I had the opportunity to attend The Big (D)esign Conference in Dallas last week which focused on the cutting edge Strategy, Social Media and User Experience all from a design perspective. I picked up some key themes from the speakers over the two days, and felt that the speakers did a good job of expressing excitement for the future of design.
Design to a Meaning
The opening Keynote presentation by Susan Weinschenk entitled Psychology of Online Behavior, touched on the core of usability based on human Psychology. Her view of usability is based on the core senses humans use continuously to evaluate all situations and how site design and flow can be used to trigger these core senses. One of her many key points that struck home for me was that people by nature crave information so don’t force the traditional 3 click rule on your site, the challenge is helping your audience focus their attention to key inputs that drive desired behavior through quickly and intuitively drilling to their desired level of detail.
Nathan Shedroff closed the first day with his Future of Design presentation highlighting the idea that all good experiences are driven by “meaning” and how the design is the process of creating experiences. The most successful products have all tapped on core meanings that make their product appeal to their target audience. “Meaning is more powerful than Price & performance” and “Meaning last longer than Emotions” statements drove home the fact that all designs should start by identifying the core meanings that your brand conveys to its audience/target. The challenge, defining how the audience will connect through designing an experience that reaches them at the core meaning level. His list of 15 core meanings; Accomplishment, Beauty, Creation, Community, Duty, Freedom, Harmony, Justice, Oneness, Redemption, Security, Truth, Validation and Wonder. How does your brand/product/service connect?
Lessons from John Hughes
The Saturday morning keynote by Chris Bernard definitely woke up the audience as he featured quotes and music from Classic John Hughes films. What does Ferris Bueller, Breakfast club, and Sixteen Candles have to do with Design one may ask. Chris spent the hour focusing on seven key attributes that good designers can learn from his legacy; Vision, Reflection, Sketch, Planning, Authenticity, Curiosity and Mentoring.
Using Data
Stephen Anderson presentation When Data Gets Up Close and Personal had a great view of how everyday behaviors can be influenced by metrics and visual cues. The idea that status can drive behaviors based on our core desire of competition is present in everyday interactions ranging from video games to reducing energy consumption. Who doesn’t want to make the high scores list anyways? The keys to leveraging data to drive behaviors; Identify goals, Identify behaviors to encourage, translate data to be passively tracked and measured, Display scores in fun ways, Create rules to translate data into insight, Set Challenges and rewards, Test and refine. Sites such as Mint.com and Dopplr provide both visual cues and informative feedback to make a rounded experience that is both fun and provide valuable feedback to users.
The presentation that was closest to my heart was Aaron Hursman‘s Effective Dashboard Designs: Why your baby is ugly. Aaron did a great job of enforcing the fact that a Dashboard should be a simplistic view into the data. The use of visualization is key to highlighting “trouble areas” to be addressed ultimately allow dashboard to do their jobs of highlighting areas of business that need attention. His examples showed the value of intermingling Tabular and visual displays via graphics help create very compelling and actionable dashboards. The one point that he stressed that any organization needs to understand is that a dashboard is only as good as the available data, so the need for interdepartmental collaboration is key to successful dashboard designs.
