My founding partner in crime, Tony, came across this post and whilst the original is very much worth the read I wanted to pull out the conclusion of this very astute and powerful piece. For us it’s nice to read a comprehensive and intelligent reasoning of what we knew in our gut to be so, which is why our SaaS platform, HARBOUR, has had designer input right from the moment it first started to take shape.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but whether you’re talking brand resonance or system interface usability, as humans’ beauty is a hard wired influencer that we simply can’t rationalise out and one we certainly ignore commercially at our (or our clients) cost.

In Defense of Eye Candy

by Stephen P. Anderson

In many design conversations, there is a belief that applications are made enjoyable because we make them easy to use and efficient (interestingly, whether it’s stated or not, these conversations value the role that aesthetics plays in cognition). However, when we talk about how emotions influence interactions, it’s closer to the truth to say things that are enjoyable will be easy to use and efficient. Allow to me explain.

You remind me of…

Product personality influences our perceptions. Think about how quickly we form expectations about someone simply based on how they dress or present themselves. Similarly, the UI design decisions we make affect the perceived personality of our applications. In the example below, which window is friendlier? Which one looks more professional?

Products have a personality. Why should we care? Consider this:

• People identify with (or avoid) certain personalities.
• Trust is related to personality.
• Perception and expectations are linked with personality.
• Consumers “choose” products that are an extension of themselves.
• We treat sufficiently advanced technology as though it were human.

…and so on.

By making intentional, conscious decisions about the personality of your product, you can shape positive or negative responses. Take a look at Sony and how they applied this knowledge in the Sony AIBO. Let’s consider why they made this robot resemble a puppy.

Here, you have a robotic device that isn’t perfect. It won’t understand most of what you say. It may or may not follow the commands it does understand. And it doesn’t really do all that much.

If this robot was an adult butler that responded to only half our requests and frequently did something other than what we asked, we’d consider it broken and useless. But as a puppy, we find its behaviors “cute.” Puppies aren’t known for following directions. And when the robot puppy does succeed, we are delighted. “Look, it rolled over!” What a great way to enter the robotics market.

Consider: What kind of personality are you creating with your application? And what expectations does this personality bring with it?

Put it all together and…

Why should we really care about perceptions? Consider these findings from research presented at CHI 2007:

“…users judge the relevancy of identical search results from different search engines based on the brand…Participants in the study indicated that the results from Google and Yahoo were superior to identical results found through Windows Live or a generic search engine.”

What is a brand but perceptions? In this study, functionally identical results were perceived as better due to brand attributes such as trust, personality, and perception. What’s rational about that?

Hold that thought.

Attractive things work better

Okay, so maybe perceptions are important to product design. But what about “real” usability concerns such as lower task completion times or fewer difficulties? Do attractive products actually work better? This idea was tested in a study conducted in 1995 (and then again in 1997). Donald Norman describes it in detail in his book Emotional Design.

Researchers in Japan setup two ATMs, “identical in function, the number of buttons, and how they worked.” The only difference was that one machine’s buttons and screens were arranged more attractively than the other. In both Japan and Israel (where this study was repeated) researchers observed that subjects encountered fewer difficulties with the more attractive machine. The attractive machine actually worked better.

So now we’re left with this question: why did the more attractive but otherwise identical ATM perform better?

Norman offers an explanation, citing evolutionary biology and what we know about how our brains work. Basically, when we are relaxed, our brains are more flexible and more likely to find workarounds to difficult problems. In contrast, when we are frustrated and tense, our brains get a sort of tunnel vision where we only see the problem in front of us. How many times, in a fit of frustration, have you tried the same thing over and over again, hoping it would somehow work the seventeenth time around?

Another explanation: We want those things we find pleasing to succeed. We’re more tolerant of problems with things that we find attractive.

Stitching it all together

Recent studies into emotions are finding that we can’t actually separate cognition from affect. Separate studies in economics and in neuroscience are proving that:

“affect, which is inexplicably linked to attitudes, expectations and motivations, plays a significant role in the cognition of product interaction…the perception that affect and cognition are independent, separate information processing systems is flawed.” [Frank Spillers]

In other words, how we “think” cannot be separated from how we “feel.”

This raises some interesting questions—especially in the area of decision making. In short, our rational choices aren’t so rational. From studies on choice to first impressions, neuroscience is exploring how the brain works—and it’s kind of scary. We’re not nearly as in charge of our decisions as we’d like to believe.

Consider what you’re doing with your interfaces to speak to people’s emotions? But user interface development is still maturing and catching up to what other disciplines already know: the most direct way to influence a decision or perception is through the emotions.

So, is “pretty design” important?

When we think about application design and development, how do you think of visual design? Is it a skin, that adds some value—a layer on top of the core functionality? Or is this beauty something more?

In the early 1900s, “form follows function” became the mantra of modern architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright changed this phrase to “form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union,” using nature as the best example of this integration.

The more we learn about people, and how our brains process information, the more we learn the truth of that phrase: form and function aren’t separate items. If we believe that style somehow exists independent of functionality, that we can treat aesthetics and function as two separate pieces, then we ignore the evidence that beauty is much more than decoration. Our brains can’t help but agree.

If you’ve popped into this site a few times since we launched it back in the autumn of last year you’d have noted how we try and keep a seasonal theme (started with 3DMC coloured leaves, then snow flakes and as we broke into spring a few weeks back so the chicks hatched forth – our own little tweetettes).

Anyway, seems that our designer needed to get some darkness out of his system (design wise). I don’t think you could get more of a contrast from what went before. Are we turning to the dark side? Is the palette of the site reflecting the economic mood at large? Nahhhh – we just like the contrast and subtle touches the design master (whether Jedi or Sith) has added. Hope you do too. Let us know either way

Let us know if you have any opinions on it.

