A year in

It’s nearly a year since I started my PhD, (and coming up to three years since this blog was launched). Last week I had my end-of-year review, and, while I don’t often post about the minutiae of being a research student on the blog, I know that at least a few of you are in [...]

A ‘Behaviour Change Barometer’

This is a kind of exploration of some ideas I worked on a while ago as part of my research, and have only just come back to, in order to tidy them up a bit. I’m putting it online as a way – perhaps – to get some comments/criticism, and also to enable me to [...]

Getting someone to do things in a particular order (Part 4)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 (coming soon)
Continued from part 3
This series is looking at what design techniques/mechanisms are applicable to guiding a user to follow a process or path, performing actions in a specified sequence. The techniques that seem to apply with this ‘target behaviour’ fall [...]

Design with Intent presentation from Persuasive 2008

Dan Lockton: Design With Intent (Persuasive 2008)
view presentation (tags: environment affordances sustainability lockton)

EDIT: I’ve now added the audio! Thanks everyone for the suggestions on how best to do it; the audio is hosted on this site rather than the Internet Archive as the buffering seemed to stall a bit too much. Let me know if [...]

User intent and emergence

Something which came out of the seminar at Brunel earlier this week (thanks to everyone who came along) was the idea that any method of selecting ways to design products that aim to shape or guide users’ behaviour really must incorporate some evaluation of users’ actual goals in using the product – users’ intent – [...]

User-Centred Design for Sustainable Behaviour

TU Delft’s Renee Wever and Jasper van Kuijk (who runs the insightful Uselog product usability blog), together with NTNU’s Casper Boks, have produced a very interesting paper, ‘User-Centred Design for Sustainable Behaviour’ [PDF, 400 kb] for the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering (indeed, probably in the same edition as my own paper addressing many similar [...]

Seminar, 27th May

I’ll be giving a brief seminar at Brunel on Tuesday 27th May, in advance of presenting at Persuasive 2008 – it’s a bit of a practice/rehearsal, to be honest…

Getting someone to do things in a particular order (Part 3)

Continued from part 2
This series is looking at what design techniques/mechanisms are applicable to guiding a user to follow a process or path, performing actions in a specified sequence. The techniques fall roughly into three ‘approaches’. In this post, I’m going to examine the Poka-yoke approach. If you’ve been following the previous posts, you’ll probably [...]

Getting someone to do things in a particular order (Part 2)

Continued from part 1

These are the suggested mechanisms applicable to User follows process or path, performing actions in a specified sequence – they fall roughly into three ‘approaches’. In this post, I’m going to examine the System element approach.
System element approach
This approach includes mechanisms relating to the layout and properties of system elements, hence all [...]

Getting someone to do things in a particular order (Part 1)

Photo by trancedmoogle.
Back in January, I introduced the Design with Intent method on the blog. I’ve been developing this since then, and, suitably tested and refined, it should form the first stage of the PhD.
Essentially, the DwI Method is intended to be a structured ’suggestion engine’, where a target behaviour is put in one [...]