Articles from: Design

The gentle art of seduction

Every day I talk to clients about how digital solutions can be particularly good for nudging and exciting their customers. It’s all a bit like dating but without the Casanova ending.

As was later the case with 20th century marketers, Casanova often repeated the same pattern in his pursuits. He would discover an attractive woman (customer) having trouble with a brutish or jealous lover (competitor brand). And then three acts would follow.

Act 1: The seducer ameliorates his lady’s difficulty. Act 2: She shows her gratitude, he seduces her, a short and exciting affair ensues. So far so good, but then comes… Act 3: The seducer gets bored and orchestrates a rapid exit. The end.

For Casanova, life was an open field of sexual opportunities without consequences. For the marketers, it was an open field of transactional opportunities without post-purchase responsibility.

Persuasion without information is as unsatisfactory as information without persuasion, but together they beget seduction.

The best thinkers in User-Centered Design have long claimed that information and persuasion are two opposite modes. Some content is labelled as persuasion or even manipulation, and is associated with advertising and marketing, while other content is understood to be information and therefore virtuous. But maybe persuasion and information are not mutually exclusive. Maybe we just need to re-write Act 3 so that persuasion + information = seductive strategies.

Here’s an example: a week before Valentine’s Day I went online to find something nice for the lady in my life. I tried my best to appear susceptive by freely giving away my personal details in the hope of attracting some targeted offers relevant to my needs. I entered competitions to romantic holiday destinations; I saved several virtual shopping baskets full of flowers and chocolate, and so on. I even returned to several websites, just to show how keen I was. But maybe I was too keen, as instead of tailored suggestions for romantic gifts all I got were the usual Viagra spams, dating and gambling adverts, and an offer to join a new gym.

Persuasion design is dead. Long live seduction design!

Seduction design is all about nudging and exciting the customer, rather than using an all-or-nothing strategy. The most elaborately designed experiences inspire people to adapt their behaviour and engage with new features and functionalities. In other words, the customers allow themselves to be seduced and buy into the proposition that the product or service is worth their time and money.

Designers, marketers, and creatives need to design for seduction as much as for aesthetic impact and usability. Methods of seduction can sell a genuine offer through the combination of motivational psychology and careful preparation. To convert this into a website, a mobile application, an email, or a banner, each element – graphic or verbal – must be given a seductive value that deepens into a suggestive relationship over time.

Had Casanova known that, I’m sure his romantici evenings would have ended happier both for him and his ladies.

Marcus Mustafa - Head of User Experience - twitter.com/dacrumb

It’s stunning the pace at which high end technology stampedes towards the home computer. Microsoft are working on video editing software that brings special effects within reach of amateurs. The fun we’ll be having with appications like this in digital creative work is clear to see. just can’t think of a client for Pimp My Grandma….

Last week Apple released the much anticipated update to it’s iPhone operating system. Finally bringing many of the features most phone providers would have thought completely necessary in a modern smart phone: MMS, Video capture, Cut, copy, paste, Memo recorder, Background IM applications.

The Apple website lauded these new features as exciting developments, yet they can be found on most current Nokia, Sony Ericson, Samsung, LG and HTC handsets.

It’s taken two years to get these features on the iPhone - with many saying 3.0 is what it should have had when it launched. Yet everywhere I look i see iPhones, it’s easily the favoured handset amongst my friends - with the previously unconvinced now benefiting from their purchase of the new iPhone 3G S.

So did this lack of key features make a difference in the beginning, did it limit the success - no. The iPhone was so far ahead of the competition in other areas that people felt happy to live without these must-have features. This approach to not including everything people expect underlines a key principle for the internet age

Prioritise your killer features to bring instant success and don’t be afraid to add the perceived must-have basics later.

Avoiding the mythical phase 2 or phase 3

How many times have you heard - “That’s a cool idea, but lets put into phase 2″ - it’s an admission, a lack of confidence or ambition - and a fast track to mediocrity.

It happens like this, new service developments, shops & services start with hygiene factors. The team worry about doing the basics well and spend most of the budget doing these. Invariably things don’t go to plan and the pot for all the innovative extras gets smaller and smaller. The site or service launches, and it immediately fails to get traction, the audience figures grow much slower than expected, feedback isn’t a positive as expected which further pressures their development budget. This leads to a review of the project, a postponement of phase 2 - and a belief the service idea doesn’t work or the core idea was failed.

The next time your team think about delaying an exciting and innovative idea to phase 2 - ask yourself this - which of our supposed must-have features can we delay instead?

Delivering on your ambition

If your ambition is to build a better X - and let’s face it just about every project starts that way -  don’t start by copying the competition and talking about  doing the hygiene first. If you’re not innovating or doing something noticeable, why should people change their existing behaviour. Playing catch up with your competition is hard. Start from a positive position and force them to try and catch you. And remember if hygiene is easy it will be easy to add later.

