Design with Intent | User Psychology

Eight design patterns for errorproofing

By Dan Lockton ⋅ February 27, 2009 ⋅ 6 comments

Go straight to the patterns
One view of influencing user behaviour – what I’ve called the ‘errorproofing lens’ – treats a user’s interaction with a system as a set of defined target behaviour routes which the designer wants the user to follow, with deviations from those routes being treated as ‘errors’. Design can help avoid the [...]

Designed environments as learning systems

By Dan Lockton ⋅ February 11, 2009 ⋅ 3 comments

How much of designing an environment is consciously about influencing how people use it? And how much of that influence is down to users learning what the environment affords them, and acting accordingly?
The first question’s central what this blog’s been about over the last four years (with ‘products’, ’systems’, ‘interfaces’ and so on variously standing [...]

Angular measure

By Dan Lockton ⋅ February 6, 2009 ⋅ 8 comments

A few years ago I went to a talk at the RCA by Alex Lee, president of OXO International. Apart from a statistic about how many bagel-slicing finger-chopping accidents happen each year in New York city, what stuck in my mind were the angled measuring jugs he showed us, part of the well-known Good Grips [...]

Heating debate

By Dan Lockton ⋅ February 1, 2009 ⋅ 10 comments

Central heating systems have interfaces, and many of us interact with them every day, even if only by experiencing their effects.
But there’s a lot of room for improvement. They’re systems where (unlike, say, a car) we don’t generally get instantaneous feedback on the changes we make to settings or the interactions we have with the [...]

Stuff that matters: Unpicking the pyramid

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 14, 2009 ⋅ 5 comments

Most things are unnecessary. Most products, most consumption, most politics, most writing, most research, most jobs, most beliefs even, just aren’t useful, for some scope of ‘useful’.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to point this out, but most of our civilisation seems to rely on the idea that “someone else will sort it out”, [...]

Staggering insight

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 5, 2009 ⋅ 7 comments

I’ve mentioned a few times, perhaps more often in presentations than on the blog, the fact that guidelines for the design of pedestrian crossings in the UK [PDF] recommend that where a crossing is staggered, pedestrians should be routed so that they have to face traffic, thus increasing the likelihood of noticing oncoming cars, and [...]

The semiotics of signs vs fences

By Dan Lockton ⋅ December 30, 2008 ⋅ 4 comments

Is the impact of the sign’s message increased or decreased by pairing it with a fence?
What about when the fence is flattened?
What about when no-one seems to have found it important to fix?
Why?

Placebo buttons, false affordances and habit-forming

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 1, 2008 ⋅ 13 comments

This is a great graph from GraphJam, by ‘Bloobeard’. It raises the question, of course, whether the ‘door close’ buttons on lifts/elevators really do actually do anything, or are simply there to ‘manage expectations‘ or act as a placebo.
The Straight Dope has quite a detailed answer from 1986:
The grim truth is that a significant [...]

London Design Festival: Greengaged

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 18, 2008 ⋅ 7 comments

The London Design Festival always throws up some interesting events, especially involving clever people trying new things in design and sharing their experiences and expertise.
This year, the Design Council are running Greengaged, a “sustainability hub… developed and organised by [re]design, thomas.matthews and Kingston University with Arup and Three Trees Don’t Make A Forest”. It’s a [...]

Skinner and the Mousewrap

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 17, 2008 ⋅ 4 comments

Dontclick.it, an interesting interface design experiment by Alex Frank, included this amusing idea, the Mousewrap, to ‘train’ users not to click any more “through physical pain”.
It did make me think: is the use of anti-sit spikes on window sills, ledges, and so on, or anti-climb spikes on walls, intended primarily as a Skinnerian operant conditioning [...]

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