Gearing to talk about why designers fail and what to do about it is Scott Berkun. Berkun wrote, “Making Things Happen”, “The Myths of Innovation” and “Confession of a Public Speaker”. He also was a manager for Microsoft from 1994-2003, team leader on WordPress and his works have appeared in Wired Magazine, New York Times, Forbes Magazine, Washington Post and many others.

Everything we do is design, even if we are not conscious of it. Writing a poem, painting something beautiful or even writing lyrics to a song, these are all in fact design. Design goes in further that organizing your desk space, training your employee or even organizing a corporate baseball team is considered design.

Are you a designer of some sort? Then you fail. All designers fail about 95% of the time. That just means that when you first arise to your design, plan, or draft, generally it won’t be the final product. Failing isn’t a terrible thing. Once we fail, we recognize our mistakes and construct better solutions or concepts. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, built on July 1, 1940 collapsed on the morning of November 7, 1940. The obstacle was the bridge was built with shallow plate girders instead of strong trusses. Wind can bypass trusses but girders impede the wind. This resulted in the bridge to actually sway back and forth at 42 miles per hour winds. With this failure though, it created the current Narrows Bridge to become a success and also allowed engineers to understand the obstacles that stand in the way for suspension bridges.

Thinking outside of the box can stimulate ideas. Sometimes it’s difficult to come up with designs so it’s better to just shift items around and play with ideas and concepts. The Rubik’s Cube helps demonstrate thinking outside of the box. When we were children and couldn’t figure out a solution to the cube, some of us would take apart the cube and put the pieces back together. No instruction is given that we couldn’t do that! It’s just a matter of seeing another solution to a problem.

Most of us fall into the design trap and this is a major roadblock to get to the final outcome. In the book, “How Designers Think” by Bryan Lawson, he comes up with four design traps.

1. Category: obsessive taxonomy
2. Puzzle: problem solving for its own sake
3. Numbers: believing what’s measured is all there is
4. Drawing trap: love the sketch more than what it represents

In order to get to that perfect design, we must experiment and fail continuously and learn from our mistakes. Understanding what we did wrong and how to get that final product is a process we must all accept as designers.

The next speaker who falls on the list is Jason Santa Maria. A little information about him is he’s the creative director of Typekit, founder of Mighty, faculty member of MFA Interactive design, vice president of AIGA/NY, creative director for A List Apart, co-founder/designer for A Book Apart and a founder of Typedia.

In 1993 we had no fonts, 2008 we were limited to 18 cross browser fonts and now today we have thousands of fonts that can be embedded to websites for users to see. By selecting the correct font, you can project a certain message or impression such as the font choices “The New Yorker” makes. Before, when we post articles online, we would have to decide from a dissimilar font since the typeface on paper may not be the one located on the web. Now, we have the capabilities to have the exact same font on print and the web so now people who read the paper and users who view an article online can have the same experience.

Understanding type and being able to perceive a good one from a bad one is not as simple as it looks. It takes some specialized skills to learn how to differentiate, particularly since there is an overwhelming number of old and new fonts being produced.

Each typeface has a role and should be used only a certain situations with some having exceptions. Contrast of fonts is significant. Having different typefaces, color, sizes, etc. can conceive art. You can control what people read first and control how they feel. Even “ugly” fonts have influence too. Researchers found that fonts such as Comic Sans and Monotype Corsiva can actually improve learning for students. Students and teachers that have an effortless time going through material are likely to succeed but do they retain this knowledge? Giving them a more challenging typeface to read will in fact increase their retention since they’ll struggle and take additional time to focus on the words.

When someone asks what a good font type to use is, it’s not an easy answer as, “Helvetica”. You must take in consideration as what will it be used for? How will it be used? Under what conditions? Do some research on your typefaces. The font you use were created with precision and time by someone, so learn about who created it. It’s important to know the history of it. In the movie, “Back to The Future”, the typefaces on the tombstone were created much later than the date Emmett Brown died, specified on his tombstone.

Each font has a few characteristics that follow them. Some can be stable, powerful, contrast, angular, etc. So the next time you’re working with letters or words, review the different fonts available and see what it can do for your design.

There are 5 principles in psychology design that should be considered:

1. Speed

With the statistic about people making an impression within 1-3 seconds, it’s important to take a clear and precise decision on your design since you have very small window to be evaluated.

