When we judge the quality of a product we judge it by the total experience. That is: the actual properties of the product plus the experience we have with these properties. Because the experience depends not only on the product but also on its surroundings —other products available, emotional attachment— the perceived value of a product varies from place to place and from person to person. This split between the actual product quality and perceived quality leads to a situation where it becomes possible to increase the perceived value, without actually increasing the actual product’s quality. To stay competitive many companies choose to increase their experienced quality through large advertisement campaigns that enable the price of the product to go up. It can create a situation where expensive products become expensive, not because they are good, but because the marketing campaign needs to be paid for. I would argue that there is a better way: increase the perceived quality through actually increasing the quality. This is the age-old path of the craftsman.

Quality is realised through the interaction between the physical and the psychological world. Take a bottle of wine for example. The house wine sold in a local supermarket supplies the alcohol that will get your body in a more relaxed state. Nevertheless it is no match for the experience of drinking a French wine imported by a French friend whom you met years ago during your stay in Paris. They might do their physical job equally well, but the psychological impact is of a different magnitude. You can engage with the story, you feel the care, passion and dedication of both the friend and the château in every sip you take. Besides the insurance that only the best ingredients are used, you also want to be engagement with the story and the care of the craftsman who created the product.

In a competitive market the producers of products need to keep on innovating and increase their quality to remain competitive. In the category of computers it becomes quite clear that what was known as the best of the best five years ago is no longer relevant today. But what if innovation is no longer possible? If you are the producer of a famous quality whisky with roots going back for centuries, coming up with a new improved flavour might not be the successful path to follow. Instead what you can do is focus your attention on perceived quality. You can tell the consumers through advertisement campaigns about your unique values, your incredible ingredients, your centuries of tradition; all these stories increase the experience of the first sip.

The problem here is that the quality of the product remains the same. None of the hard working labourers in the distillery will get an extra penny for the improved experience, since what they are doing remains what they’ve been doing for centuries. Or even more in the case of mineral water, where the labour involved consists mainly of bottling the water that was already there. What goes for both mineral water and whisky is that the price that we pay to purchase these products is mainly used to pay for the advertisement that seduced us to buy these products in the first place.

I think this is wrong. We should not waste the sparse resources of this world on advertisement that informs us that we should really buy products of good quality by craftsmen who care. It does not benefit the hard work of the craftsman and it creates the risk of make-belief. Thanks to the power of branding and advertisement we might consider to buy products —for example clothes— that are of a higher price and lower quality than those we could have bought if we weren’t persuaded by the power of marketing.

The money could better be spent on making people aware of the advantages of purchasing products that are created by people who truly care about creating great products. People who not only perform their job, but master it, not because there is a demand for quality, but because pushing quality beyond the ordinary creates a sense of meaningful being for the craftsman. Passion, dedication, care and hard work create an environment where magic can happen. When the reason for making good products goes beyond the wish of keeping clients and reputation, there is a new space where good can become great. L’art pour l’art, craftsmanship for craftsmanship’s sake.

Jesse James Garett
We have to look at the experience that is being delivered also outside the medium that we delivered it in. Our work is not done when we deliver it, it’s done when it is used by our customers. An experience is (always) the outcome, but our goal should be to engage our users in it. We can speak about engagement in four different dimensions, the perception – action dimensions and the cognition – emotion dimension.

Liz Danzico
Not only should we redesign the language and concepts that we are using we should also alter what we design and how. We should bridge the gap between creator and consumer and meet in the middle where the consumer can use and reuse what the designer made. We should also understand that to give room for improvisation we should be much more clear about the few rules that we keep in place. To enable improvisation we should design for three things: the present – it has to happen in the now, detectability – it must be understood at at least some level (see rules) and responsiveness – there should be a short feedback loop to keep people engaged.

Michael B. Johnson
We build bows for violins, useless on themselves, but unmissable to create beautiful things. Quality is the best business practise. We layer our films in three levels, the world in which the story is set, the character that live in that world and finally the characters. Beauty is not merely a a side product. Making beautiful products make people happy and enable them to be more productive

Joshua Porter
If we want to have a bigger seat at the board table, than we should account for our work. Data driven design might seem to be the answer but is not. There is a problem with the current divide between data driven and intuition design. Intuition design might come a long way but leads us into endless discussions. Data driven design might be clear but could cause us to optimise a sub-optimal peak with out ever getting to the much higher mountain a bit further up. We should there for set up a culture that takes the best out of both world. Data doesn’t design, designers do.

