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Local maxima and the perils of data-driven design

At UX Week 2010, Facebook Product Designer Adam Mosseri gave a presentation called Data Informed, Not Data Driven. It’s an excellent talk and Adam gave some really good examples demonstrating how data-driven design can take you into “local maximum”, which … Continue reading

Classic Interaction Design TV: IDEO Nightline Episode

What do you mean, you haven’t seen the classic IDEO shopping cart episode of Nightline? It’s well worth a watch, if only to remind yourself that your research and design skills are not limited to the web… Can’t see the … Continue reading

Dark Patterns: An Overview For Brand Owners

While my first presentation on Dark Patterns was aimed at Designers and Researchers, this one is aimed at Brand Owners and Marketers. There’s some new material here, but if you’ve been involved with the Darkpatterns wiki, it’ll be fairly familiar … Continue reading

Adding delays to increase perceived value: does it work?

A story on Hacker News yesterday kicked off a discussion about purposefully adding a delay to a service to increase perceived value. It started off with a link to Dan Ariely’s recent article on locksmiths: how they can open most … Continue reading

A Titanic Design Blunder

If this is true, it has to be the most famous, most catastrophic UI design blunder ever: “The error on the ship’s maiden voyage between Southampton and New York in 1912 happened because at the time seagoing was undergoing enormous … Continue reading

More mobile usability testing sleds…

Back in May, I wrote a short post on how to make your own iPhone usability testing sled for £5. It’s pretty straightforward: cut a piece of acrylic to the right size and bend it to shape using a toaster. … Continue reading

UX Brighton Presentation on Dark Patterns

I’m sort of live-blogging this, so I’ll be brief. My presentation from UX Brighton 2010 can be found on slideshare here, as a PDF here (2MB) and as a big-ass PPTX here (72MB). Huge thanks to Cennydd Bowles and Andy … Continue reading

David Ogilvy: “We Sell or Else”

Here’s a wonderfully dated video of David Ogilvy giving what looks like a keynote address to a Direct Response Advertising conference (by video, which must have been breathtakingly modern back in the 1960s). Ogilvy came from a background in research, … Continue reading

How to get the results you want in surveys & polls (funny)

An old YouTube clip from Yes Minister (an early 1980s BBC political comedy), which shows how leading questions and tone setting can get you any results you want – if you’re willing to stoop that low. Via Nikos Karaoulanis.

Darkpatterns.org: naming and shaming sites that use black hat, anti-usability design patterns.

Have you ever wondered why there are many clearly defined Design Patterns for good design, and Anti-Patterns for mistakes, but in the field of UX we have no recognised terminology for evil design? And why has the SEO industry always … Continue reading