Sjors Timmer

The social networks of today aren’t what they used to be. Facebook, LinkedIn and other large survivors have evolved from a simple collection of personal data (like the the files they keep about you at the CIA) to something that has no ‘old’ media comparison any more. How did we end up there, what are the social, commercial and technological changes that brought us this far and what is the effect of commercial questions on the way we can express ourselves on these social networks. These are the questions that I will try to answer in this post.

The possibility to be always online together with the large amount of the population who has broadband has turned out to be a fertile soil for social networks, in their short history they quickly rose up from static biographical pages to an oversized ticker-tape ticking away the lives of everyone you’ve ever known. Also in other areas change did roar, the move from communicating by email and forums to blogging, twittering and status updates and eventually the ‘like’ button changed the landscape again. This social-technological change combined with  a change of expectations on privacy and the way we interact with technology is the backdrop for this story.

What does this mean for social networks

First. Different people
The amount of people online has reached new heights and is slowly approaching the line were everyone who could possibly be online will have internet access. Not only are there more people but they are also more tech-savy, better capable to deal with new challenges and less afraid to use their credit-card. In short: everyone is here, they know how it works and they are not afraid to pay.

Second. A continual search for new money
Deep changes have taken place on the commercial side of social networks. Not only is there more money flowing from investors and consumers  into the web, expectations have also risen to new heights, competition has brought the fee for most services down to zero, and banner blindness and internet smartness have made it harder to shake money out visitors. I’ll highlight three money making methods that still play a role in the design of social networks.

• Banner advertisement (such as payment for clicks, views and sales)
• Information harvesting (these  annoying long sign up forms you have to wrestle through, or the bright yellow boxes that tell you your profile is only 40% done)
• Engagement enhancement (creating brand awareness, and help to find community leaders to use them to get the first two methods done more effectively)

Third: New technology and new design challenges
From a technological point the internet of today is hardly recognizable for that of 1999. “Always on” has become the default, both with the ongoing penetration of broadband, the possibilities with wi-fi and the completion of the 3G network. Computers have become faster and even do their job when sized back to phone-size. Also the software made great leaps forward, browsers became ubiquitous, ajax technology gave way to a whole new thinking about web ‘pages’ and the open-source nature of the internet allowed for high pick-up speed of innovative ideas. Social network builders have to live up to these challenges and, in the end, make a profit. They’ve figured out a couple of solutions to come to there.

• More content in total and less content per page allows for as many banners as possible
• Increase the amount of places where users can leave information behind, more information is better targeted banners
• More engagement and activity, brings up the amount of page views, possibly the amount of clicks and teaches the system more about it’s users.

Forth: How a different design forces /allows for a different identity presentation
From how you look to what you do, where Myspace and Friendster all still based around the profile, your virtual representation in cyberspace, Facebook managed -with the help of Twitter and Friendfeed- to move beyond the profile and beyond the wall to something like the live-feed, your own micro-news CNN news-ticker. We have to understand that this is different from chatting and forum-posts, these still have an internal structure even a topic. The Facebook newsfeed is coming closer to Google Epic than Google ever came.

• Presentation model: based on the assumption that more pages will allow for more advertisements space, and that showing more banners would be the solution, websites catered for having as many pages as possible.
• Interaction model: By putting more focus on creating activity, the role of social network changes too. Where in the myspace era designing a fancy style for your profile was enough, at Facebook your profile is of little matter, what counts is what you do, to exist you have to constantly feed the network, and what you feed it defines how you the world sees you.

Would you thread an ordinary notebook like this

Are those who use a Moleskin more successful, richer and more creative? Maybe a weird question. Logic tells you “of course not!”, writing in an expensive notebook should not differ from writing in one that you bought for a pound. But think with me for a moment, to be able to buy a Moleskin you need to be mentally and financially capable, so it’s quite likely that you are successful enough to allow such expenses and mentally ready to be seduced by style (or quality as they say)

Another question, are the owners of an Austin Martin more successful, richer and more powerful than those who drive to work in a Vauxhall? I bet you’d agree with me on all the three questions. Allow me to take you to another question: what came first, the Moleskin or the success? Maybe you need some success to buy your first Moleskin, but what about the second, and the third. Would you rip pages out it (like you do with that one you got for free), would you write down your shopping list, would you loose it somewhere on the way?  Or would you follow the lead that the Moleskin sets and focus more on quality and tread your ideas and behaviour with more respect?

