Nick Finck

Mental Notes Jul 8th, 2010

So what do you do when you’re stuck?  As a user experience professional we often find ourselves in a situation where we are not sure how to turn good project into a great one.  Sometimes we find a standardized way of doing something and assume its the best way to do it.  Other times we find ourselves overlooking the possibilities of what could be.  Our jobs as user experience professionals is to consider the traits of human behavior and how to use that knowledge to produce desirable and persuasive experiences for those who use our products, websites, applications and more.  Thankfully now there are tools to help us through this process…

The User Experience and Psychology Jun 16th, 2010

Now it’s not good enough to just be usable. The design has to fit into peoples’ lives. It actually has to make people happy, and anticipate their needs.

—  Dana Chisnell, Beyond Frustration: Three levels of happy design

Dana Chisnell just published an article on the evolution of design and user research to include more attention to psychology and its role in the user experience.  It is called Beyond Frustration: Three levels of happy design. It is a great article with some great examples (TripIt, Netflix, ZipCar) and I highly recommend you check it out if you haven’t already.  Dana, if you’re reading this, keep publishing more articles like this, I love them!  (via ozinn)

Having seen many presentations on this subject by Stephen Anderson, and recently one by Aaron Walters, I find it very fascinating to see how things like psychology and emotion are starting to play a bigger role in how we think about our work.  Meanwhile I am looking forward to getting my set of Mental Notes, a creation by Stephen Anderson that promises to be extremely useful to our work.

Nick Finck on Radio Johnny Jun 14th, 2010

Recently I had the privilege and honor of being interviewed by the great Jeff Parks for Johnny Holland.  This was my first podcast interview in quite some time.  The conversation meanders between the philosophy of user experience, social media, corporate culture, the voice of the people, transparency & marketing, trust, failure and more.

I highly recommend you take an hour to listen to the full thing, even if you are not a UX professional there is still a great deal of take-aways on a business level in this interview.  In addition, at the end of the interview I make a personal announcement public for the first time.  I hope you enjoy listening to it!