Category Archives: regular

Venusian Time or Flow

Written by Guillermo Torres. Posted on June 5, 2009. Filed under regular. Tagged . Comments Off.

When I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time in the school library. I’m was not an avid reader, I was a geek. I loved browsing through tons of book. I would read a little and then skip to the next one. One of the subjects I was always fascinated with was Greek Mythology and culture.

I once read how the greeks had different concepts of time:

Chronological Time

Named after the god Khronos. Is the masculine time, the time that we meassure, that rules our lives.

Venusian Time

Named after Venus. Is the feminine time, you follow venusian time when you are in that state of love for your subject and time streches or compresses. You can see this in the stories of lovers that spend all night together, or artists that loose track of time while working on a project that they are very passionate about.

This is simmilar to the concept of Flow, a mental state that UX designers try achieve in their work. We want the user to fall in love with it’s subject. Software should help the user stay in venusian time, not interrupt it.

Æon Time

Which is eternal time. When something or someone escapes a lifetime. “That’s a classic!” is what we usually say.

It is such a beautiful concept. I remember this vividly because it has followed me through life. The problem is, I don’t remember the book where I got it from, and I can’t find any documenation on the web. Does anyone know about this? Please let me know, I would like to start using it as a citation.

Affordance

Written by Guillermo Torres. Posted on March 30, 2009. Filed under regular. Comments Off.

“…the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. […] Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.” (Norman 1988, p.9)

Google monitors your home power consumption.

Written by Guillermo Torres. Posted on February 11, 2009. Filed under regular. Tagged , , . Comments Off.

Google just launched PowerMeter, a tool that lets you track and visualize you home power consumption. Initially, the tinkerer in me rejoices at the prospect of going through all of this data seeing how my seasonal habits and moods change the results. But I already spend too much time in the supermarket reading nutritional labels. Too much of my free time is spend going through my last.fm stats, my site’s google analytics and my calorie counter. At what point do you say T.M.I? I guess that it all comes down to your own interests and the results that you get from actually tracking your life’s data. Going through my last.fm stats might not be as useful or beneficial as PowerMeter , but I get a lot of satisfaction from it due to my interests in music and data.

Component libraries and personal style

Written by Guillermo Torres. Posted on January 30, 2009. Filed under regular. Comments Off.

One thing that I have noticed around my team, is that when creating wireframes people are not really using component libraries as much. Instead, we tend to copy and paste from older files. Why is this? From asking around it seems like the biggest reason is personal style. This seems odd because we are talking about components for wireframes which should be devoid of style. The thing is the wireframe process is still part of the creative process, and when it comes to any creative process, you need to see yourself in there.

Creating user needs

Written by Guillermo Torres. Posted on November 26, 2008. Filed under regular. Tagged , , . Comments Off.

I work at a digital marketing/advertising agency and the time when I see the most contrast is at the beginning of a project when I am defining user needs. More often than not, I find myself with little to none user needs and a some user wants. In addition to that the type of project calls for the “creation” of user needs. It’s advertisement after all!  But I still thing that they need to be treated differently than user needs, so I usually set them apart and label them “Desired Behavior”. So if User Needs are the goals that the user is planning to achieve while interacting with a product. Desired Behavior are the goals we want the user to want to achieve.

When the user starts an application or enters a web site, they will come with a set of needs and goals the want to achieve. Though, in advertising, we also want to create goals for the user while they are engaged (sell, sell sell! Among other things).  We need to understand these user goals so we can see how we can manage to create all desired behavior into goals. If we create a product, a training program for example, the user might come with a set of goals geared towards training, and while they are achieving those goals, we might engage them to add other goals like buying a specific training product, or sign-up for something.

We could always call these goals Business goals, but I think that we need to see them from the User’s POV in order to understand the best way to create conversion.

Fragmented Experiences

Written by Guillermo Torres. Posted on July 12, 2008. Filed under regular. Tagged , , . Comments Off.

The way that people are interacting with brands has changed in many ways. The customer is moving from passive consumption to active participation, and brands are starting to focus on target users instead of target audience.

Traditionally, businesses were limited to discrete touch points with their customers, most of them through analog media. Nowadays, there is an infinite numbers of ways, both analog and virtual, to engage individuals. A fragmented customer experience would become the norm, and fluidity would be ideal.

