Workshop Seductive Interaction Design

A while back, LinkedIn experimented with a feature: a little meter above the users’ information, showing their profile’s “percentage completed.” Suddenly, more users filled out their profiles. The feature didn’t have a clever interface, a sophisticated information architecture, or show any technical prowess. It just leveraged basic human psychology.

As designers, we work hard to provide powerful features in our applications, but if users don’t take advantage, it’s all waste. We have to extend our designer’s toolkit, leveraging the latest thinking from behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric.

In this fun-filled, interactive workshop, Stephen P. Anderson will guide you through specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications, especially during the post-signup period, when it’s so easy to lose people. He’ll demonstrate how to engage your users through a process of playful discovery, which is vital whether you make consumer applications or design for the corporate environment.

Using the Mental Notes card deck, participants will start with an application that is perfectly “usable,” and take it to the next level by exploring how things like feedback loops curiosity and social proof could make a site more seductive.

Who is this workshop for?
Designers, developers, marketers and product managers– anyone involved with the design of website and applications. The focus of this workshop is on how to design for behaviors, which is one thing diverse product teams can align around!

What will you learn?
By the end of this workshop you will:

• Discover practical ways to apply ideas from psychology to interaction design
• Learn 15 principles from psychology (such as Curiosity, Set Completion and Sequencing)
• Understand why making things usable isn’t enough
• Understand how our design decisions influence behavior
• Be able translate business goals directly into behavioral goals (allowing us to measure UX decisions)
• Learn how even business apps could benefit from a little playfulness

Workshop Critical Thinking for UX Designers (or Anyone, Really) co-taught with Russ Unger

Love creative problem solving, but need something more practical— something specific to User Experience? Russ and Stephen will share with you the exercises they use to solve the REAL problems.

You’ll flex your critical thinking muscle through a series of jumpstarter activities. Even better, attendees will be encouraged to participate, if not embarrass themselves in front of a room full of their peers as they challenge themselves to see past the first, obvious—and often incorrect—answers, and start to flip problems on their heads to see solutions from a different view.

Session Takeaway:

• Gain a better understanding of what critical thinking is, why it is important in the world of User Experience Design.
• Identify ways to evaluate the visual and verbal messages in your work.
• Spot artificial constraints to focus on the root problem(s).
• View problems from a different perspective and remove yourself as a consumer/user.
• Learn how reframing problems can lead to radically different solutions.
• Dissect problems to uncover solutions you may have previously overlooked.