Can we design something that makes people forget about their worries, even just for a slightest while? Something that makes them smile?

Thanks Jiajin for our good conversation over dinner that’s leading to this post, and Casey for the quote “design that makes people smile”

A very interesting video on the story behind the consumerism of today, the planned obsolescense where products are designed to fail after a certain lifespan, and how this behavior that has supported the growth of economy in the advanced countries but has major impact on the environment due to the massive technological waste dumped in the third world countries.
(thanks Chris, for sharing this video, absolutely love it)

Last week, I was in my hometown in Bali, Indonesia, for a three full day traditional ceremony. All the family members and extended relatives attended almost the whole three-day-procession. Balinese value social work highly, and they are willing to drop whatever they are doing to help and support religious or traditional activities. What interest me was, that the three day procession took place on weekdays. Didn’t they have to work?

If you have lived in Bali for a while, you will notice that people prefer to work independently on their own, or in government institutions that are not so strict about taking attendance. What I noticed, was that they still continued working even though they are not physically present in their offices. One replied email and prepared quotation to send to her client, one received a set of photos for review, reviewed them in his iphone, and made a phone call (using his other CDMA phone which has cheaper rate) to discuss his feedback. I also saw my cousin, who is just a teenager, managed his online business of trading finger boards online using his blackberry, and his brother was trading custom print t-shirts through his phone too. In all, they get to be there to help up with the event, but work still goes on.

If you think that this flexible working style is speeding up in the US or Europe, I bet that people in the emerging countries are adopting it much faster. This is driven by their economic and socio-cultural needs to strike a very well balanced work/life relatinships.

For me, I have experienced it in different circumstances. When I play an addictive and challenging games, when I read a really interesting book, when I worked on my thesis, when I chatted with friends about very juicy news, when I worked on interesting and challenging design projects, or when I successfully concentrate while meditating.

The concept of flow was introduced by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1960s. According to him, people are most happy when they are in a state of flow. It is a state where people are in complete concentration and absorbed within the activity at hand. A state in which people are so involved that nothing else seems to matter. It just feels right.
This is like the highest level of experience one can achieve!

I think they are trying to be casual with the conversational tonality and use of language, which is totally cool, but they have forgotten to consider what’s the goal of the users in using the website, to find out how to “go there”. And if the website cannot fulfill this main goal, forget about being casual or trying to make a joke. It can be perceived as being judgmental and it’s not funny at all.
Oh well, I love gothere.sg for its ease of use and simplicity. I guess the designers missed this (not so) corner case.

The bus case example reminds me of the public transport issues that we are facing in Bali. Maybe it’s about time to involve the public to co-design it…

On side note, it’s always inspiring to see design initiatives that gives something back to the society, something meaningful, something that will help make people’s lives a little bit (if not a whole lot) better.

The book cover is the first impression. It is the first thing that attracts me to pick it up, to flip through it, and to make quick decision over whether it is going to worth a read. Especially, if I have not heard or read any recommendation on the book itself.
Interestingly, so far, the books that I have picked from a quick judgment of its cover, the layout, font and ease of reading of the content, are the ones that I have enjoyed reading the most.

There is something about the first impression that lasts forever. With a new person that you meet, with a new place, a product,… Type ”First Impression” in your search engine and you will see how many pages of tips or suggestions how to make a great first impression. If it is not important, why do so many people care about it?

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discussed about the power of thinking without thinking, how people make split second decisions, by quickly connecting the small set of cues seen on the current situation to the related past experiences and knowledge in their memories.
Through our experiences, we have developed sets of rules in our memories. For me and books, it’s like… a book with boring cover with lots of small text in the content equals to a book that I will never finish reading. It’s mostly because the weight of how much I don’t enjoy the process of reading it is heavier than how useful the content is. With this set of rules in my brain, unconsciously I tend to skip the rows of books to the ones that have interesting, clean, or querky covers, pick it, flip through to see if the content has good visual content and balance, good size of text, and then I read a paragraph from random page, and see if it interests me to read more. If all the above are yes, it’s highly likely that I will buy and finish reading the book.

Same is probably true with other products. How would a customer judge which product he would likely buy in a quick glance?

As designers, it’s then becoming very important to get the first impression right, and then continuously build and deliver to the expected experience. Because more often, people Don’t Judge A Book by Its Cover.

Empathy is an important skill for an experience designer. It is that ability to stand in our customers shoes, see through their eyes, listen through their ears, feel through emotions, that sets it apart from merely studying people as if they are laboratory guinea pig. Empathy is beyond the functional and cognitive understanding. It is about emotional understanding, that is deep and meaningful.

One way to build empathy is to go through the experiences as the user or customer ourselves, or perform ethnographic and contextual research to start building the knowledge and understanding about the users. This deep level understanding is necessary. If you don’t know your customers, there’s no way you can build empathy for them.

Persona is a good way to represent the research insights and understanding, in a way that is relatable and can help the team to build empathy for the people they are designing for. It will help the team to start imagining how that persons lives, what he goes through, how his day is like, what motivates him, what is important to him, who he listens to, how he sees the world, how he feels, etc.

Another tool is Empathy Map, featured in Gamestorming book by Dave Gray. Here’s how it looks like:

(image courtesy of  XPLANE)

And if you are ready, watch this radical experiment in empathy by Sam Richards.