“Each encounter no matter how brief is a micro interaction which makes a deposit for withdrawal from our rational and emotional subconscious.  The sum of these interactions and encounters adds up to how we feel about a particular product, brand or service.” –David Armano

These micro interactions that Armano speaks about are particularly relevant for marketing agencies that have to deal with integrated campaigns on a regular basis. In the first half of this decade, an integrated campaign would normally be comprised of print, TV, out of home and digital, where digital means banner ads that drive traffic to a microsite. Nowadays, with the rise of web 2.0 the marketing industry is taking notice of the power of social media. Instead of creating a brochure-like microsite, interactive agencies are going where their customers are, social media websites like MySpace, YouTube or Facebook and letting them interact with the brand.

Form best practices – abridged

Written by Guillermo Torres. Posted on June 3, 2008. Filed under regular. Tagged , . Comments Off.

The one thing we need to remember is that forms came to be as the digital version of the paperwork needed for data collection. Now, web forms have increased it’s complexity, and wich also increases the user’s mistakes and frustrations.

  1. Make sure the user’s task is clear.
  2. Group and order items in a logical way.
  3. The data should be as simple as a tag and a text field.
  4. Be quick and direct with instructional text. Too much text will be skipped.
  5. Speed up data entries by setting up smart default options when possible.
  6. The form must be easy to fill out without the use of a mouse (tab, enter, etc).
  7. Use top-aligened labels for reduced completion times.
  8. Use right-aligned labels for reducing vertical space.
  9. The length of text fields should provide enough space for inputs.
  10. Avoid secondary action buttons if possible (excep, cancel button)
  11. Ensure a clear visual distinction between primary and secondary action buttons.
  12. Suggest inputs to disambiguate.
  13. Use inline validation for inputs that have potentially high error rates.
  14. Provide appropriate visual language where errors occurr.
  15. Indicate progress for long forms.
  16. Disable submit button after first click to prevent duplicate submissions.
  17. Make sure to add relevant code for screen readers and auto-fill applications.


sources: Jakob Nielsen, Luke Wroblesky, Martijn van Welie

One Laptop Per Child program has apparantly failed

Written by Guillermo Torres. Posted on May 23, 2008. Filed under regular. Tagged . Comments Off.

This is very sad news. I really had my hopes up for this program, I see some people blaming the design, but how can you blame the design if the product never reached the hands fo those who used it. It seems like the only shippment that was really made was the one for Uruguay.

Critics say the product was designed from a cultural perspective misaligned to the culture and context of the people who are supposed to use it. And they invoke how different Asian education is to Western education. As a Venezuelan, I see Latin America’s education as being pretty much all western. If this program were successful in some of these countries, that would still be a huge success.

In the case of the Apple Newton, who was also a design failure, it was the user it was designed for that didn’t buy it. In this case it’s not the end user who didn’t buy, they never really got a chance to see it. I think the business plan is more to blame than the product itself.

The evolving mental model of an experience

Written by Guillermo Torres. Posted on May 16, 2008. Filed under regular. Tagged . Comments Off.

How important is it for a user to keep a mental model of the whole experience? For a while I thought it was important for the user to know what the whole experience is about but now I am leaning towards the opposite. It’s not as important to know that a product does X, Y and Z. It might be easier to engage the user with X, and later on they’ll learn about Y and Z.

It all comes down to having casual users and power users. Make an experience where the user’s mental model of the experience evolves, expanding in complexity in time. At the user’s leisure.

A good example is Flickr, you first see it as a sight were you upload your photos so your family can see it. But eventually you realize the social aspect of it and start participating in the community. Pretty soon you will be making your own moo cards.

Twitter on the other hand, has a service that is pretty difficult to explain and for people to get. That’s why I see how smart it is for them to just keep it as simple as it currently is. Adding more functionality like pictures, location, etc. Might make it even more difficult for new users to “get it”.

Death of the Microsite

Written by Guillermo Torres. Posted on May 9, 2008. Filed under regular. Tagged . Comments Off.

I have done my fair share of microsites, I would say that the trend has definitely  shaped my career. But more and more, the as a marketing initiative is dying. One of the main reasons is that it’s hard to drive traffic to the one-off URL. People seldom remember to go to a site after seeing the call out on the print or TV campaign. Back then, the benefits of making a microsite far outweighed these drawbacks. 

Ever since the rise of web 2.0 marketing and advertisement initiatives have been shifting, the trends is to go where their customers are. The money spent on microsites is now spent on social media sites. Some have had more success than others. The audience and the brand need to be the right kind for a successful campaign in a social media site.

The other shift has been coming from rich media banners, where content can be as deep as any microsite. Though there is still something to say about context.  The same marketing message can be taken more seriously outside of the context of a banner.

In the same way, we see microsites shifting their roles, in certain campaigns with a fragmented experience the microsites can act as hub or a portal  to the campaigns presence in the different sites and mediums.