Experience design is designing in such way that it influences behaviour, thoughts and believes.

Where have we heard those words before? In the very fine art of marketing. In the field of web-applications design we should follow the path set up by many designers before us and make products that are not only useful, (or usable) but are also a pleasure to use. From the first click on the link to your site to the very last check-box on the last tab, it’s not only the usability, the amount of features,  the personalisation options or the amount of free web-space that counts, but the quality of the experience

And it’s the quality of the experience that adds the most value to your proposition and your business. Does Coca-Cola work better against hydration than tab-water, is a Jaguar more useful to bring you from A to B than a Vauxhall, does a Suit from Savile Row keep your warmer than a trainings-suit from Primark? Of-course not, in the first world people pay a premium for a better experience. And who can blame them, for don’t you deserve the best experience?

In this article I want to discuss the relation between emotion and design, but first let me say why I think that we are having this discussions at this very moment (and not a decade ago (or next decade)) I see five reasons.

• Interaction design is more than graphic design on a screen or industrial design in a browser
• Enlightenment, modernism and the questioning  of man being rational
• The rise of neurological research, and the continues psychological and sociological experiments
• The availability of a massive amount of behavioural data
• Internet companies have found themselves in a saturated market with highly competitive products

I believe this is the right moment  to connect emotions with design research. Let me first go over the word “emotional” (again) in our language emotional is often used as the opposite of rational, when you are ‘all emotional’ you are not acting rational, and even worse both also carry a value connotation, to be emotional is bad, to be rational is good. I (and many with me) think this is a strong oversimplification that will not help us any further. Emotion is in accepting that in order to make a decision we  take much more into account than only  ‘is this cheaper or will this last longer’. As Malcolm Gladwell tried to explain in his book Blink or Weinschenk in her book Neuro Web Design there is a lot of thinking going on beyond closed doors.

The estimate from neuroscientist is that our five senses are taking in 11 million pieces of information every second. And how many of those are we processing consciously? A mere 40! (Weinschenk)

Is it pure magic what happens with the other 10 million inputs? Luckily we can already say quite a lot about the way those other inputs are processed, they are (mostly) in-line with our needs (A theory on needs was developed by Maslow, the so called hierarchy of need) I don’t want to go in this too deep, but I hope you agree that there is an awful lot to take into consideration when making a decision. This taking into consideration is what I for the lack of a better therm will call ‘emotional’ decision making.

Interaction design
Interaction design (or user-experience design, information design, webdesign, etc) although there isn’t makes one thing pretty clear, designing for digital interfaces is not the same as just applying old design knowledge (architecture, graphic design, industrial design) to a new medium. We need the old knowledge, but it’s not enough, we have a new thing to learn about what happens when time, humans and mediated social action meet on a screen, magic happens. To know more about this magical field many people have turned to fields originally hardly associated with design such as psychology and sociology, as I shall try to make clear in this article, it was about time.

Enlightenment and modernism
Now let’s move back a bit in history -and make some terrible generalisations- and try explain why in the first place we have to defend emotional design over rational design. In the period of enlightenment the idea man could get out of the darkness and get on the path of progress if only we would be rational came to the surface . If we would follow our mind and with the help of technology we could work towards a better future for all mankind, we could put ourselves on a infinitive track of progress. In the 20th these ideas shaped thinking about design and architecture the idea of modernism rose on the horizon. If only we would remove every non-essential part, all the clutter, all the fluff, than at the heart we would reach a perfect blend of man and technology the essence, buildings would be white and shiny, products would be simple and clean and font-faces would be simple yet beautiful. Even the short rise (and fall) of post-modern design could not stop it, post-modernism gave us a change though to question our believes, maybe there would be more in life than this.  Now with the knowledge that there is more to progress than just simply removing everything that was not necessary to the job. Emotions came back to the table.

