Kelly Goto is a design ethnographer. She had a lot to say about designing things, approaches to finding the emotional charactersitics that make people respond, and many interesting examples. She almost had too much to say… She rushed the last part of her talk, just as she was bringing all the threads together into an explanation of a coherent design research methodology.

Here is some of what she covered:

empathy

We are trying to be connected to the materials we design.

She tells the story of her children going through a hospital experience, and how that made her really want to make a difference to medical interfaces.

Connected experiences

Connections between things, devices and lifestyles and products for creating change in behaviour.

Connection=meaning, Systematic and connected. Systems are connected things

addiction and fun

We want you to create addictive experiences

How can we evolve back from stooped computer beings to people with open, good posture? Open to real physical interaction, being physical together is being connected. Posture.

Functional, usable, pleasurable.

Understanding people’s rituals is the key to understanding an addictive experience.

devotion

Example of the fun and effortlessness of driving a mini. Mood is so important. Context is everything. Experience, trust. Relates to brand. Human machine communication. Efficiency. Usability.

Challenge is to make machine to human communications fun.

research

Focus groups don’t give accurate information. Observation in context provides more rich understanding of complex things like lifestyle and emotion.

Break down the experience into emotional functional comfort.

beyond usable

We are now at the point that things should at a baseline, function. We have moved up mazlows hierarchy of needs. Usability is covered, we can start thinking about some of the higher values.

sensory engineering

(And this is where it started getting a bit rushed)

Kensei engineering.

People Input sensory and knowledge. Moved Demographics Psychographics Emotional

Contextual interviews

“Deep hanging out” allows researchers to discover emotions.

experience mapping

Identity public private Satisfaction wonder comfort connection Context timeline Understand hidden needs

Kensei Aware, unaware.

We have to understand the spacing in between things and understand connections and lifestyle.

I hope she posts her slides sometime, it was hard to get the last 10 minutes of her talk, but plenty keywords to thing about.

A Safari extension by Panic that lets you draw, use a highlighter, edit text and add sticky notes to a web page and then email it to someone. It’s free, so get your clients to install safari and start using it. The little touches are what makes this a fun to use, and as such a great bit of interaction design.

Panic also creates Coda, a text editor for Mac, and Transmit – the only FTP client I have ever felt willing to part with some cash for.

My previous layout here was a fairly simple custom theme. But not simple enough for an upgrade to the new version of WordPress, which broke it.

So I have a default layout with a shoe-horned header image.

Todo, tofix.

• Please Scroll
  (tags: webdesign humor)
• War? There’s an iPhone app for that | Technology | guardian.co.uk
  My first thought was, surely the military would not expose itself to the risks of a consumer device? But then I thought it is inevitable that technology as ubiquitous as the iPhone seems to becoming gets put to some usage that many of us would not feel comfortable with. It’s usually the other way round anyway, we get the military gadgets that have been civilianized. But as the article points out – the applications have their place in disaster emergency situations.
  (tags: iphone technology apple apps)
• How to recognise a good programmer
  Another checklist to run your decisions by. There is probably a lot of sense in this article, but the truth is, when you are in the interview situation, from either side of the table, you know when you have a match. Sure there are basic skills that must be met, but most important is the idea that you can work with this person. If you’re starting from a checklist, you are probably starting from the wrong angle.
  (tags: interview jobs programming)
• Rally Wants To Bring Location Back To Its Core, With Only Your Real Friends.
  I haven’t so far really got into Foursquare. I have checked in a few places, but no-one else I know is playing. (Let me know if you are) This aims to be even more limited in terms of social circles – and I agree with the principle. I think there is something to be said for deeply valuable connections over multiple, transient ones. Unless you’re like me and no one else you know is playing, in which case you have to resort to real conversations, perhaps face to face.
  (tags: apps iphone socialmedia)
• The secrets behind menu design – (37signals)
  No not user interface menus. Some good business principles here taken from restaurant menus, understanding what you really have of worth to offer your clients and users, and what they are willing to pay for. The basic idea: know your customer.
  (tags: design pricing business)
• Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail
  Paul Kedrosky points to what could be Google’s weakness, whereby it is the victim of its own success and via adword fuelled top search results its search results become useless to the average user. Google eats its own tail. This of course assumes the giant is incapable of accommodating a changing landscape and reacting to this threshhold. Will a new pattern emerge?
  (tags: google advertising seo future)
• Using Google Reader “Send To” with WordPress | thingelstad.com
  This could be useful for my blogging workflow!
  (tags: wordpress tools)

Earlier this year at Clinic London we launched the new website for Turner Media Innovations, the advertising and media consultancy part of Turner Entertainment representing Cartoon Network, CN Too, Boomerang, Cartoonito, TCM and Adult Swim. read on…

We’ve only just got the print designers to stop sending us their web page and html email designs in Indesign. They get it now: pixels, not points. RGB, not CMYK. 72 dpi. Limited fonts. Photoshop. We’ve had to really drum it in. So you can imagine the looks I got when I suggested we ban Photoshop from the web design process. read on…

Today was a day of meetings. In one afternoon session we reviewed some new proposals for an existing client. It’s been almost a week since the feedback meeting from our initial proposal, and things are all looking very positive, but the client manager feels under pressure to follow up with revised proposals and costs. So we are meeting to 1) get the report back from the client meeting, 2) think up some features to add to the list, and 3) plan a way forward. “We need to show them something…” read on…