We can’t solve the problems with the same tools that created them. – Einstein

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Einstein

It was a pretty interesting discussion, and a few ideas came out of it that I want to share with you all:

1. Don’t offer the user total control, offer them the feeling that they’ve just successfully designed a site according to their own preferences.
2. Customising sites should be a quick, fun and enjoyable experience,  after which users should go on with the reason they came to use your site in the first place
3. Just because site editors are build in a certain way (for example colour pickers) doesn’t mean you should just reuse that pattern. Think a step further, how can you steer the user in the direction of good design
4. Although the request might be for a site editor,  a customisable template might do the job as well.
5. If you build an editor with many features, you will attract people who love even more features
6. Tools do push a certain design, don’t give a user too much rope..

A decent write up of this presentation is still in the pipeline, but meanwhile here is my slideshow

If you have any examples from your own experience or came across other sites with great customisation tools, please share it in the comments

Later on I discovered that I was haunted by a mix of two ideas, first that in the future things would be better and second that through taking risks and hard work one would always become successful. And as far as I’m aware, I’m not alone. If we no longer believed that buying new and better products would lead to happier lives, if progress could no longer be linked to faster computers, and if a seventy hour work week no longer represented the road to success, the Western world would go downwards fast. Lucky for us most people do buy into the idea that technological progress is essential for the progress of us as a species, and that progress is good beyond questioning. Thanks to this unquestioned faith we now sit behind our glowing screens, drinking fake Italian roast fresh from the machine, burning through our lives for a better tomorrow.

The problem with those two ideas is that they are quite hard to reject. When asked most of us would admit that our lives did become better since the eighties and that we do enjoy the benefits of modern technology. It looks like it is the ideal system of self-fulfilling prophecy. Those noble enough to work hard and take risk will be rewarded, and those faint of heart and plain lazy get the empty lives they deserve. These are the ideas that have made America great, and created a model for the rest of the world to live by.

I want to take you to a place where these ideas collide: the internet start-up. An intense mix of courage, extreme ideas and long working hours that should make up the best chance to meet the future first. The internet-entrepreneurs, the dreamers and the constructors, they are often celebrated and praised by the captains of state and industry. The scene of high-tech start-ups seems to constantly deliver on their promises, innovation is at a speed never seen at any time in any area, and every year it seems to be delivering more new millionaires than the Russian mafia.

Who in their right mind would ever want to be sacrificed in the name of innovation, who in full knowledge would accept an seventy hour work week for unhealthy low pay, who educated by the best would spend their days in cheap office space with Spartan furniture. One look on Techcrunch gives you the answer: the internet entrepreneur! Prince of the future, horseman of innovation, fighter for the revolution, always awake, glued to their desk, only separating from the computer for fellow knights. They fight their solitaire battle, kept warm by fire-side stories of nerds become billionaires like Gates and Jobs; they expect that anytime now victory will be theirs.

But there is a darker side too, a side all too well known by the Googles and Microsofts of this world. The internet industry needs waste, innovation needs failures, many of them. Before a great idea can be turned into a great product it will demand millions in cash and wasted centuries in labour. Who are the minds behind the curtains, who benefit most from keeping these dreams alive? Who try to hide the burn-outs, the wasted lives and capitals, who celebrate the winners and keep all failure hidden, who speak badly of the office drones and hail all young nerds who give up safety and security for sleepless nights? They are the same Steve and Bill who eagerly wait for the very few survivors of the innovation battle. When the day breaks they will reward them with diamonds and glory and enough champagne to help them quickly forget their brothers who wasted their long hours for the beast of innovation.

So what should one do in a battle that knows no victories? Waste one’s days away in the safe factory of the large institutions? Play the endless games of bureaucracy and office sucking up and back-stabbing? Or should one fight the hopeless battle as described above? Maybe it is a good thing that we are human after all, driven by irrational emotions and wild desires. If one would ask me, I would say saddle the horse, bring me my armour, for god, glory and the country, I’m going to battle.

We are moving from representing ourselves online to being online. The expression of our online identity is no longer what we’ve accomplished in the past, but what we are doing in the now. Just like us brands  can no longer work on their heritage, but are challenged to actively engage in the now.

