Fitts’ Law refers to the relationship between the time needed to move to a target and the target size and distance. The smaller and more distant the target, the longer it takes to move to a resting position over it. The law also states that the faster the movement and the smaller the target, the greater is the error rate due to the trade off between speed and accuracy. Fitts’ Law is important in the design of controls, layouts and any device which functions to facilitate movement towards a target. Read more »

Making more sense of brand experiences

A recent post on Making Sense of Brand Design (link here) shares some great examples of creating sensory signatures to create short term impact and long term brand identity, and recent reading (see references) has revealed more ways in which the senses can be leveraged to create great brand experiences.

The most interesting overall finding revealed in Helmut Leder’s Scientific American article is that in the short term how a product or experience looks is very important to its appeal, but after a month of use how it feels comes to be much more important than how it looks. It’s great to wear a really fancy pair of shoes for the first time, but we won’t wear them very often unless they are really comfortable on our feet. Read more »

Tip of the tongue

Our ability to recognise things that we have previously experienced is much better than our ability to recall the same things from memory. Recognition is much easier because recognition provides cues which helps us sort through our vast memory and find the most relevant information. We all find multiple choice questions easier than short answer questions, because the list of possible answers makes it easier and quicker to find the right one, as we can narrow down options very efficiently unlike short answer questions which leave a much greater range of possibilities for us to search. Read more »

The brain science of marketing

In his recent book Brainfluence, Roger Dooley shares 100 tricks for persuading and convincing consumers based on a wide range of evidence from neuromarketing and many other fields such as psychology and behavioural economics. The examples are well documented and overall this is a much more practical, structured and sound guide to brain science of marketing than many other books (including notably Buyology which is less structured and poorly documented). Read more »

The ratio of nature

The golden ratio is the ratio between the elements of a form such that the sum of two elements are in the same ratio to the larger one, as are the larger and smaller elements to each other (see the rectangle below). This ratio approximates 1.618 (or 0.618; the two numbers are the reciprocals of each other) and is found throughout nature (for example in many seashells), art, architecture and also in the dimensions of the human body. It is also called the golden mean, golden number, golden section, golden proportion and divine proportion, and is closely linked to the Fibonacci Sequence (read more here) as the ratio of numbers in this sequence converges on the golden ratio.

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“A few years ago it was simpler. Designers just designed things: objects like lamps, chairs, computer mice, cars, buildings, signage, page and screen layouts. Of course, we knew that the things we designed affected people’s experience. But still, it was enough to design the thing.”  - Fulton Suri

Design and everyday life

Great design is able to serve our needs and, more importantly, give meaning to our lives. It adds value to products by manipulating both subconscious emotional cues and also tactile and material factors to create an emotional bond. Our bodies and most especially our hands, have amazing capabilities already built into them to enable us to interact with and manipulate the world to achieve our goals, and good design ‘amplifies’ those capabilities, empowering us to do more with the abilities we already have. Read more »

The path of least resistance

In life, it’s inevitably true that the greater the effort to accomplish anything, the less likely it is that it will be accomplished, a truth known by designers as the law of performance load (and also called the ‘path of least resistance’ and the ‘principle of least effort’). For any design, the amount of physical and.or mental effort required to achieve a goal is the performance load, and as it increases, performance time and errors increase and hence the probability of successfully completing a task decreases. Conversely, as the performance load decreases, the task becomes easier and the likelihood of completion increases (and time and errors decrease). There are two types of load which contribute to performance load, related to the mental effort (called cognitive load) and the physical effort (called kinematic load). Read more »

“Mathematics is he universal language of the mind, music is the language of the heart.”  - Robert Schumann

A worm in your ear

Last week I spent some time shopping in Jakarta, to understand the competitive environment and category messaging for a brand I am working on. As I wandered through a (relatively modern) supermarket in Jakarta, I noticed my irritation at the shop’s jingle which kept repeating, repeating and repeating as I walked through the aisles. The jingle was short, felt quite childish, but irritatingly catchy (it’s still ringing through my head now – I can’t seem to forget it as much as I would like to). Read more »

We’re only human

Anthropomorphism is a strong tendency for all of us to find forms that appear human-like to exhibit human characteristics more appealing. We tend to attribute such characteristics to animals, non-living objects, material states and abstract concepts (including organisations, spirits and deities, and the term anthropomorphism was coined in the mid 1700s to describe this behaviour. Such behaviour extends to animals, plants, forces of nature (wind, rain, sun) and we all tend to depict these as creatures with human motivations and characteristics. Such behaviour is very common in the arts and storytelling and mythology. Read more »

“Five senses, an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them – never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?” – C.S. Lewis

Marketing to the senses

Our experience of the world, and the brands in it, is always mediated by our senses and our mind. Every communication, interaction, touchpoint and connection must first come to us through one or more sensory channels, and then is subject to interpretation by our brains, mostly based on past experiences and anticipated outcomes. In previous articles, I have written about the five main senses, and their importance in architecture, design and marketing. Read more »