If you take a look back over the myriad of web 2.0-like developments we’ve seen over the last few years. The ones that succeed are the ones that get their new ideas out there quickly, claiming their space with a bright new idea and then adding new features as their audience grows and helps them understand what makes sense.

So be brave, implement the things that differentiate first, then add the basics over time. If you talk about doing a phase 2 - make sure you’re audience is so excited they want a phase 2 and you then deliver on it.

Its D&AD black pencil (and student award) judging time, and this year we’re very proud to host at LBi!

Here are some quick pics of the setup (we’ve even put a tablecloth on our coffee bar ) First on the list for judging are the student’s furniture design and professional product design categories tomorrow! Also pictured is my favourite piece of work from the students, a great stool-come-table…

MIX09, Microsoft’s ideas forum for website designers and developers, really caught my interest because it featured Bill Buxton. Microsoft hired Bill in 2005 as Principal Researcher to focus on
the emerging world of ubiquitous computing. This year is proof that Microsoft are taking design seriously. Bill kicked off the whole shindig with his presentation entitled The Return on Experience. This is territory normally reserved for product and technology announcements.

He enthusiastically talked about design and the design process. As part of the converted, it was impossible to stop nodding as he explained that the user experience is not the object or the user interface but that true experience is the result of the interaction with the thing. Experience is holistic. For those of us who do design interfaces, a good bit of advice is to make sure our “state transition diagrams” actually describe the transitions. The baseline is to create something that is functional - it works logically and technically. However, the experience is characterised by how you get from state A to state B. Experience is about designing for flow.

Day 2 of MIX reinforced the design theme with Deborah Adler’s keynote presentation of the Target ClearRx system, a reinvention of the prescription bottle and label. This was launched back in 2005 but is still a great case study of how design can make a real difference. In this instance, it saves lives. Her parting bit of advice beautifully encapsulates the user-centred design ethos: “a successful design experience begins by, one, having a love affair with your customer and really digging into your customer’s needs, and two, bringing your design skills to bear in solving those needs both humanly and humanely”.

There were numerous technology announcements and I won’t list them here. Here’s a good recap. There was one feature that I liked. It had Bill Buxton written all over it. It’s called SketchFlow and is part of Expression Blend 3. SketchFlow allows interactions to be prototyped with sketches or something more evolved. Remember, experience is about the transitions and the flow. I haven’t tried Expression Blend since it was in beta. This makes me want to give it another go.

Bill B is the best thing to happen to Microsoft since, well, Bill G. He points out that the challenge is how to deliver the experience and get the return no matter what the platform is. True brand experience transcends platforms and channels. Does all this point to a new Microsoft - one that is less about engineering and more design-led?

A few Fridays ago, the Facebook album art meme swept through the office. Here are a few of our creations. You know the rules.

Next in our series of Friday frolics was the ‘always successful’ create a typeface from your own possessions in 8 minutes and no longer. Cue the normal stuff like: belts, shoes, wallets, glasses, keys, mixed in with a few more sign of the times items: lanyards, USB sticks, monitor leads and batteries (lets not ask). I don’t think it will be getting commissioned by FontFont any time soon but I’m sure we can do something creative with it.

A TrueType version can be downloaded from here.

Our Friday typeface created from items about our person

Indeed, following on from Riaz’s post I too attended the Microsoft Truman Session. Their take on the world come 2019 caught my eye.

I must say, their vision piece was extremely well thought out and crafted. There were of course some usual suspects: digital newspapers, an evolution of Surface and interactive mirrors (hey, we’ve already done that for Macy’s). I guess when imagining the future these technologies are de riguer.  I would have liked to see the vision piece driven by narrative however. Perhaps a storyline. How’s this: A story about a strange man that builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves?  Oh, wait.

Yesterday evening at the Truman, we had the wonderful pleasure of Microsoft giving us the lowdown on the latest and greatest in the world of creative products and services coming out of Redmond. The audience, mostly from user experience, creative and client services, were treated to demo’s of Silverlight, WPF, DeepZoom, Surface, Live Mesh, Azure, Secondlight, Windows 7 and so much more. With so many creative technology engagements at LBi, the fit of these technologies alongside some of our .NET, SharePoint, Endeca and EPiServer builds makes a lot of sense for our customers.

It was a great insight into the ‘New’ Microsoft and where it’s heading, I’m very excited that LBi are part of this venture and look forward to seeing our UX/Creative teams blend with Microsoft to develop some very cool, exciting and cutting edge creative digital solutions.

