In a recent article at A List Apart,  Patrick Lynch summarized (and enhanced) Don Norman’s hypothesis from his famous book ‘Emotional Design’. To quote:

Why attractive things work better
In psychology, emotional reactions to stimuli are called affective responses. Affective responses happen very fast, and are governed in an automatic, unconscious way by the lower centers of the brain that also govern basic instincts (food, fear, sex, breathing, blinking, etc.). Think of affective responses as the brain’s bottom-up reaction to what you see and feel. Cognitive responses are your brain’s slower, top-down, more considered responses. They’re governed by your personal cultural views, learning, experiences, and personal preferences that you are aware of and can easily articulate. Affective reactions assign value to your experiences; cognitive reactions assign meaning to what you see and use.
Affective and cognitive responses to visual stimuli are governed by a three-stage process in the brain, at visceral, behavioral, and reflective processing levels:

In his talk from 2003, Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at design that makes people happy. He names the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.

Digital marketing agency released a comprehensive Social Media playbook, and you can download it free from Scribd.

360i Social Marketing Playbook

Some quotable bytes:

If today consumers can easily avoid commercial messages they deem intrusive,  annoying, or irrelevant, then the central way to  engage them is to engage with them. Listen to them.  Respond to them. Take their ideas seriously. Change in response to their interests

Social media are highly effective in the middle of the purchase funnel, to improve brand or product consideration during the period when consumers are gathering opinions and listening to word of mouth

(via KONIGI) Joshua Porter’s “Designing for Sign Up” presentation from Webstock, 2009, does a great job of focusing the task of sign up on user motivation and anxiety, and thinking through scenarios that help remove barriers to entry or ‘frictions’. Porter describes the entire experience leading up to the call to action, providing excellent examples that ease users into sign up.

Matthew E. May is the author of “In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing“. A quick synopsis of his concept on elegance of incomplete ideas is published as a change this manifesto, “Creative Elegance: The Power of Incomplete Ideas” [PDF]. To quote -

It is nearly impossible to make it through a typical day without exchanging ideas. Whether deciding on something as simple as a restaurant for a long overdue night out, or as complicated as the design of an entirely new product, we are forever involved in sculpting and selling our creative thought. Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete, and certain. But what if that’s wrong? What if the most elegant, most imaginative, most engaging ideas are none of those things?

Experiencing elegance is nearly always this profound. The unusually simple yet surprisingly powerful nature of any elegant this or that gives us pause, and the impact changes our view of things, often forever. Elegance delivers the power to cut through the noise. It can shake markets. It can change minds, and mindsets, as you’ve just witnessed.

When I read the manifesto, couple of things came to my mind. First, the context of visual abstraction level in comic books and use of graphics in learning contents. It’s an eternal dilemma for comic book artists of different genre- what should be the abstraction level of the illustrations? How much it should mimic reality? (Check out Scott McCloud’s TED presentation on understanding comics). Second thing came to my mind, this is THE reason why we almost always get disappointed by watching the silver screen rendering of a favorite novel. Words are the ultimate level of abstraction from visuals, which allows us to construct an image in our mind from the ‘incompleteness’ of the words. After reading a novel when we watch the movie version, a cognitive dissonance is inevitable.

What kind of abstraction level is OK for learning content design?

Jeff Veen from Small Batch, Inc., presented a short and sweet session over at Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco in information graphics and data visualization. During the talk, he focuses on some of the classic examples of information visualization (John Snow pump, Minard’s map, the tube map, Gapminder’s dynamic data visualizations etc.), the issue of “decorative” data versus accessible and usable data, and the emerging challenge to empower lay people to participate in visualizing and analyzing their own data.

3 Key points stood out for creating a good infographics:

1. Find a story in the data
2. Assign different visual cues to each dimension of the data
3. Remove everything that isn’t telling the story

Also read: Infographics: Primer for Learning Content Designer

Found via: information aesthetics