Fireworks. All elements are vector based. Later on I’ll talk about a great Fireworks plugin which allows you to create a clickable prototype out of this one.

Digital prototyping tools for iPhone applications

Now that you’ve sketched your ideas and described/visualized your intentions you may want to feel the application or test it with real-life people. The most effective way to this is to test the application with a digital prototype (preferrably on an iPhone). There’s several powerful tools that can help you out.

Prototyping for the iPhone using Fireworks Fireworks plugin by Unitid

This plugin by Unitid was developed for you to create clickable prototypes out of your Fireworks mockups. I don’t create web and mobile mockups in Fireworks but the demo they show on their website works really well on my iPhone. I’m not sure how much work it is to do the trick but it looks like a great tool to extend MetaSpark’s Fireworks toolkit.

Balsamiq online protoyping tool

Balsamiq is both available as a desktop or webbased version. The desktop version will cost you $79 dollars, which is great value-for-money when you are on the road a lot. When you work mostly in your own office and have a steady internet connection the webbased version is just fine. Balasamiq recently added simple interactions which makes it possible to test your mockups with real users. The only downside I can come up with is that you can’t draw custom widgets in the application itself.

iPlotz online protoyping tool

My colleague Wopke recently recommended me to use iPlotz as an online prototyping tool. I had never heard of this tool before but it works really well. When you got used to working with Balasamiq or Protoshare already, then there’s no reason to switch, but it’s just a fine app to design you iPhone mockups since it has a whole set of iPhone widgets.

I haven’t tried to be complete here, so you may very well have additions to this. Please don’t hesitate to post the tools you use as a comment below.

Yes! 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive

When you’re looking for a book that’s comprehensive on why some things are more persuasive than others and takes you to the core of that theory, this may not be your book.

But when you’re looking for a book which is easy to understand, is full of great real-life stories and inspires you to come up with ideas to improve your product or service, this may be the right choice.

Weapons of influence

You’ll finish this book in no-time. Because of the easy-to-read short 3-4 page stories it’s easy to recall the stories and tell others about them. Most of these stories are based on Cialdini’s six weapons of influence.

Reciprocity

The book describes the story of Bobby Fischer (former world chess champion). In 2005 he was a US-fugitive because he played a $5 million chess game in the former Yugoslavia. Iceland granted him citizenship and risked their relationship with the United States.

Many people wondered why Iceland accepted him in their country. The reason was simple, they had to return him a favor. The book explains what Bobby had done for Iceland 30 years before, but the main point is that people tend to return a favor for something they got from someone else.

Reciprocity example

I think one of my former clients succesfully benefits from this principle without knowing it. It’s an online upholstery store. You can order three free samples before buying something for real. I believe that by doing this favor, people are more likely to buy the product in the end.

Commitment and consistency

When people commit to something, they tend to honour that agreement even when the rules and conditions have changed in the meanwhile. Car sellers sometimes raise the price when someone returns after a while to buy a car after-all. Since the customer has decided to buy the car he’s more likely to do concessions on the terms and conditions.

Cialdini tells a story about the difference between people were willing to volunteer in a project. There was a huge difference between people who actively volunteered (filled the fields in a paper form) and people who passively volunteered (had to leave the fields blank). There was no difference between the groups at first, but the groups that acually turned up differed a lot!

Commitment and consistency example

At the moment we’re performing a test on one of our websites. We want to raise the number of comments that are submitted at an online magazine. We believe that adding a rating functionality which is followed up by a comment form will result in a higher number of comments compared to the current version which only has a comment form. We’ll keep you posted on this one.

The people at The Black Snapper claim to have increased the feedback on their website in a sort-a-like way.

Authority

People rely on those with superior knowledge. People seek for guidance on how to respond in certain (often unfamiliar) situations.

Authority example

At McKinsey Quarterly they have a ‘voices’ section in which they invite thought leaders outside of McKinsey to contribute to their knowledge base. As a website user you have the opportunity to have a conversation with these thought leaders.

The ‘Editor’s choice’ section at CNet shows products which are supported by CNet’s experts. They are open about the way they rate these products and explain clearly who these experts are.

Social proof

People tend to do things that they see other people do. This effect is bigger when the people who show a certain behavious are similar to you. The book contains great story about a hotel-chain which wants its hotel guests to reuse their towels and persuades them by claiming other hotel guests reused their towel as well.

Social proof example

I noticed Buzzillions is using this principle as well, their slogan states ‘Product reviews from people like you’. They can’t be too specific since they have a really broad audience, but their smart tagline helps people imagine someone writing the review.

Liking

People are more easily persuaded by people they like. Cialdini states that the more we like someone, the more we are likely to say ‘Yes’ to them.

Liking example

Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn has used a simple supermarket owner in their commercials and on their website for a few years now. By choosing this funny, cute and normal (he could very well be your neighbour or dad) guy in their commercials and on their website they made really successful use of the persuasive principle of liking. It’s really hard not to like this guy (and therefore the Albert Heijn brand).

Scarcity

Perceived scarcity generates demand. Some e-commerce shops display stock information, by showing how many products are left in stock they can benefit from the scarcity principle. Another way of doing this is setting a time limit on a discount for a certain product.

Scarcity example

A while back I noticed my colleagues at a Dutch online liquorice store make really smart use of this principle by showing the exact amount of liquorice they still have in stock. In many occasions users will feel urged to order now instead of later because of the scarcity of the product.

Sources

Wikipedia about Cialdini
Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive – Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin and Robert B. Cialdini

FutureNow persona breakdown

The terms Competitive, Spontaneous, Methodical and Humanistic were first coined by the Eisenberg brothers in their great book Waiting for your cat to bark?.

In a previous post I talked about how an MBTI based framework can be helpful to generate ideas for website concepts. This week I came across this video which explains the same method by describing the Mint homepage as an example.

The designers of the Mint website either consciously or unconsciously designed the website for all four buying modalities. The video below was created by James Archer of Forty, an American marketing agency.

Four decision modes

How people decide on websites

We asked all visitors to formulate an opinion or a critique about the book before the meeting. Critiques about the book were diverse but almost all were positive. A lot of the readers thought they could very well use some of these infiltration tactics themselves or use them to advise their customers who have trouble justifying usability in their organizations.

In fact most of the tactics were used by the readers already. But there was never a book that formulated so many ways to win people for you in your quest to get usability into the minds of the people within an organization.

Bottom-up approach is not always enough

There was some discussion about how some of the readers had trouble reaching the right people inside an organization. To change a complete organization (or to speed up the process) you’ll need to get in touch with the CEO or his managers either directly or indirectly.

The book doesn’t provide any hands-on tips to get up to CEO level. One of the readers explained how he helped an e-commerce manager at one of his client’s companies by providing him with the right data all the time but kept failing to convince top-level management.

After a while he found out that it could very well not be the data that wasn’t correct but the way the message was sent. In chapter 39 John describes that you need to think like a leader to get the message across.

Passion and enthousiasm are most important

The group recommends every UX designer within the field who feels himself limited by a lack of support from inside their organization (or their client’s) to read this book. Almost every discussion we had during the evening came to the same conclusion. However, the only way to get any of these tactics to work is to have a passionate sender to communicate the message.