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 »