The IxD Library

Jodie Moule, “The A-B-C of Behaviour” (2011)

We all seem to be talking about changing behaviour through good design…but changing behaviour is actually really hard. Working as a psychologist in a detox unit at the start of my career has admittedly shaped my view of what it takes to change someone’s behaviour; and whilst I learnt it certainly isn’t impossible, it often takes time. Combine this with the fact that most human behaviour is not considered to be overly planned, with ‘conscious thought’ playing, at best, a small role in shaping our choices…things start to become a little tricky for us as designers. So how do we start to make sense of what influences someone to change their behaviour, given we are often charged with creating designs that are ultimately intended to encourage, if not drive, some form of behaviour change?

Ben Bashford, Emoticomp (2011)

Interaction designers are used to using personas (research based user archetypes) to describe the types of people that will use the thing they’re designing – their background, their needs and the like but I’m not sure if we’ve ever really explored the use of personas or character documentation to describe the product themselves. What does the object want? How does it feel about it? If it can sense its location and conditions how could that affect its behaviour? This kind of thing could be incredibly powerful and would allow us to develop principles for creating the finer details of the object’s behaviour.

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I think you could develop a persona for every touchpoint of the connected object’s service. Maybe it could be the same persona if the thing is to feel strong and omnipresent but maybe you could use different personas for each touchpoint if you’re trying to bring out the connectedness of everything at a slightly more human level.

Paul Heckel, The Elements of Friendly Software Design (1991)

Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley” (1970)

Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura, “Apparent Usability vs. Inherent Usability: Experimental analysis on the determinants of the apparent usability” (1995)

Doug Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” (1962)

Sara Ilstedt Hjelm, “Semiotics in Product Design” (pdf) 2002

Robert Miller, “Response time in man-computer conversational transactions” (pdf) (1968)

Sebastian Deterding, “Pawned: Gamification and Its Discontents” (2010)

“Make It So: What Interaction Designers can Learn from Science Fiction Interfaces” (2008)

Michael Nielsen, Moritz Störring, Thomas B. Moeslund, and Erik Granum, “A Procedure For Developing Intuitive And Ergonomic Gesture Interfaces For Man-Machine Interaction” (pdf) (2003)

Chris Blow, “Crisis & Interaction Design” (2010)

Rob Tannen, “Ergonomics for Interaction Designers” Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 (2009)

Daniel Cook, Why We Turned Microsoft Office Into a Game” (2010)

Karen McGrane, “Foundations of Interaction Design” (2008)

Shoshana Zuboff, In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power (1989)

Steven Johnson, Interface Culture (1997)

Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (2004)

Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing (2005)

Jonas Löwgren and Erik Stolterman, Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology (2007)