Mittwoch, 29. Juni 2011

Sascha Lobo über die Zukunft der Arbeit

Sascha Lobo war gestern in Hamburg und hat hier zum Thema "Zukunft der Arbeit" gesprochen. Ein erster Teil des Vortrags fand exklusiv bei OTTO intern für Führungskräfte statt, der andere dann öffentlich im Rahmen der neuen Kooperation von OTTO mit dem betahaus Hamburg in den dortigen Räumlichkeiten.

Es ist interessant anzuschauen, wie sich der weltweit zweitgrößte Versandhändler bemüht, frischen Wind in die Segel zu bekommen und Land gutzumachen, z.B. zum großen Konkurrenten Amazon. Zum einen soll es wohl die eigenen jungen Mitarbeiter ansprechen und ihnen zeigen,wie modern der Konzern ist. Andererseits kann ich vermuten, daß dies eine Recrutingmaßnahme oder zumindest PR-Maßnahme ist, die ein modernes Bild von OTTO präsentieren soll. Man wird sehen, ob hier nur ein Exot zum Bestaunen geholt wurde oder ob die Führungskräfte des Konzerns wirklich zugehört und Erkenntnisse gewonnen haben.

Der Inhalt des öffentlichen Teils läßt sich anhand des Blogeintrags auf HASENFARM gut nachvollziehen. Der interne Teil soll laut Aussagen eines Teilnehmers große Überschneidungen aufweisen aber noch einen leicht anderen Fokus gehabt haben. Wir dürfen gespannt sein, was OTTO daraus macht.

Montag, 27. Juni 2011

Design for Behaviour Change

My mentor and friend Arno Bublitz from pragmatic-experts has recently presented at the IA Conference 2011 in Munich on the topic of Design for Behaviour Change. I recommend his presentation if you are interested in how to plan and produce design decissions that address user behaviour.

Recap of Conference "Design for Conversion 2011": Persuasion for converting a visitor to a customer

Persuasion and Influence has been topics of this blog as the concepts I see beyond pure considerations of  usability and flow in interaction design. Originated in the techniques sales persons employ when convincing their customers (see Cialdini's book 'Influence', see synopsis) persuasion has arrived in the digital realm when BJ Fogg started his investigations about the motives behind people's interaction with the computer (see Captology). Long before that it was known through Reeves and Nass' work 'The Media Equation' (see synopsis) that humans basically interact with the computer in a social way. Taken together these works demonstrate for the interaction with computers a strong prevalence of concepts that humans learn during early life.

Our social nature, how we interact with others and from which grounds we trust them is the background of a new concepts: Persuasion Profiling (see Wired article: Welcome to the Brave New World of Persuasion Profiling). The Design for Conversion Conference (the next one to take place at the end of this week) is taking up this idea and will bring together interface designers, product owners and user experience experts to work on casestudies and deepen their understanding of how to work together to create user experiences that are able to change people's (bying) behaviours in a measurable way. See the presentation below for details, a pecha kucha presentation by the local conference organiser Lutz Schmitt or the blog entry by Marian Steinbach about the concept of the conference.

I am especially excited to see Dan Lockton speaking about design for behaviour change. Since I have worked in the FUN research project, I feel that incorporating game mechanics in electronic products has fallen too short. Now, Dan has also learnt from game design and included principles from game play in his Design with intent toolkit.

How to influence user behaviour: Design with Intent (Design for Persuasion, Brussels)
View more presentations from Dan Lockton

By the way: Arjan Haring is currently developing PersuasionAPI to make the concepts of persuasion applicable for marketing. The blog at Conversion Design (in English) and the blog at konversionsKRAFT (in German) are valuable sources of interesting readings about the topic.