Inspiring talks of 2018: Feelings & Product's personality
The new year has already begun but let's take a look what 2018 brought to us in terms of design inspiration.
I had the opportunity to visit Amuse conference in Budapest and its line up was full of design, data-science and business insights. Even though the variety of topics was rather wide, I sensed many speakers putting emphasis on focusing on the user's emotions more and the importance of a product’s personality.
Here are my personal favorites.
Tobias Ahlin: Where'd all the feelings go?
Tobias, currently working as a designer for Minecraft, definitely stole the show for me at Amuse conference, as he shared a fresh and inspiring talk with us and actually a worry — don't we live in a utilitarian design paradigm way too much? Don't all apps and interfaces kinda look the same focusing on being very simple, flat and minimalistic?
What is important to keep in mind — simple and easy is not in conflict with expressive and engaging. For example, OmmWriter is a very simple text editor with minimalistic design, yet very expressive given its soft background pic and atmospheric music playing, both trying to tune you into the right mood for writing.
Moving further and further to flat design, it seems we started to design differently than before. Way more strict, overly elegant, overly serious. Our common way of thinking is that we predict that chosen way, the utilitarian one, is better the other way around. We are overwhelmed by design dogmatism.
“Clean is better.”
“We design for utility, not for feelings.”
“What a users accomplishes is more important than how user feels.”
“The less friction accomplishing a task, the better.”
Does this sound familiar to you?
These are the current design dogmas. And what is wrong with that? Dogmatism leads to poor judgment. Usually, people with poor judgment tend to defend themselves, are highly opinionated, have one view of the world and look for facts to prove them right and furthermore, are up for changing the rules to fit their view. They usually don't change their mind even after having another load of information available.
Whereas flexible people usually carefully weigh proofs pro & against, give complex answers to difficult questions, look for facts to prove them wrong and update their belief when presented with new evidence.
That's why designers should foster this design dogma-free approach. Because if we got stuck at “Clean is better” how could Photoshop possibly become one of the most popular tools for graphics editing as its interface is not simple at all? Also, if we got stuck at “The less friction accomplishing a task, the better”, we might be losing engaging experience because users' engagement often means that designers introduce some friction into accomplishing a task.
Yes, the author is working in the game industry and yes, you might probably object that this kind of experience wouldn't fit into your app…But what you can do, is to think about moments in your app that you can improve by focusing on how your users feel when using it. This potentially leads you to add some playfulness and animations. So if you want your users to feel these engaging moments, you should probably learn how to prototype high fidelity designs. Because, if you don't define design with high fidelity, someone else will probably do it not the way you want…or they just skip it.
Key takeaways:
- Focus more on how the user feels during key moments in your app.
- You can offer a way more engaging experience to your users by introducing more expressive design and playfulness.
- Don't take design dogmas so seriously!
Adrian Zumbrunnen: Designing for attention
What I appreciate on design talk is a hands-on experience on a product. Adrian was talking about 3 products he worked on and what he learned.
We are no longer just designing for an experience but for attention.
Timing is a huge factor to get people’s attention. Imagine you could catch user's attention just with playing with time through motion.
Here's an example. You chat with a girl and you ask her out. She starts to type so you can see the typing animation. Then she stops to type. And then she starts to type again. “Sure” she replies.
How sure she really is when you observe the whole process of replying? As soon as the motion gets into play, it changes interpretation. Playing with time and motion can introduce a lot of interesting psychological concepts and it also keeps people hooked and focused on what’s happening.
Product personality is obviously something that can make user's experience much more pleasant and steal their attention towards the product. Sometimes it's hard to build such products, but you can always aim for every interaction to be authentic and personal to create this intimate moment between product and user. Generally, adapting to the context you can make everything more personal for the user.
Key takeaways:
- Sometimes, the product is fundamentally something different from what we are building. Ask yourself a simple question: What is your product? Is it a notepad or text editor? Can you feel the difference?
- Products should have personality and opinions.
- By playing with time, you can gain your user's attention and keep them focused.
- Get your hands dirty. No need for reading tons of books. Fail fast and fill your weaknesses you'll discover by experimenting.
Pablo Stanley: Good to great UI animation
Before you skip this with a thought in your mind “We have more important things to do than fancy animations” — wait! Every designer should have the basic knowledge of UI animations–unless you don't want your product to be loved by its users.
Good animations guide us, help us with context switching and give us feedback if we do something right or wrong. Designer’s goal should be making animations which meaning feels obvious. Because when something feels obvious, it means it is working and you don't need to think so much about it. Can you recall a moment when you were using an application and everything felt so…good? I bet that the app was not even helpful from the content point of view, but also full of delicate “invisible” micro-interactions that made your experience with it so seamless.
In nature, nothing just moves linearly. Play with easing and duration to achieve a natural feeling. But don't worry, sometimes even a small effort can lead to great impact. You can create a cool animation even in Keynote (and it's free).
So, yeah, animations are great, but is there a situation when not to use them? A simple rule of thumb is: don’t use animations just because it’s cool or when you don’t have any intention with it.
For specific practical tips, you can read Pablo's article here.
Key takeaways:
- Animations should have a purpose, should feel natural and add character.
- If you don't design it, someone else will (and probably wrong).
Still not enough of inspiration, you say? Check this.
Calm tech by Aber Case. The concept of calm technology is a reaction to the increasingly hectic world in which we live in. It also slightly reminds me of Don Norman's Design of everyday things, but more about now. TLDR: Technology shouldn't require all of our attention, just some of it and only when necessary.
Biomimicry by Janine Benyus. If “When in doubt, go to nature” resonates with you, do not miss this inspiring thought about biomimicry. This 7 minutes video explains that many great solutions for design problems come from nature.
Thank you for reading and add I'd be happy if you share your own personal favorite talks!
