How do you make decisions? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably answer that you pride yourself on weighing the pros and cons of a situation carefully and then make a decision based on logic. You know that other people have weak personalities and are easily swayed by their emotions, but this rarely happens to you. You’ve just experienced the fundamental attribution error — the tendency to believe that other people’s behaviour is due to their personality (“Josh is late because he’s a disorganised person”) whereas our behaviour is due to external circumstances (“I’m late because the directions were useless”).
Cognitive biases like these play a significant role in the way we make decisions so it’s not surprising that people are now examining these biases to see how to exploit them in the design of web sites. I’m going to use the term ‘persuasion architects’ to describe designers who knowingly use these techniques to influence the behaviour of users. (Many skilled designers already use some of these psychological techniques intuitively — but they wouldn’t be able to articulate why they have made a particular design choice. The difference between these designers and persuasion architects is that persuasion architects use these techniques intentionally).
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In a creative field like design, we face an undeniable truth: our wells of inspiration are bound to run dry from time to time. In those periods of imaginative downtime, we seek out sources that can help us return the creative flow to our working process, and get us “back in the game.” But when we need a quick recharge, where do we turn? Many of us have our favorite “go-to” places when we are victim to creative drought, though perhaps with a little help, our routinely chosen paths could change.
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Intellectual property rights are often confusing and sometimes the topic of heated debates. There are those who question the worth of creative products and projects, claiming design and art are something anyone can do, regardless of training, experience, or any inherent ability. As creatives, a deterioration of intellectual property rights is a dangerous possibility. By going public with our work, we have no recourse to prevent others from using our designs, our photos, or our other artwork without paying us or even offering proper credit.
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It’s nearly impossible to provide an accurate quote to a prospective web design client without first gathering information about what that particular client needs. Some designers do this in either a face-to-face meeting or over the phone, but more often, they have a questionnaire that prospective clients fill out. This is preferable for a couple of reasons, but the most important is probably that this document then becomes an integral part of the design process and is available to refer back to along the way.
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“Form follows function” is a widely accepted — albeit controversial — principle that most designers in a variety of disciplines have adopted since its inception at the turn of the 20th century. On the web, we commonly refer to function as usability which is the ease of use and navigation of a website in order to achieve user’s goals.
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The attention span on the Web has been decreasing ever since Google had arrived and changed the rules of the game. Now with millions of results available on any topic imaginable, the window to grab a visitor’s attention has decreased significantly (in 2002, the BBC reported it is about 9 seconds). Picture yourself browsing the Web: do you go out of your way to read the text, look at all the graphics, and try to thoroughly understand what the page is about? The answer is most likely to be a straight “no.” With bombardment of information from all around, we have become spoiled kids, not paying enough attention to what a Web page wants to tell us.
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Since the beginning of CSS3, Web designers have begun experimenting with different code-based solutions to add to design, and even to make up a design entirely. Even with older versions of CSS there are many design solutions that can be done with 100% code, no images necessary.
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Designing and indeed front-end development for a website that will have content edited by non-technical users poses some problems over and above those you will encounter when developing a site where you have full control over the output mark-up. However, most clients these days want to be able to manage their own content, so most designers will find that some, if not all, of their designs end up as templates in some kind of CMS.
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Years ago, the online design community was a thriving conversationalist — of sorts — through the comment sections across the community. It was through leaving meaningful comments that the thought-provoking ideas presented and discussed in a post were examined by others whose perspective and experiences may have provided them with a slightly different take. The continued dissection and discussion of the topic expanded the dialog far beyond the initial post, challenging and redirecting ideas and allowing dialog to evolve; it showed a certain level of critical thinking from within the community.
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Since the beginning of time people have exploited the human desire to sin, to achieve their goals. Finding out what causes people to sin helps us understand the triggers which prompt people to take an action. The Web has made it even easier to exploit these tendencies to sin, in order to build user engagement and excitement about your service or product.
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