affective design

Happy New Year from affective design!

Trevor van Gorp — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:21:36 +0000

2008 was a year filled with emotions that ranged across the entire gamut of human experience. In this Olympic year, athletes were not the only people who celebrated both tremendous victories and tremendous losses. From the election of the first mixed-race man to the highest office in the United States, across the gamut to terrorism, [...]

Deconstructing Product Design

Trevor van Gorp — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 05:23:04 +0000

William Lidwell is the author of one of my favorite recent books on design, Universal Design Principles. Earlier this week, he asked me to invite the readers of affectivedesign.org to offer contributions for his new book: Desconstructing Product Design. Lidwell wants to know “what you think and feel” about some of the most well-designed consumer products [...]

affective design Improves the Edmonton.ca Experience

Trevor van Gorp — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 04:59:41 +0000

Last week, affective design’s latest user experience project was launched, with the help of Yellow Pencil (who handled the build) and Dirty Lab (who handled the visual design). Government and municipal websites often suffer from a number of issues including poorly defined business and communication goals, a lack of governance (i.e. who is responsible for what) [...]

Design for Emotion and Flow on Boxes and Arrows

Trevor van Gorp — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:29:40 +0000

Over at Boxes and Arrows, they’ve just published an article I’ve written discussing how to design interfaces that encourage the creation of “flow“. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” to describe the mental state where all of the subject’s attention is captured in their activity. During my master’s research, I realized that flow was [...]

The User Experience Iceberg at FOWD

trevvg — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:39:05 +0000

Steve Pearce from Poke presented an interesting take on the User Experience Iceberg at the recent Future of Web Design (FOWD) conference in London, UK. His presentation, User Experience vs Brand Experience, is another interesting use of the iceberg as an analogy for user experience, and the sketches are great! Channel 4 Scotland also provided an [...]

2008 UX Methods Trading Cards and Swimlanes

trevvg — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 04:51:22 +0000

Back in March, I had the pleasure of working with Jess McMullin over at nForm User Experience on the 2008 UX Methods Trading Cards for the 2008 IA Summit in Miami. For the 2007 set, I created many of the images from examples of my own deliverables. For the 2008 set, image creation duties were [...]

Searching for Happiness

Trevor van Gorp — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:10:11 +0000

Happiness is a topic that has been getting a lot of attention lately in design and research circles. One of the difficulties with any discussion around “happiness” is that everyone’s definition of the term differs. This ambiguity leads me to question exactly what it is that designers and researchers are measuring against when they find [...]

Ubisoft Aims for More Emotional Games

Trevor van Gorp — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:51:08 +0000

Over at Wired Magazine, Ubisoft’s Montreal CEO talks about the importance of making video games more emotional to increase appeal to gamers.Yannis Mallat recognizes that emotion, rather than technology, is the real reason that games become hits. “The future of games isn’t so much about what technology you use, but how that technology facilitates games that [...]

The User Experience Iceberg - Update

Trevor van Gorp — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 03:43:24 +0000

Sadly, while attempting to upload an updated version of the User Experience Iceberg presentation to Slideshare, the original presentation page was accidentally deleted. I’m hoping that the fine folks at Slideshare can help me restore the deleted stats. Until then, if you’ve linked to the page on Slideshare, your link should remain active. But if you’ve [...]

The User Experience Iceberg

Trevor van Gorp — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 20:48:20 +0000

Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience is a great illustration of the components required to create engaging and rewarding experiences. But, it can be too much information for clients to fully comprehend during a quick presentation. The analogy of The User Experience Iceberg is a great way to help your clients realize that visual [...]