A big thanks to the Microsoft folks who spent the evening with us. James, you blew us away with Azure, ‘gen 4’ data centers and Windows 7. Michael, thanks for showcasing the likes of Surface, DeepZoom and Secondlight – very cool stuff indeed! And off course Matt, our account manager, for organising things on the Microsoft end.

Right, where did I put that copy of Expression Blend…

Professor John Maeda’s course on Digital Typography begins on a Tuesday in the Fall of 1997 at MIT. Before getting deep into the rendering of movable type through PostScript and JavaScript, Maeda insists his 15 select students read the course’s only set text: Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. 

Photograph by Mike Harding, sneak.co.nz

The Elements of Typographic Style
Robert Bringhurst
Design, Writing
Buy a secondhand hardback copy of V 3.0+ if you can…  

Robert Bringhurst is not merely a designer and historian: He is a poet, widely published and highly regarded, who describes typography as ‘the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form’. That stopped me in my tracks too when I read it for the first time.

Do you know or have you ever had that ‘power-book’ feeling? And no, I’m not referring to laptop computing. I mean when you’re holding a book in your hands and you think: ‘this is special, this will be with me for a long time’. Or have you ever had something new or unexpected thrust into your life and bizarrely from then on you notice copies of it, or references to it everywhere? This is Bringhurst territory.  

Think of the Elements of Typographic Style as a compact encyclopedia; inspired in-part by The Elements of Style (featured elsewhere on the reading list)… It’s a rule-book for the ‘the most conservative of all the crafts’ whist also encouraging the reader to break those rules ‘beautifully, deliberately and well’. 

It includes histories of Western (Latin) and Non Western alphabets, descriptions of font rendering technology, conventions of measurement, anatomy and annotation, a thorough run through of diacritics, the mathematics of proportion, a taxonomy of the major font families, a glossary of terms… I told you it was encyclopedic. 

The expressive ’sounding’ of words and the visual representation of letterforms can work together to create layers of meaning. It has always been this way and the digital medium is no different. At LBi The Elements of Typographic Style has inspired a project called Lyric Type where song lyrics are typeset and animated in the pursuit of meaning and feeling… I hope to share our progress soon.

This spicy pack design from Doritos in Japan (courtesy of my good friend John-Patrick) is so wrong, and yet so right… Not sure what it says about them as a snackfood, but the windmill-ee certainly looks pretty happy…

The reading list is a new posting category here on the LBiQ blog. These are the ’set texts’, the most useful books directly relating to our profession. The reading list is sub categorised broadly as follows:

Ideas (including ways of thinking creatively, workshopping…)
Writing (inc. long copy, short copy, scriptwriting…)
Graphic Design (inc. layout, typography…)
Experience Design (inc. interaction design, service innovation…)
Drawing (inc. storyboards, scamps, wireframes…)
Photography & Cinematography
Planning, strategy & marketing theory 
Technology
No doubt new sub categories will be created as the list grows. When adding a book please use the Reading List tag category and consider the following classification order.

<Title> A Technique for Producing Ideas
<Author> James Webb Young
<Category> Ideas 
<Optional Image as web link>

<Brief Description> Widely held as the 101 for ideas thinking in advertising. The creative thinking technique outlined in this powerful little book can be summarised thus: 1 Learn - gather everything you can in support of your brief. 2 Brainstorm broadly and without judgment, combine existing elements in new ways. 3 Sleep on it. 4 Let the idea come to you. 5 Invite criticism and consider practical applications.

————————————————————–

The Elements of Style, illustrated edition
William Strunk Jr. (illustrated by Maira Kalman) 
Writing 

Punctuation, brevity, composition, spelling… This book is a lot more fun than it sounds. The Illustrated version is elegantly produced and sensibly edited-down to the core things every English ’speaker’ should know. One of my all time favorite reference books.

————————————————————–

Thinking with type
Ellen Lupton
Design, Writing 

This is much more than a book about typography. Yes it does a good job explaining the anatomy of type and how to set it, but this is a book about how to use type to enhance legibility, reinforce meaning and provoke emotional response. One for the writers as well as the designers.

————————————————————–

Drawing on the right side of the brain
Betty Edwards
Drawing, Ideas 

This is a book about how to be creative disguised as a book about drawing. Based on R.W. Sperry’s research into the right hemisphere of our brains, Betty explains how to control which side of your brain is dominant. Sounds crazy doesn’t it (left = conscious mind, language, rational / right= subconscious, music, visual)… All I can say is I’ve used this book for years and It works. 

————————————————————–

Cinematography, theory and practice
Blain Brown
Cinematography 

As Digital blends with film and TV this is one of those ‘if you read one book on the subject read this..’ moments. Filmspace, lens language, camera dynamics, continuity, lighting as storytelling. Theory and practical techniques in one place… This book is f*cking awesome.

