Trevor made great points today about the value of little thinking. Kind of like the tyranny of the big idea but better expressed, with more jokes. He stressed the importance of thousands of little ideas in building decent brands, not one big one. (Someone will have taken better notes than me and will write it up, I'm sure.)
But I found these illustrations last night while grabbing the stuff off YouTube to make my presentation: iSquint has these great error messages.
I suspect proper interaction designers will hate them because they're a little confusing, but I think they're, well, charmingly confusing. They suggest there's a person back there writing stuff, a person with a sense of humour. And, actually it doesn't matter much if they're a bit confusing because all you're doing really is making the pop-up go away. But these are exactly the signs of humanity that get scrubbed out when 'professionals' and 'grown-ups' get involved.
(This is when you cancel an operation and it reverts to not doing anything)
So, you won then?
Posted by: Ben | October 11, 2006 at 10:20 PM
Russell - well done - I am loading the pics up on Holycow now - ready in 20 mins...
Posted by: Holycow | October 11, 2006 at 10:32 PM
Cracking show today. Are you going to post the video?
Posted by: Ben Mason | October 11, 2006 at 10:48 PM
thanks Ben. I was thinking of posting the video but I'm not sure if the video will be much use on its own, without me jabbering infront of it.
What do you think?
Posted by: russell | October 11, 2006 at 11:11 PM
They're up now folks - but the quality of the pics is truly appauling - sorry! I tried to give a resume of what the whole thing was about but I know I have missed out loads. Anyway - hope this shows some of what it was like.
Cheers
Mark
Posted by: Holycow | October 11, 2006 at 11:35 PM
It'll be useful to those who saw it live. I'd like to see it again. You can probably trust the bloggers to fill in some of the gaps for you, or maybe not!
Posted by: Ben Mason | October 11, 2006 at 11:54 PM
I wonder if the value of being charming is overlooked in interaction design.
The concept of friendliness, of charm, is so ingrained into our notion of what good face to face or even telephone service is - why don't we make more room for it on the web?
A great example, I think, is the experience of using Wordpress - you really sense that there are people there trying to make it easier for you to manage your blog.
Posted by: tw | October 12, 2006 at 04:07 AM
does anybody know if somebody posted trevor materials or wrote about his talk in more detail? If you do, could you be kind enough to send me a link? Cheers.
Posted by: Javier | October 12, 2006 at 10:24 PM