Hollidazed

These are my notes of key points from the session at Friday’s dConstruct conference…

Do you love your phone or the experience it brings? You can re-upload your data if you lost your phone to an identical handset… the phone itself is replaceable.

Empathy

Think about the spaces between the experiences you’re creating.
Withings – http://www.withings.com/ Automated products that consider the spaces between.

Connection = Meaning.

Addiction/Devolution

We need to bring back connections with people rather than to devices.

Ritual – Something we can understand (how people are actually live there lives).

Devotion… Mood – context is everything. The mood people are in effects the experience people have.

Branding – Provides context… different preconceptions are levels of trust effect the experience.

Research – Getting from ‘what people think’ to ‘how people live’.  If you ask a focus group if they just washed their hands after leaving the toilet you will probably get 100% ‘yes’. Contextual research (putting a camera in there) would show a different result.

iPhone home button – comfort (goes home)/discoverable/satisfaction (tactile). Can also be personalised.

Beyond Usable – We’re at a point where things should be basically functional or useable. We’ve moved to a higher level of emotional design. Evolution of ‘Sensory Engineering’.

Kansei- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansei_engineering

Contextual Research - ‘deep hanging out’

Experience Mapping – Decide what sort of experience you’re creating.

The space in between things – Creating seamless connections that work with our lifestyle.

These are my notes of key points from the session at Friday’s dConstruct conference…

Google – The advertisers are the users and you are the product. They know about us and that’s valuable information. Really good at technology but don’t understand people.
You can be thrown off Google+ for using your “real” name… ie. the name that you’re known by (not your birth certificate/driving license/*credit card*)

Gestures – On tablets there is no feedback, undo, discoverability… it’s a whole new ball game.
Standards like moving the window and not the text.
Apple got uncomfortable and threw out existing standards in OS Lion.

Forget the old model. New world.

iPod… Apple made it legal to get music/made it easy to find … they integrated it into our lives.
It wasn’t successful because it was a beautiful product.
Amazon has done the same thing with the Kindle. An effortless system.

Think ‘systems’ not product design.

Stop thinking of a single application or website. Look at Twitter. Twitter (the company) just provides the opportunity – the users develop the content.

Systems is where the future is.

Emotion and experience. It’s about total experience – not any one component.

We design experience. What matters is the memory. How long does an experience last? “Design for the memory… memories last for years”.
At Disney, photographs/mementos are all parts of remembering the experience.

Gestures – When you scroll to the bottom of a page Safari bounces bit Firefoc and Chrome doesn’t. What function does this serve? It’s neat and elegant… it matters… it’s just more pleasurable. Mozilla/Google don’t get it.

Stories – The greatest pleasure and success comes after a negative. In films, books and games things unfold in time… over time.
Consider and plan for emotions that go up and down.

Memories are more important than reality… It’s like augmented reality… Memories can be better or worse than the reality.

3D printing – Makes it even less of a gap between physical devices and digital interfaces.

Co-creation – The most powerful tools come about when we empower others ie. Blogging.

Opportunities – Sensors that will recognise people and objects.

We’re never disconnected.

The changes are interesting. Computing started with command line which you had to learn/memorise. We then moved to graphical interfaces which were easy to learn… We’ve now moved to gestures and these have to be learn’t/memorised – we’ve gone full circle.
The browser is also like a command line interface.

The most popular games are timewasters.

There’s an opportunity for cell phones to be more exciting. When cars got too complicated they simplified… it needed to be physical/knobs… The physical emdobiment is really important and that’s coming back. Touch and feel + shake etc.

Moving from screens to stories and experiences to memories

The intention economy. Not your actions or experience now but what you intend to do in the future.

Mobile is a tricky and talked about subject at the moment. I sat in on a good round table discussion and presentation led by Amy Clarke at the recent AMA conference.

I’ve shared the mobile presentation that we’ve been using at Tincan to talk to various organisations about the mobile web. As the title suggest it’s become too big a subject to ignore any longer.

We’re trying to get people consider “mobile” more strategically…  it’s not something you add onto your website… it is your website. Ultimately this is about your content and the engagement of real users. To get started you need a content strategy.

The presentation covers responsive design and the re-design work we did work recently for the ICA. This is ultimately a collection of other great ideas and I would heartily recommend that you go and read both Ethans Marcotte’s book Responsive Web Design and Erin Kissane‘s book The Elements of Content Strategy to get started.

Almost two weeks ago I attended my first Arts Marketing Association (AMA) conference on behalf of Tincan. It was great to meet so many people from a broad range arts organisations across the country.
This years conference was in Glasgow – a great City to visit and the Royal Concert Hall venue was fantastic.

A consistent theme I heard throughout the conference was user experience, and specifically, how this relates to the changing role of marketing within the arts.

Jerry Yoshitomi‘s keynote set down the foundation for this. He told the audience to not just do things for people but with people, recognising the changing patterns of customer demand – “People are inherently creative and want to share their experience”.

Will McInnes‘s excellent keynote was also a real call to action – “Marketing needs to be more than the last mile… be the curators/the storytellers for the organisation… create intimate experiences”.

Mark Robinson later encouraged the audience to take creative risks and run adventurously based on the principles of becoming reflective, open and adaptable, along with taking responsibility to defy expectations and create generously.

As a designer this was all great to hear. In short – the future of the arts is about starting with the customer, then enabling a culture of innovation/empowering everyone within both audience and team to participate.
The clear message was that marketing identifies and creates value – I would say it’s more universal than this, marketeers are having to become designers in the universal sense.

Russell Willis Taylor closed the conference with “Art matters more now than ever, and marketing tells us why”. The point being that without marketing so much within the arts would go unnoticed.
I think that design goes beyond this. It opens the door to experience. It is driven by the quality of ideas and innovation within each organisation. We need to break away from established, yet mechanical design processes as we strive to create something unique and of real lasting value. Everyone can contribute, everyone can be a designer as long as it starts and ends with the customer.

Thankyou to everyone who attended, came to say hello, and lastly to AMA for organising a great conference.

Additionally – there’s a series of great blog posts on the AMA website with more thoughts about the conference sessions/topics from various attendees.

It’s 1st of August 2011. This blog is alive again. Stay posted. I’ve more to say and contribute.