Clear navigation is important. The easier it is for users to explore your site, the quicker it is for them to buy your product. Giving an option to allow people to move things into a shopping cart rather than just proceeding to payment may not always be a helpful thing. By doing this, we allow users to think about their decision, in which they can put the items back after reviewing that they may not necessarily need it.

2. Simplicity

Most problems we have are communication. We tend to put too much information in front of people where they get lost or confused. A simple and clear method is most effective.

Coke came up with a marketing project and a video that can be viewed below. This video increased their sales and the amount spent on marketing the project was a mere $0.00! Within a week time, the video went viral with over one million viewers. The only public announcement they did was 1 Tweet and 1 Facebook status update.

Take consideration about different colors. On my very first blog, I have indicated how colors affect emotions, but some colors don’t reflect the same feeling across different cultures.  The color for love for Western’s is red, Hindu’s is green, Native American’s is yellow and Eastern European’s is blue. You can see why this is important because something viewed positive for you may not be perceived the same to someone else.

3. Surprise

Adding a surprise element can be effective since this is outside of the norm and brings up curiosity. Even changing something like the color of your button can drive traffic. For www.carelogger.com, they changed the color of their trial button from green to orange and this caused an increase of 21% in the number of free trials used.

4. Social Behavior

This is a type of design where the actions of the users are influenced by the actions of others. Examples of this can be seen and applied to our daily lives. Some street vendor’s insert their own money to their tip jar, so when customers see that other customers are tipping, that are more inclined to do so since everyone else is doing it. If it were empty, people would be less persuaded to contribute.

Another example is an experiment done in 1969 when one person looked up into the sky and as the day progressed, other bystanders would begin to follow and soon, the whole traffic street would have to be shut down due to the overwhelming number of people looking at the sky.

We can even see that sites with Twitter follow buttons are more inclined to be clicked when there is a large amount of people following.

5. Stirring emotions

Emotions can sway people over even if they are negative and positive. Observing a poster with a child from a third world country may encourage you to buy the product because it gives you a sense that you are helping the situation.

So the next time your creating something, maybe think a little about the psychology behind your design which can help you immensely in the end.

The next speaker who followed Jeffrey Zeldman (can be seen on my previous post) is Sarah Parmenter, who traveled all the way from London. Parmenter specializes in User Interface Design and owns a design studio that focuses on online and print media called You Know Who.

When creating anything, you must consider how this will appear and undertake amongst the public. In the span of 3-5 seconds, people have molded some type of impression. Between 1-3 minutes you re-evaluate your decision upon the impression you have come up with.

People’s first impression of Coke versus Pepsi was that Coke tasted more smoother and Pepsi tasted more carbonated. During the 1980’s, the quantity of people drinking Coke was 18% and Pepsi 4%. Pepsi then came up with a marketing campaign known popularly as the “Pepsi Taste Challenge” in which they did a blind taste test between the two beverages on which tasted better. The result was 57% chose Pepsi. They then released a commercial about these results which boosted their sales and now 12% of people drink Coke and 11% Pepsi.

Design is an influential thing in which it can trick people’s minds. When 7-Up released their new look on their cans by adding more yellow, customers complained that the company added more lime to the formula. The end result was that 7-Up didn’t change a single thing.

We can influence users by just using design. Consider what your visitors see and do and this will help you understand the psychology that drives users and audiences to your product. This knowledge can also be used in an unorthodox way such as a certain hotel site which we will refer to as “hotel site x” which will list really cheap prices for their rooms. Compared to other hotel sites, hotel site x would be cheapest due to their rates. You then proceed to the site by checking out and extra fees and taxes are then calculated which they’re the same or even more expensive than the sites you were just comparing. Users are used to certain familiarity and patters when visiting websites in which hotel site x has taken advantage of this knowledge and did something out of the ordinary. Most people might not even notice these extra charges and proceed with the payment. This type of design is called dark patterns.

In the second part of this post, we will talk about the 5 main principles in psychology design that should be considered.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend a three day session about design, code and content at the Bell Harbour Conference Center in Seattle. The conference, An Event Apart, is a 3 day learning session for people who are passionate about web design standards such as user experience, user interface, content, design, etc.

In my next few blogs, I will be sharing with you some wisdom I have gained from each speaker who presented at the conference.

