London IA February 2011
London IA in February welcomes Relly Annett-Baker and Dan Lockton to The Sense Loft. Tickets again were gone in a flash (though this time round the waiting list is a little smaller). Sense Network (very soon to relaunch) have had some tickets to give away and Zebra People will again be present to assist anyone with any recruitment needs.
Talk details
Dan Lockton: Change, Work with, Ignore, Fail? Mental models, behaviour & choice architecture
Behaviour change, in one form or another, has become a hot topic, from the “gamification of everything” to the Cabinet Office’s “Nudge Unit”. Whether we are deliberate or not, all design influences behaviour - we can’t avoid it - so we might as well do it intelligently. As designers, we are used to the idea that understanding users’ mental models (how information is structured, product functions, etc) is important to UX. But when thinking about design for behaviour, our mental models of users - what people are actually like - dominates the strategies we use to influence behaviour. We make assumptions about how people will behave in response to feedback, incentives and persuasive messages, design these into systems, and then often find that people don’t respond in the expected way. In this talk, I’ll run through a selection of my Design with Intent patterns and introduce how mental models of systems interact at the core of understanding behaviour change.
Relly Annett-Baker: An exploration of website copy in the wild
A snippet-length workshop in which we shall explore the enormously important subject of website copy. We shall take a magnifying glass, pins, best fountain pen and notebook to thoroughly inspect, categorise, curate and display the specimens we happen upon. Then, scalpel and chloroform in hand, we shall appropriate some species as the best examples of type and do our best to study and replicate them so as to recreate their wondrous form wherever we might have the chance.
(London IA February 2011 poster on Flickr)