what UX ideas are Made To Stick?
Posted Friday, April 18, 10:04AMHopefully many of you have been diving into Made to Stick and Peak, from the MX book club. Reading Made to Stick have made me ask, "what makes for a sticky idea about user experiences?" Ideas in UX need to be sticky so that upper managements and other parts of the organization buy into an effort that may, at first, be rather abstract. Concreteness, credibility, emotion, and unexpectedness come to mid. And the UX team often needs a clear vision of what they're creating; something that the can return to again and again to base decisions on. The qualities of concreteness and simplicity comes to mind.
One of my favorite examples of a sticky idea comes from Flickr's new Places experience. Because flickr members can new geotag their photos as being from a specific city, neighborhood, or even address, flickr can present photos that represent countries, regions, and cities. Flickr could have said all that and more when trying to describe the new capability. But instead, they said its, "A page on flickr for every place in the world." Imagine how clear and certain everyone could be with a similar sticky idea to lead your next project.
So, what UX ideas do you think are made to stick?
In the "Experience is the Product" talk that Jesse and I gave in many places last year, there's the famous slogan from the original Kodak camera -- "You press the button, we do the rest." I love it because it presents promises to both customers and employees -- everyone understands their relationship to that phrase.
Seven Cycles, a customer frame builder in Boston describes their product as "One bike. Yours." I've always thought it summed up two things quite well: the idea that your Seven is the only bike that you will want to ride after getting it, and the notion that it is customized in every way to you and your style of riding.
Thing thing that makes me shy away from articulating statements like these with in cooperation with clients is how quickly this can devolve into marketing or advertising speak.
However, used within a team, statements like these operate on a similar level to design principles. The Charmr team's "wear it during sex" idea helped focus them around the idea that a medical device should not only be comfortable and stylish, but also unobtrusive.
One of my favorite products “Wii”.
Motion (gestural ui) stick.
I love Nintendo’s approach for focusing on the audience’s feeling rather than product features.
Will aims at play and fun.