The first speaker that kicks off the conference was Jeffrey Zeldman, an author of Designing with Web Standards, 3rd Edition, co-founder of An Event Apart and executive creative director of Happy Cog. His session introduces the inventions that led to the web from how it started to where it has gotten us now.

1452 - Gutenberg is the first European to use moveable type (typography and printing on moveable items to create a document)
1836 - First electric telegraph developed by Cooke and Wheatstone. Also referred to as “Victorian Internet” as it allowed social networking, instant messaging, slang, network security, spamming and many others.
1858 - Transatlantic telegraph cable was the first cable laid across the Atlantic Ocean from North America and Europe. Five attempts in the span of 9 years to finally achieve success.
1876 - Bell invented to first practical telephone
1945 - Vannevar Bush’s idea of the memex (device that can store books and records at fast and flexible speeds). He also helped develop the atomic bomb
1962 - Advanced Research Project Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first packet switching network.
1965 - Ted nelson creates the hypertext. Micropayments are also introduced.
1966 - Robert Taylor invents the internet
1972 - First internet demo
1978 - Apple is created
1981 - Domain name server (DNS) is introduced
1986 - Al Gore associated with the Information Superhighway
1988 - T1 backbone (numerous computers on the same network) introduced. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) developed
1989 - The first search engine
1991 - HTML tags created. AOL is born.
1993 - Marc Andressen and Eric Bina invent Mosaic (first web browser)
1994 - Jerry Yang and David Filo develop Yahoo. Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web and director of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
1996 - Bert and Hakon proposes Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
1997 - Amazon is born. IE3 supports some CSS
1998 - 300 Million web pages existing and the internet traffic doubles every 100 days
1999 - XHTML and Mozilla introduced
2000 - IE5, Opera 5 and Netscape 6 is released
2001 - IE6 released
2006 - W3C charters and HTML working group is created
2007 - Different types of web fonts are introduced
2009 - XHTML5 replaces XHTML
2010 - HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, web fonts, and powered smart phones (iPhone, droid, and hp). Two smart phones for sold for ever desktop PC.

It’s quite remarkable to see throughout history of how advanced we have gotten!

Do you remember that trade show or conference you attended with that one company giving away their promotional pens? Most likely you have gone home with a bag filled with pens and stickers from various exhibitors but rarely ever notice the company’s logo attached to the side of the product. You probably never even thought of any indication to give them a call.

Giving away promotional products can be difficult because you will lose money at the start. The most crucial thing to do is to be able to create something that the guest will remember. The best way to do that, is attaching your brand to an object that the guest will use every day. While using the product, they are bound to take a glance at it every once in a while – even if they don’t realize it. The brand would embed itself to the mind of the guest and the next time the guest happens to see the brand anywhere else, they will easily recognize it.

Quality is an important factor too. The higher the value of the promotional product, the higher the value the company will appear. If you give out pens that run out of ink after the first use, people will associate your company as “cheap” and show a negative view towards your business. That doesn’t mean to go out and get the top of the line pens that can do everything, but create something memorable. A pen that feels comfortable in the hand and has an impressive design instantly becomes someone’s favourite pen. So the next time someone is searching for a pen to use, your companies pen is the first one they reach for.

Create something people want. An everyday object is best because the promotional product will be in use daily. This would include things like pens, notepads and cups or if you have a larger budget, mugs, USB memory sticks, etc. Figure out who your target audience is. You want to design products that target a certain audience. You probably don’t want to hand out items solely to a selected few and castoff others, so make sure to do some research and target the right trade show or conference to attend at.

Keep in mind that giving promotional items will lose you money but giving it to the right people will secure you a profit in the future.

Please welcome the newest addition to InviteRight…the Status Bar! This little guy plays a big role in enhancing the registration experience of your guests.

As I had mentioned in my previous post, EventIQ is very attuned to details and we’re constantly tweaking and improving InviteRight and all of our products. A crucial element to the registration experience that we are very attentive towards is immediate user feedback – when you click on a button you want to know right away if: 1) you have activated the action 2) your action is being processed. This is where the Status Bar really shines.

Now any time a green proceed forward button is clicked you will know right away that your registration information is being processed. There’s absolutely no chance for confusion nor the need to senselessly click the proceed button repeatedly (I’ll save you my rant on those repeated Elevator and Crosswalk button mashers!)

