Ben Holliday

Don Norman, Emotional Design for the World of Objects

These are my notes from dConstruct 2011:

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.

This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 18 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky, less frequently now on X (formally Twitter), and on LinkedIn.