June 2009
An Event Apart, an intense two-day conference for standards-based web design, has announced the latest addition to the stellar speaker line-up for its upcoming event in Boston, taking place June 22–23, 2009.
Joshua Porter, interface designer and founder of Massachusetts-based Bokardo Design, will present the session ‘Designing with Psychology in Mind,’ exploring the web designer’s latest role as “psychologist,” thrust upon the industry by Twitter and its social software brethren. Porter will discuss how to take advantage of known psychological principles to not only get people clicking, but possibly get into their minds, as well.
At Bokardo Design, Porter designs simple, usable interfaces for clients from startups to corporate giants. He also consults with companies suffering from severe cases of feature creep or those who merely need objective advice.
Porter wrote the book Designing for the Social Web and speaks regularly at web design conferences and events around the world. Since 2003, he has written the popular design blog bokardo.com, which is quite well known for making design issues either easy to understand or more complicated than ever.
“As designers we must remember that behavior comes first. Always. The quirky, the obscure, the vain, the annoying, the wonderful—we need to observe human behavior if we are to support it in design,” says Porter.
“If people collect things, how can we support that? If people are vain, how does that effect the design?”
Porter points out that many successful social software products and services focus on the collection of social objects such as photos, bookmarks, friends, vampires. He believes this is no accident. People collect things as a natural matter of course, and software that supports the behavior will naturally be more successful.
Porter explains, “Specific behaviors like collecting or searching for status aren’t going away anytime soon. So instead of decrying such behavior, we need to embrace it! We need to figure out how it fits within the context of what we’re building. Sometimes it won’t. But we can’t dismiss it. If we are really serious about designing great software, then we have to give this type of behavior some thought, considering whether we should or whether we can damp it or amplify it.”
For more information, go to http://www.aneventapart.com.
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