People have trouble assigning value to stand-alone products. Your customers assign value to objects and services by comparing them to other products.
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Henk Wijnholds
Freelance interaction designer
Just do something
Start visualizing your ideas as soon as possible, it will not only help finding a solution, but also clarifying the problem.
Continue ReadingPersuasion Tactics 101
During my presentation at MediaCT last month I showed a dozen examples of how we are being influenced by all kinds of cues around us.
Continue ReadingSerious games
Last friday we invited Rob Willems to give a talk at Concept7 about Serious Gaming. He explained what serious games are, who makes them and how they do that.
Continue ReadingDesigning sustainable processes
Sustainability is a broad term. We as designers can play a large role in creating an eco-friendlier world.
Continue ReadingSketching and prototyping tools for iPhone apps
Our daily sketching and prototyping work used to focus itself mainly on desktop applications. These days mobile is getting a larger and larger share of our design time. We need to adjust our design tools for this. During the months we’ve been doing this I came across several tools, I’ve listed and reviewed (where possible) them here.
Continue ReadingPersuasion stories
A couple of months ago I read this book by Cialdini called ‘Influence’, he describes 6 powerful weapons of influence. I decided to read the follow-up Yes! 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive which describes 50 stories about the 6 persuasive weapons in action. For some of the weapons I tried to find examples on the web which (consciously or unconsciously) use them succesfully.
Continue ReadingDecision modes to help improve websites
Some posts ago I wrote about an MBTI based ideation framework for sketching ideas. This week I came across this great video which explains the same four decision modes, the video is accompanied by great examples on the Mint website homepage.
Continue ReadingSelling usability
Do you have to justify usability within your organization? At the second UX Book Club in Groningen we read ‘Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics’ by John S. Rhodes. We concluded this book could help you in the right direction, but beware, there’s more to it…
Continue ReadingProximity and continuity laws for simpler designs
The moment website visitors enter your website, they’ll start organizing everything they see in order to make sense of it all. As a designer of websites you’re responsible for organizing the information in a way the message gets across in a proper way. Proximity and continuity laws of gestalt are the simplest ways to organize your information.
Continue ReadingIdeation framework lecture
Want to know what Lego, Häagen-Dazs and Spiderman have in common? In this post my colleague Stefan Wobben and I talk about ideation frameworks and how they can help you finding the best ideas for your design challenge.
Continue ReadingMBTI sketching paper for ideation
At Concept7 we developed our own MBTI sketching paper for ideation sessions. It helps you think inside the box of 4 personality traits. You can download it here for free.
Continue ReadingDesign principles to choose the right ideas
Often people ask me how we know which ideas to choose from all the hundreds of ideas we’ve generated during brainstorm sessions. Apart from our gut feelings and experience there’s a method that could help us decide, define design principles.
Continue ReadingUser feedback: Coffee time talk
A couple of months ago, we spotted the following trend amongst some of the most innovative internet companies: feedback features, beta versions and sneak previews of new websites. Companies do anything to get feedback from the end-user.
Continue ReadingAxure tabs widget
In Axure RP Pro two important functionalities like ‘masters’ and ‘dynamic panels’ help us create rich interactions really efficiently. In some cases they don’t work really well together, I tried to find a work-a-round which I’m sharing with you in a tab widget form today.
Continue ReadingMBTI, a solid framework to sketch ideas
Do you think it’s hard to get started when you’re trying to come up with tons of great design solutions? Do you feel like you’re missing some great ideas when you’re done? A solid framework could help you. I think MBTI is a framework that can help you out.
Continue ReadingVisual ideation sessions support team collaboration
It was in the beginning of november last year when I was asked to lead three dream team design sessions for a large Dutch company. The problem we had to deal with was an information architectural problem on their website.
Continue ReadingGestalt psychology and webdesign
During my presentation at Fronteers I talked about the foundation of the gestalt theory and showed that gestalt psychology is about human perception. Researchers of this phenomenon discovered five principal laws that can be used in modern webdesign.
Continue ReadingBenefits of capturing and storing sketched ideas
Images have more distinctive features than words. That’s why it’s easier to recognize sketches among sketches than it is to recognize words among other words. Sketches enhance accessibility to earlier ideas.
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