This is pretty much a completely lifted article by Sean Carton posted on ClickZ.com, but I just thought it was so well put that I wanted to paste it across. I have taken the liberty of amending it in a few places to make it more UK recruitment industry relevant (talking about TV ads isn’t really us), but I think the parallels are so striking overall it holds up. See what you think (oh – and there are some great posts linked to from the article too – so give yourself 15 minutes, get a coffee and have a good read).

The end of Advertising agencies as we know them

Do we really need advertising agencies anymore? Are we witnessing the great “reboot” of the advertising industry hastened (but not caused) by the current recession?

It’s pretty obvious to any reasonable person watching the tens of thousands of layoffs in the industry along with the simultaneous implosion of the newspaper industry that the ad biz as we know it is in serious trouble. Couple that with the ongoing decrease in advertising spending along with new studies (such as this one from Microsoft) that predict that the Internet will overtake TV in 2010, and it’s clear that advertising as we’ve all grown to know it is on the way out.

I’m not predicting the death of advertising. That’s baloney. If anything, we’re witnessing the rebirth of an entire industry that’s going to expand in ways we’ve never thought of before — especially if we expand our concept of what advertising means. And we’d better. Before we blow it like the newspaper industry has.

To understand the tectonic shift we’re in the midst of now, it’s helpful to remember where ad agencies came from. Originally advertising agencies were “agents” for newspapers, placing ads produced by clients in newspapers. In 1877, the J. Walter Thompson Co. figured out it could sell more advertising space if it created the ads instead of relying on clients to create ads. The modern agency was born.

As new media developed, the advertising agency adapted. Radio and TV required new creative skills and new people. Agencies kept growing and adding more overhead. Agencies became more unwieldy, more rigid, and more set in their ways.

Then along came the Internet and all that changed.

It took a while, but today advertising is less about the big colourful press ad campaigns and more about producing measurable results across a host of media and channels. Social media, search marketing, and online direct response (with its associated need for candidate-relationship management and other data-handling technologies) have required new skills and and a new way of thinking.

And that’s the crux of the issue. Advertising as we’ve known it has always been about an “interrupt” model that requires candidates to pay for content by sifting through pages of classified print ads. It’s been about grabbing and holding attention in a linear way because that’s how media worked.

It doesn’t work that way anymore. And neither does the advertising agency as we know it.

Why? The full-service monolithic agency model worked fine in a world where there were a small number of national newspapers, a local/regional champion or two and perhaps a niche industry magasine too. It doesn’t work when you have to deal with dozens of media channels and a plethora of options within each that change on a nearly daily basis. New technologies pop up (social networking, Twitter, online video, etc.) and new skills and new thinking are needed to deal with them. Large organizations with large payrolls, hierarchical structures, and well-defined (and well-defended) areas of expertise can’t possibly hope to make any money when they have to staff themselves with a constantly expanding cast of experts to deal with new media challenges. Add to that a compensation model based on a world that’s long gone (retainers and media commissions) and the agency model we’ve all grown up with starts to look like a relic of the past. Turmoil in the industry provides proof.

So what to do? Simple: explode the idea of the monolithic agency. Get rid of the concept that only an agency that does everything can possibly create and manage large campaigns. Look for more flexible and fluid models that expand and contract as needed, bringing in new expertise when needed and ditching it when it’s not. Think distributed, not centralized. Think “collective,” not “company.”

As more people get laid off and can’t find jobs at other agencies (who are also laying people off), more people hanging up their shingle and do whatever it is that they do best, creating an explosion of entrepreneurs and experts who (without the overhead of a big company) can do things cheaper, faster, and more flexibly than their counterparts at big companies.

If this sounds suspiciously like the “free agent” and “new economy” predictions we heard eight years ago, it kind of is. But there’s one big difference: now we have the (free!) tools to actually make it happen. Social networking, collaborative tools such as Google Docs, and advances in mobile technologies make it possible to create a distributed team that doesn’t need to be in the same place to work effectively.

So what’s the agency of the future going to look like? Probably a lot smaller and focused on strategy, account/project management, creative leadership (but not execution), and media strategy (but not planning and buying). Most agencies will revolve around these hubs if they’re honest with themselves. Agencies will exist to provide high-level strategic guidance that clients need in a media-chaotic environment. Agencies will expand or contract as needed or will explore radical solutions such as crowdsourcing to get work done for less money.

Whether this scenario turns out to be completely accurate or not remains to be seen. But nobody can look at what’s going on today and say that the agency of tomorrow is going to look much like the agency of today or yesterday.

So what do you think? Has Sean hit the nail on the head – or am I just part of that “explosion of entrepreneurs and experts” and therefore my judgment is clouded by hoping that the new world that Sean talks of is to become the new reality?

I knew it had been a while since I’d got anything written on this ole blog, but could scarcely believe it when I saw it was a month (the posting dates don’t lie after all!).

So a quick apology for the break in service – all with good reason though as we’re currently very busy Beta testing our proprietary SaaS (Software as a Service) platform HARBOUR (TM) and it’s Applicant Tracking & Content Management Systems (ATS & CMS) products. It’s all getting very exciting as we have a presentation booked in for the 29th April to launch this to the Recruitment Advertising Agency world (well – those in London anyway) as I think our new approach has something for them to offer clients and I certainly value their input. Quite a daunting crowd for me, but we’re full to capacity for the event and I have a couple of other meetings arranged with people who can’t make the 29th but are interested in finding out more – so now it’s about getting on with it and doing our work as much justice as possible.

So please bear with – I’ve got a number of blogs I’m itching to get down and some full replies to some other people’s thoughts , so hopefully normal service (whetever that may be) will be resumed soon enough – if not before then definitely to start next month and let you know about HARBOUR and how the launch was recieved.

Take care.