All improvements to the guest registration experience have been met with extensive testing. For example, the buttons on the Visual Floor Map likewise offers immediate feedback on such information as seating availability, and names of other seated guests. Most importantly our system allocates Table/Booth selection priority on a first come first serve basis right down to the very nanosecond! For events that can expect a mad rush of registration, InviteRight is well equipped to ensure a fair and equitable registration.

Immediate feedback is also important in the creation status of events. A similar progress bar appears whenever you click on the Save button when you are Creating your events, so you will know that all of your important changes have been committed.

At EventIQ, every step of your guest registration experience is important to us, and the Status Bar offers a logical and intuitive indicator that will help to reduce confusion during the registration process. This ultimately this will save you time and effort in having to answer fewer phone calls or emails from guests wanting to confirm their registration.

See, a little bit of smart design goes a long way!

Spring time is upon us and with it comes the excitement of change and renewal. Here at EventIQ we’re starting the season off with a fresh new look to Inviteright. If you’ve logged onto your account recently to create a new event or edit an existing one you’ll have witnessed the improvements first hand.
Our re-designed interface is even more intuitive than before, mirroring the look and format of the registration page that are used by your guests. The colour coordination and blocked off titles for each section allow for easy navigation and logical work flow from one area to the next. You’ll find creating your events even easier and faster than before! This new design will save you time, which makes it easier for you to create even more events in Inviteright.

I can attest to how this design has already made a tremendous impact on my setups with our clients. Every week I juggle between the creation of several new events so I spend a great deal of time within the Create status. With the smart new layout, my eyes move from one important detail to the next with ease. Now admittedly this may not seem as though it should warrant such enthusiasm, but believe me, as any event organizer will tell you, the success of any event is in the details, big or small. At EventIQ we place a great deal of emphasize on our attention to details, because the absence of such details can have a major impact on your Guest’s registration experience. The new design maps everything out cleanly and logically so that I won’t miss those details…and neither will you!

This is only the first of many improvements that we’ve made recently and I’m very excited to show them off in the coming weeks. You’ll learn about fantastic new features in InviteRight, and I’ll even uncover some old features you may have never known about before. Feel free to check out www.inviteright.com for yourself and take a look at all our new features.

The lull of winter is over, and we’re ready to spring into action, so let’s go!

We’re pretty good at giving you great tools to manage your tickets and registrations, but you’ll always be better at branding your own materials to fit your company’s image.  That’s why we’ve made it easy for you to customize your invitations and forms so that you can show off your own logos, colors and other branding that your guests will instantly recognize.

An easy way to do this is by creating your own theme.  You can upload your own header and footer that will appear on your invitation, registration and confirmation forms. Simply give the theme a name, category name, background color and upload the header and footer images.  You can create and save multiple templates, saving you lots of time when you want to re-send a new invitation but with the same branding. By creating your own theme, you can design the interface to look however you want it to and even make it have the same look and feel to your website. If you’re not the best designer or can’t make the design communicate to your attendee’s, you can contact us to help you build that perfect form for your event.

Of course, if you’re in a hurry or you don’t want to upload your own images, we’ve also got a huge library of pre-made theme templates to choose from.  Whether it’s a graduation, conference, seminar, golf tournament or even gala, we have that perfect theme to match that specific event. For more great tips on how to create the best looking forms for your invitations, visit our support pages.

To keep up with growth of media and technology, we seem to always have to update ourselves to the “new”. Something as straightforward as a business card needs a fresh new design once in a while.

With the emerging of QR Codes, we may see these more regularly in our everyday lives such as wherever advertising can be placed and that includes even business cards. Remember when having the phone number or fax number was the most important thing on a business card? Well, with a scan of the mobile phone on a QR code, you can go to any site with more detailed information about the contact such as to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, corporate website, etc. This allows you to connect instantly with the contact and have access to their social networking information. Instead of cramming all your information on a business card, you can now just put down the important information and store the detailed information on the site your QR code links to.

Since media and technology is always changing, will business cards be replaced? Videos replaced radios, DVD’s and Bluray’s replaced VHS’s, CD’s replaced cassettes and will the mobile phones replace business cards? Business cards are convenient to easily and quickly distribute and all the contact information is located right on the card. With technology though, we can just store the contact information on our portable devices.  Also, this would ideally also eliminate another resource of cutting down trees for the abundant amounts of business cards being made at a time. Is having a QR code on a business card a good idea and will business cards get replaced? Let us know what you think.