Psychological research
A lot has happened since Sigmond Freud uncovered the subconscious, experiment after experiment prove that humans are not as rational as we think. Research keeps on proving that people are influenced by reciprocity, commitment consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity (for a short introduction on these: Neuro Web Design) So although people are not rational, the factors that influence their behaviour are known and can be studied. This of-course with the hope that we will come to a rational way of understanding irrationality.

Data crunching
Now we have stated that although humans don’t behave as rational as expected, patterns in their behaviour can still be found, it is time to move on to the rise of the internet companies. Because any action that happens on a network can be registrated by that network, there is a massive amount of data available on internet usage. Data in itself is not really meaningful, just a long strings of zeros and ones. Meaning only appears after we work with this data and turn it into information. The quality of this information both depends on the kind of data, the quantity and most important the questions you try to answer with this data. If you start mixing psychological insights with quantitative data, interesting patterns start to emerge. You could for example base authority on the amounts of links that any web page gets, or you could use data clustering to create statements as ‘people who bought this also bought’. Or use it to answer if a border should be 5 or 6 pixels. Important to remember is that data is only useful when you ask the right questions.

So now we have the right mindset that by doing research we can improve the workings of technology, we have the psychological models to know where we have to look for answers and we have the data to give us the answers. Now the only thing we need is a financial stimulus to actually start working.

Web companies face a saturated. mature market
To be a successful company in the online sphere is at least as hard as to be successful in any market, there is no easy money any more. Although it might be easier than ever to start an online service and to have visitors coming your way, this is true for everyone. Thanks to the growing awareness of good usability practices most new web applications are now usable, this however is also true for the competition. To make the most out of their visitors companies have to make each visitor count. The psychological lessons about humans emotional behaviour are therefore really valuable, design that anticipates human emotional behaviour can make a visible difference in the amount of people that will actually use a website. By applying this knowledge we can move on from ‘is the user’s task doable’ to ‘does the user want to do the task’

So there we have it, the mindset, the questions, the answers and the money. This is why we will hear a lot more about psychology, sociology and emotions in the design world the coming decade.

more to read:

Donald Norman’s Design and Emotion
Predictably Irrational
The amazing slide shows by Joshua Porter
Pieter Desmet research emotions method

This is my tiny wrap up of uxcamplondon talk that I held at the Ebay Headquarters down in Richmond. My talk had the  inspiring title “designing for the difficult – because some things just aren’t simple”. Before I had my talk I had only a vague understanding of the concept. But I think I understand it a bit better now, so i decided to give you a rough outline of the concept.

The problem
The problem is quite clear, many applications (be it software such as word, excel, be it web-apps such as ebay or facebook) are quite well designed to get beginners up to steam, and also have some advanced features for the top of the end users. How someone goes from beginner to advanced users is still an hardly explored terrain, leading to many people stuck in the middle. To use a graph to explain the problem: If a new product arrives on the market some people will quickly ‘get it’ and become an advanced user, most people will slowly grown in to the functionality they need and become moderate users, and also a fairly large chunk will never grow out of the beginner state and or give up, or only use the very basic of functionality of the software. The challenge therefore is: how can we get as many users from beginners to moderate and from moderate to advanced in a way is most natural to the user.

Old answer – the manuals
Rtfm Write lengthy manuals, hundreds of frequently asked questions, and many pages on help. Although this is not a bad thing to do, it’s also not the best for two reasons:

• Users don’t read for various reasons, but mainly because reading requires true effort
• Developers and designers don’t like to write manuals (no statistics for this claim, so I’m happy to be proven wrong)

So the reading coin doesn’t work out for two reasons, no-one likes to read and no-one (almost no-one) loves to write help texts, faq and manuals when they know they won’t be read.

