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…

Stephen P. Anderson has spent his career focusing on improving the user experience from the perspective of psychology and human behavior.  Not long ago I was fortunate enough to sit down with him and talk about a project he had been working on.  The project was centralized around bring these things we often overlook or forget about human behavior, the psychology and science of it all.  He introduced me to Mental Notes.  A collection of cards used for brainstorming our way beyond the social norm, beyond building good products to crafting great experiences with those products. 

Last week I received a set of Mental Notes I had ordered.  I was hoping they could help me on some of projects by reminding me of some aspects of human behavior that I simply wasn’t thinking about at the time.  I can only say they far exceed my expectations.  The cards went into detail beyond what I thought, exploring new concepts I had not been aware of and enabled me to correlate that back to the issues surrounding the project I was working on.

I think there’s a very real problem where we come across all these great ideas but then we get into the project we focus on the basic usability things; we’re just getting the project done on time. We don’t leave time and we forget about all these really creative things that make our work exciting.

—  Stephen Anderson, Stephen Anderson on emotional design

For those in the Seattle area, you will be happy to know that Blue Flavor in association with IXDA Seattle will be hosting a free talk by Stephen Anderson on The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions at The Watercooler.  With any luck, Stephen will have some Mental Notes cards to show off, and perhaps some to sell.  I hope to see you there!