OK enough reading for now. Plenty more to come…

The 26th of January is Chinese New Year and 2009 is the year of the Ox. Somehow I doubt I’m the only one to have spotted TFL’s lovely China in London posters. 

South Ken: China in London (V&A blogs' Flickrstream)

The design echoes traditional Chinese red ink block prints and is unlike anything else on the underground right now. The China in London poster reminds me how traditional forms can be reinterpreted in a modern medium, resulting in something timeless and beautiful… no doubt it will enter the canon of classic underground posters.

The internet is of course awash with predictions for the year of the Ox. Supposedly ‘we will feel the yoke of responsibility coming down on us this year. Way-out fashions, abstract art forms and newfangled notions will be given an impassive stare by the phlegmatic Ox’.

Sounds kind of boring. Thankfully there were no signs of the phlegmatic Ox at 146 Brick Lane today, where the last days of the Year of the Rat were spent reveling in wall to wall way-out newfangled abstraction.

The globally influential Toronto Sun reports…’The Ox is the quintessential hardworking, conventional cleaner-upper who will put everything back in order and turn chaos back into reason’. That sounds more encouraging… But what about creativity in the year of the Ox?

The Ox is said to have a vivid imagination and ’unlimited creativity and perspicacity’. Wow. Unlimited creativity and mental power? That’s more like it. Perhaps then we can expect hard working creatives to take over this year.

萬念俱灰 一炮而红

LBiQ4 - Death of the big idea?

In our jaunt through LBiQ 4 and it’s exploration of ideas; big and small, traditional and new, it’s clear completely new ideas are increasingly hard to find – if they ever existed in the first place. “There’s nothing new under the sun”, after all, as some crusty old fool once said. (I think we can be fairly sure he didn’t work in advertising.) As the web grows up, and is no longer the brave new world of unchartered possibilities it used to be 10 years back, we need to look back and recognise the patterns that were formed during that period of innovation, to identify the successes, and the failures, and to work with and from these in order to keep advancing.

In the thrust for The New it is important not to lose sight of a few simple facts. Check this year’s hot work: quizzes, games, viral films, soap operas, blogs and scrolling banners. Nothing new there, per se – these formats are now established, in some cases almost traditional - but all are succeeding today in 2008 by combining creative thinking with brand messages in novel and interesting ways that match and resonate with the passage of time and the changes that are happening in the world at large. 

Just as David Gunn says there are only 12 types of advertisement, a creative writing teacher might inform us of only 14 ways to start a novel, or seven types of plot; and a musician teaches us that there are only a set number of chords; we can surmise there are a limited number of interaction models in digital, a set number of viral types, and a comparable set of methods for online advertising.

So let’s stop sticking our noses up at ‘just another’ video site, or in-search-of viral film, or interactive scrolling banner, and look a bit deeper. There are ideas a plenty in the digital world - ideas that creatively stretch the main brand promise, trigger the all-important emotional hook, and ensure they are bloody well executed. Inventing new forms of communication is hard, and it’s not necessarily the job of a commercial creative. Don’t be afraid to use what you know already. It’s easier, simpler, and usually much more effective, to focus on mixing and matching known quantities in order to find creative digital ideas that work. 

Want some inspiration on finding big brand ideas? Take a read of Brand Marketing Manifesto, in which a feisty future-looking John Grant sets out a thesis for ideas and creates a framework based on eight cultural streams: innate emotional hooks that exist deep within our psyche and can be found in centuries of literature, film and music.

Me? I’m off to write a book on the 10 different types of viral. Stay tuned.

Lego master craftsmen have been putting the finishing touches to a model White House, motorcade, and even queues to the porta-loos, as excitement surrounding the upcoming 56th inauguration of a US president reaches fever pitch.

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

There’s a real groundswell of love for loaders at the moment - what with the Creative Circle Honours 2009 having a special one-year-only award category, and a build-up of online chatter about this more and more rarely seen craft. Now Big Spaceship have taken us into the next dimension with their brilliant loader museum - Prettyloaded. At the moment it seems to be just hosting their extensive agency collection, but looks like plans are to expand. If you have a great loader, email the curators here.

If you’re ever wondering how to name your heavy metal band, here’s a wonderfully simple information design that should help you in the quest.

I’m moved to include a lovely old Dilbert cartoon given to me by Dan Holder a senior art director here.

It raises a good point about “best practice.” If we’re honest with ourselves best practice is the last refuge of the unimaginative. It says we’ve stopped thinking about a problem and have settled upon a “lore”. Best practice is a sacred cow which we do well to sacrifice. More than ever, brands need brave ideas which cut through in what is undoubtedly a time of crisis. It’s time to dream to innovate, create and have fun. If you find a best practice document here’s a handy way of dealing with it.