Old answer – the course, seminar, workshop
Sent the users of your software so lengthy and expensive help courses, where they will burn away their valuable hours and burn away valuable company’s cash. Although this method works, it comes with the down down sides, that it requires even more effort than reading and most times courses are more expensive than the software itself.

New Answers
I believe there are better methods to educate the user and there are several fields of which ux-designers can borrow inspiration and information.

• Game design - is already working for decades on how to get users through their levels with giving them the right challenges at the right time.
• Marketing – also has a long track record in how to get users to do something /anything
• Education – Just as the classic examples of the book and the classroom, there should be a lot of information there on how to motivate people to learn new tasks.

Together with the fields above there are also two scientific areas that give a lot of ‘new’ answers: sociology and psychology both studying human behaviours and trying to come up more answers on how to keep the change > effect train running. Recently this whole field has got an incredible boost by both the further development of neuro research and the incredible rise of data mining

To me it seems no more than logic that ux field should learn as much as they can from those three fields of work, two fields of science and two incredible methods. Luckily this is already happening, but as far as I can see not in a very structured way.

To give you some links to sources where you can read more on this subject:
Books:

• Neuro web design - what makes them click (read my review)
• What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy
• Making meaning – (still have to read this, thanks for the tip Alfred)

Articles

• Beyond Usability: Designing Web Sites for Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust
• Design for Emotion

Examples
I’ve gathered quite a series of examples, but at the moment I feel it’s to early yet to state that it is anything beyond incidental anecdotes, but for those interested; have a look at my presentation:

There are a few topics, that I want to write about the next times, I’ve already mentioned them in my previous post, but I’ll define them once more.

• Goal based design
• Flow design
• Emotional / experience design
• Play and fun as a way to achieve goals

They are all part of the same process, and describe our relation with technology, we create and use technology, not because we are such fan of technology an sich, but because we want to get something done.

Goals
It’s important not to confuse goals with tasks, as Norman points out, tasks change with every update of technology, I used to write a letter with a pen, than I switched to typewriter, than I used Word to write it, and now I’m even using Wordpress to express myself. So the technology, and tasks have changed pretty dramatically over the last decades. The goals however -to bring an idea across- is already the same for millennia. So by looking at how to get the most done, we shouldn’t focus on how to preform a certain task as optimal as possible. Instead we should ask ourselves (as creators and users of technology) how we can achieve a certain goal as easy and good as possible. (There are some nice books about order versus chaos, and how much wasted time there is spent on creating order in systems that function as well with a little mess)

Constructing Flow
A flow is a certain series of sub-taskt that together will form a finished task. Flow is where man and machine meet for the first time, the person want to achieve a certain goal and is using certain technology to reach that goal. (Or the other way around, certain technology can facilitate certain goals but needs users to achieve those). Flow is also the name of a state of being.

Most of us have experienced a mental/emotional state where all of our attention (or energy) is totally focused on an activity. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) named this state “flow,” based on how participants in his studies described the experience. (source)

To facilitate a flow therefore, a website should focus on delivering only those tools the user needs on that particular moment. You can already see the problem here, how does a website (that is most likely been build to support multiply goals by users with different flows) facilitate a user with the the flow that will work best on that moment. There are a few known solutions already, but all seem to have their down sides. To name a few:

• A user can hide the non necessary tools (as Wordpress does)
• Depending on a predefined kind of user the interface will have certain features (Photoshop and Dreamweaver for example)
• The Interface can learn from your actions (text input on the iPhone in theory) and MS Office 2003 (?)
• Facebook and Linkedin (at least in the past) have a you are now on 30% do something to go to 40%

As you can see from the last example, both designer of the flow and user of the flow run in the same problems. The designer does not know what each specific user want to do at each moment, and can’t therefore not optimize that particular flow. And the other way, the user might know what to achieve but will not no what the most efficient way is to achieve the goal. From the list above, hide and move at own choice and being encouraged to explore the rest of possibilities seem to be the best solutions, since they don’t force the user to make decisions / or make decisions for the user without informing. Enable and encourage to play seems like the best solution. (And also why an undo function is so important (2)