Something that has been distorted by the thick clouds of mass media, became clear once-more: a brand (is only) a group of people working together with a common interest. In that way it comes as no surprise that brands become more like individuals. The lack of two way communication allowed brands to act like aristocrats directing the world from within their invincible castles. These days however the villagers found ways to unite against the aristocrats. Making it impossible for anyone to hide and deny responsibility behind the anonymous face of a brand. In a way it can be seen as a step backwards in time towards an older model where people bought their products from local craftsmen with whom they had a personal relationship.

Top-down, directed and centralized communication its being replaced by a bricolage of presences that are dynamically generated by the multi-directional and decentralized interactions of the crowd. The brand identity is the result of this complex interaction, and it’s defined every day anew by experience. This connected and shared experience is made out of a multitude of conversations, faces, comments, quotes and images that float around the brand (but no longer controlled by it) and they define a liquid and ever changing identity.

The reason that the top-down brand strategy became obsolete so fast, is because they turned out to be even less useful than pre-social media. The consumers got together faster than their rulers could divide them. More and more we will see it happening that a group of people who all have a strong personal brand come together to form super groups. A famous example of course is CSNY, but you can see it happen in every industry. Brands should avoid being an abstract entity, and start to make clever use of the strengths of the group of people they represent. Only by putting individuals in the foreground there will be enough trust generated to truly engage.

Social media is a tool set that allows the villagers to unite themselves, the old aristocrats are still welcomed within them nevertheless, but only on the condition that they’ve leave their shield and sword at home.

A while ago I answered some questions for .Net magazine about my work at Webjam, only a few quotes got published, so it seems like a good idea to share my answers with the world.

What does user experience mean, as far as you’re concerned?
User experience is about aligning the existing elements –information, visual style and interaction- in such a way that it creates the best experience for the user whilst still adhering to the company’s goals.

Why does user experience matter? What are the benefits?
Creating a user experience is a given, creating a good user experience is hard work. A large part of human decisions are non-rational decisions, there is no checklist to conclude if we trust a site, or if a site is friendly, instead it’s a feeling felt about the whole experience. Structurally improving the experience of the users will therefore benefit business in general.
How do you approach user experience when creating websites and working with clients?

You have to be clear on two areas, first, what does the client expect that a user will do on a site? Selling their car is quite different from downloading a press release. Second, what is the type of experience they want to achieve? Trustworthy for a finance site is different from cutting-edge for a 3D designer, equally child-friendly for a Zoo is different from quality for an established tailor. Knowing the usability and experience goals will help you to determine the right approach for a fitting user experience.

How does psychology impact on UX, and are there any basic key rules designers should bear in mind when  working on projects?
In the diverse and crowded Internet marketplace the time of easy revenue for Internet companies is definitely over. A useful and usable website are conditions for entering. To get ahead of your competition you have to do more, and it is here where knowledge of psychology comes into play. From persuading a visitor to sign up to convincing a member to stay actively involved, a UX designer has to use a wide range of design elements to influence a user’s behaviour. In a way UX is borrowing more and more psychological tactics from marketing and sales.

What do people get wrong regarding UX in web design? What common mistakes do you see or misunderstandings do you find are rife?
Often there is a strong focus on just one of the elements of UX, the site looks beautiful but it is very hard to complete any task, or the site is very usable but has become so minimalistic in design that filling in your tax form seems like more fun! It is important to understand that good UX comes from understanding the customer. After that you only need to add great information architecture, great interaction, great visual design and great copy to create the winning formula.

What do you think the next big development in UX will be?
In a saturated market with highly competitive products and services, creating usable sites won’t be enough. The key question is not if the user can use your site but if they want to. Therefore, understanding and influencing user’s behaviour by using lessons learned from psychology, sociology and marketing will become increasingly important.

I also promised to give the links to all the sources I’ve used, so here they are:

LukeW’s talk on Social Models the information he collected for this talk was pure gold.

Cameron Marlow’s great blog on Facebook data http://overstated.net/2009/03/09/maintained-relationships-on-facebook

Some statistics on activity and differences between men and women by Adreas Kluth

Value of relationships on Facebook by Business Week

How to sell to your friends by Fast Company

arxiv.org/abs/0906.3202: Distance Is Not Dead: Social Interaction and Geographical Distance in the Internet Era (blog post Relations vs distance )

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1400214.1400232 The convergence of social and technological networks (thanks to Luke W)

On twitter and friends by Hubspot

On twitter and relations by HP

Also thanks to my co-speakers Marjolijn and David and to Webjam for letting me go.

the tag for that day: #LPS and the first blog post and second blog post and the review on Studium Generale

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?

• 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