Experiences: Software User Experiences

Psychological factors such as thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition directly correlate with our customers’ online advertising experience. Making customers feel like wanting to do something requires us to offer a completely enthralling experience, not one that has negative connotations for our customers. Today, we often see advertisements that clamor for our attention, begging us to view them. Customers’ past experiences with the Web set their expectations for online advertising today. How can we shift this prevalent advertising paradigm to one that instead has psychological appeal?

In this article, I’ll discuss the cognitive elements at the intersection of advertising and human behavior. By taking an approach to advertising that looks at the impact psychological factors have on customer behavior, I’ve learned that customers respond directly to online advertisements, as we can see from their emotions, behavior, and interactions on the Web. Read More

Dissonance is a musical term. It means things are not in harmony. Design dissonance occurs when a product or service sends out cognitive signals that run counter to the desired effect.

In the strictest sense of the term, design dissonance often relates to usability—when a design somehow pushes a user in the wrong direction, in terms of both understanding and action. But in a broader sense, design dissonance can create disappointment, particularly when it occurs in relation to a service.

Personally, I define user experience as the perceptive sum of a series of interactions. Therefore, my goal in sharing my thoughts on design dissonance is to help you avoid creating negative interactions that would harm the overall experience. Read More

For most people, sound is an essential part of everyday living. Sound can deliver entertainment—like our favorite music or the play-by-play call of our hometown baseball—and vital information—like the traffic and news reports on the radio as we drive to work.

Audio signals also help us interact with our environment. Some of these signals are designed: We wake to the buzz of the alarm clock, answer the ringing telephone, and race to the kitchen when the shrill beep of the smoke alarm warns us that dinner is burning on the stove. Other audio signals are not deliberately designed, but help us nonetheless. For instance, we may know the proper sound of the central air conditioning starting, the gentle hum of the PC fan, or the noise of the refrigerator. So, when these systems go awry, we notice it immediately—something doesn’t sound right. Likewise, an excellent mechanic might be able to tell what is wrong with a car engine just by listening to it run.

Since people are accustomed to such a rich universe of offline sound, it’s notable that our digital user experiences—while far from silent—do not leverage audio information to the same extent that they do visual information. When designers and developers create user experiences—be they for Web applications, desktop applications, or digital devices—audio is often a missing ingredient. Read More