Emotional design II

First lets find a place for emotional design, as far as i consider, we should keep it as far from the new age crap as possible, but we should acknowledge that we are humans, and we use a lot of emotional power to make decisions and not only rational constructed thoughts. Because the decisions made are not rational or well thought out, they are however real and can also be tested, just not as easy as just asking the question. Another point where we should keep design away from is being purely business (money?) driven, as a designer I would state ‘create great products that users love, and the money will come’. A good example where money focus will lead us appeared in an article on UxMatters. this article mentoined emotional design as a selling’ point beyond user experience design itself (or maybe not beyond, but as an important part of). The post is both worrisome as fascinating

By leveraging the science of persuasion in new and insightful ways and designing specifically to optimize the elements of persuasion, emotion, and trust, we can systematically influence customers’ online behaviour. (source)

Not only becomes a website a place where people can get a happy experience, you might also get the feeling that people are subconsciously forced to inhale whatever business has cooked up for them. It has quite an unethical feel surrounding it, than again, if it makes the people happy, why not. As appears in the comments, the blog post turns out to be one large commercial for a user experience company. Though, it touches some interesting points, where usabillity is not enough to create a good site.

Emotional feedback

The last point in this post (that is already all over the place) is the point Norman makes about how people are extremely well equipped for social interaction -and his chapter about how robots should have emotions- made me wonder how we could apply those ideas to web interfaces. The idea that interfaces can be more than just stating facts is slowly becoming common ground. Flickr keeps us learning different languages to say hello in, Wakoopa allows you to reach all kinds of awesome levels, and also the 404 messages of many website have become opportunities to engage people.

To end this unconstructed post of ramblings, some nice slideshows:

Lately I’ve spent some time in trying to map the ‘true essence’ of social networks, as always with true essence they refuse to be mapped. Here is my attempt though

There are (should be) three mayor components in any social network

• Users – this might be members, visitors, creators, editors, (who knows even spambots), someone needs to be willing to do something though.
• Actions – having user is not enough, a social network should also enable these users to do things, to alter the status quo, to change reality.
• Objects – last there need to be things that user can preform actions on -to be visible in a digital world you will need to create, alter, reflect on media objects
• Time

In other words we could state the goal of a social network is to ‘enable people to perform actions that will change what was there previously’

If you would be willing to follow my thoughts this would mean something for many of the current social networks out there, because it is NOT (only) about publishing (blogging, writing, uploading photos, uploading films) it’s fine if you want to focus on that, but don’t call yourself a social network. It is also NOT (only) about activity, displaying activity (twitter, friendfeed, facebook wall anyone. It is (here it comes) about the following three things:

Social networks should enable users to prepare, act, reflect:

Enable a user to see what is going on:

• Enable a user to see what is going on (activity feed) (real time)
• Enable a user to create, reply, act, do, take the action (publishing)
• Enable a user to know what effect this action had

To enable this, social networks should rebrand themselves as social collaboration tools and focus on

• Providing quick insights on what is going on
• Making actions disturbingly easy
• Provide an easy way to know what happened after you acted

You now might want to read more at Boxes and Arrows and read about Google Wave

And more important pleaes leave me your thoughts on what you think are important actors when we think about social networks

One of the questions that has kept me awake last weeks is ‘how can you create design visions?’ , how can you set a direction on the way the design is going. How can you set goals for design five years ahead. For business planning these questions are still tough but they’ve got a history of business planning of several centuries to get inspiration from, and they have the numbers, so their goals are easy to measure. By the end of the year we want to have ten mayor clients and a turn over of one million, check at the end of the year, 9 clients, nine hunder thousand turnover, almost there only ten percent off.

Measuring user experience
Design is measurable in goals of clicks, visits and conversion, but does this equal user experience too? If your conversion goes up by 10 %, does that mean the user experience went up by 10 too? One way of approaching this problem is by measurement, although not as easy as financial goals, there are several methods available to measure user experience, and get their experience expressed in numbers (for example see here: Measuring Usability and a paper about Single Usability Metric or Usability Benchmarking or the work of Nigel Bevan and this great thread) This might solve the problem of measuring how usable your product is, and might even being capable of measuring some emotional states. And therefore you could start expressing statements, as our overall user experience is now 7.1 by the end of the year I want it up to 8.0. For those who love numbers this is a wonderful method, is does not really solve the problems of design visions though. As Donald Norman states in his book, ‘as easy it is to create usable products, it can be pretty hard to create useful products. For usable most times applying the rule ’simple is better’ will the job, and eventually you will end up producing hammers and nails.

Future visions
An other popular but more expensive way is the future visions that Microsoft and IBM for example push out every year

This review is about the book Neuro Web Design – what makes users click by Susan M. Weinschenk. As the title suggests this book is supposed to be about what web designers and web marketeers can learn from ‘recent’ insights from psychology to build websites that are better up for their tasks. I.E. how do you get a user to click, write, engage with your website in a way that you want.

The book is divided in eleven chapters that all support one main concept and end with a handy summarizing bottom line. Because the book is neatly structured it’s not that hard to summarize. Therefore I will first provide you with a summary, and secondly a conclusion. As you might notice, that there are hardly any mind-blowing new insights, but one could say its the execution of ideas that count, not merely having them.

First chapter is about the working of the brain in general. We have three brains, working closely together, Susan uses the easy to remember names, new brain – where the active thinking happens, mid-brain – where emotions are processed, where your feelings are, and the old brain – that focusses on general survival, also works with the automatic functions in our body, as walking and breathing. An interesting fact is that we receive around 11 million sensory inputs a second, but our concious brain – the new one- is only capable of handling 40 of them simultaneously. To create successful websites we should therefore not only focus on our new brain where reason and logic live, but just as much -or even more- focus on the other parts of the brain that are outside our concious regions.

Second chapter is about social validations, we want to be normal, we want to be like others, therefore we continuously scan the environment to get a feeling of what might be expected from us. We therefore are particularly influenced by the decisions that others made, recommendations on Amazon for example, or the interestingness factor on Flickr. An other great way is to use case studies and stories of people who we can imagine to be real and who’s stories we can connect with.

Third chapter is about reciprocate and concession, about how giving things away for free actually helps working on peoples guilt feeling to balance out their relation to you, give them free information, and they might be willing to give some information back. Give them a free trial period, and they will consider your offering to pay for a service more happily.

Forth chapter is about scarcity. If things come in endless amounts, than or they are too easy, and we might take them another time, or they are not good enough, and people wouldn’t even want them if it is free. If there is some price to pay though, we feel more interested, expensive things must be good right, hard to reach places must be more interesting. Make information harder to get, make product offers run for a limit time, and they all appear to be more interesting.

Fifth chapter is about not providing endless choice, give people distinctive choices. We can only handle one or two product features at the same time, so if you want people to choose a particular product, make it appear on top of the list, let the most expensive one have more features, connect it with a story about a identifiable person and the deal is closed. Or if you want to sell a model X of 20 pounds, present it next to model Y of 110 pounds and model Z of 12 pounds. Even if X is only a slightly bit better than Z people will still go for it, because it looks like such a deal compared with Y, and Z is so cheap that there must be something wrong with it. (supermarkets love this trick to sell you their home brand) Perhaps here filtering techniques start to help too. As long as we have the feeling that we are slightly in control. Not every advanced search delivers on its expectations. Horizontal browsing might therefore provide a good alternative to vertical search (Check this presentation on Amazon)

Sixth chapter is about you! have you noticed how many times Flickr uses the word you on the logged in homepage? -nine times the word you, two times your name, and a whole menu named ‘you’. Your old brain is completely you focusses and loves to know more about things that are there for you to provide you with a better life. This focusses on three general themes of survival. Avoid danger – even if the danger isn’t focussed upon us, our brain will still be extra alert when we see risky things, show advertisement right after a scary film scene and we are more likely to take notice, and by having things flicker and blink they will get our attention. Find food: if you are by any chance in the food business, lucky you, show food lusciously and the customers will run into your shop. Sex sells, pretty people, girls with Bambi eyes, it all still helps to close the deal.

Seventh chapter is about commitment and consistency. Get people on board and they are more likely to stay on-board, increase your fees slowly each year, and they still feel committed and stay with you. Speak towards an inner vision of who some-one things she is, and more likely she will go for your product to stay consistent with her inner story and with her history of being. Writing positive reviews for example will not only give other people the feeling that they make better informed decisions, but it will commit the writer of the review stronger to the product.

Eight chapter is about similarity and sameness. Attractive people still are a good way to sell products, celebrities go a long way, and if your site is created for a specific target audience, than do show them. People that appear to be just like us, are trusted more.

Ninth chapter is about the fear of losing. Losing an offer because time runs out, buying the most expensive version because fear of missing some of the good stuff. (Nine is also about chapter four) Threadless can be seen as a good example here

Tenth chapter is about pictures and stories. We are in general not that good in remembering dry information, but when folded in a delicious story and topped with emotional pictures of real (attractive) people it moves right into our unconscious brain.

Eleventh chapter is a conclusion; we are social animals, think in stories, in emotions and in humans and your next product that will help people to communicate more divers, more easily, faster and more engaging will become a hit.

Conclusion.
Although the book is not really bad, it’s lack of web bases case studies (even the most famous ones are absent) and the chunks of information that leave you behind hungry for more (yes, I really was able to summarize chapter nine in one line, it was hard not to write more words than Weinschenk about this topic) make the purchase of this book doubtable. I got the feeling that Weinschenk certainly does know her psychology facts and research reports, nevertheless her lack of knowledge on the area of web and design do prevent this book from being exciting and engaging. At least 60% of the book is filled with examples that have noting to do with the internet. Although I actually learned a few things about the latest neuro-research, calling this book neuro web design is misleading. My advise would be that she teams up with web designer and writes a follow up as soon as possible. Until than, just read my summary and save up for books that are filled with passion for the field. Susan’s conclusion is a great example of her doubtful motives:

I don’t know what the next big thing online will be. I wish I did know. Than I could create it, make a lot of money and retire.

Her desire for money unfortunately led to this joined attempt with New Riders to create a book that promises much, but fails in execution.

I will give this book three stars, one for the great topic, one for the nice construction of the book, one because I did learn something, a minus for the lack of related case studies and a minus for the lack of real engaging content.

As I pointed out in my previous post, I think that there is still something missing on all the great diagrams that are already made about design. And that is “why bother about design in the first place”. I placed my writings in a nice little diagram that hopefully explains what I meant, but also opens new questions.

As far as I can explain from this diagram is that the goal of design is to enable people to work with technology in such a way that they can do their task they think they need to do to achieve their goals.The most important thing I wanted to make clear is that not only should designers focus on which task a user want to preform with a certain technology, they should also consider which goals (and vision) a user has, for their might be other tasks more suitable to achive their goals.

I came across quite some sideshows, some arguing quit strongly against calling the artist formally known as interaction designer Tafkid now a user experience designer.

Although i do agree with the key ingredients of this presentation, I also think one should avoid wasting ones time on defining meaning of words or meanings of professions. By the time that you successfully defined them, something new will have coma along that is exactly the same but 5% extra, and you can start defining again. Although it is interesting, I feel I have better things to do. If you feel you have some time left, please start working on defining art and artist, the difference between a blogger and a journalist and what web2.0 really means. I’m happy with that it is impossible, but I do believe that it is certainly possible to call a number of concepts that it is related too. That will be sufficient for me. If the world calls my profession UXD designer (or UX designer, or UE designer) than that is what I will work with.

Frank Spiller of the very interesting blog Demystifying Usability made a great illustration to cover this problem

(source)

So User Experience Design (formally also know as Usability )deals with all these subjects, and many more, sometimes it will be the right name, sometimes it wont. To quote good ol’ Shakespeare

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”