Monkeynotions

I have been learning that in design listening really isn’t so much as what is said but what isn’t said. I think I learned this from my past Creative Director when I first started at AOL; it was my first real job in Design. It was so different from what I had learned in school. Basically how do we take all that methodology and do it faster, quicker, better, and get a ton of stakeholders on board?

He also spoke a different language … he said this “feels like” or “it’s like…” human analogies and terms that were different than the scientific Jakob Nielson School of thought (3 out of 4 people do not see ‘Logout’). At first I was very confused all the time and wondering what exactly he was looking for, what did I need to do to translate into that feeling or impression he was looking for to make him happy.

I’ve been learning that scientific terms are good; however, qualitative patterns, human language, and human terms are better? Why? It’s the way people know how to express themselves. This means that looking for qualitative patterns require me to learn how to listen to what isn’t being said and increase my observation skills.

While business and science love to quantify actions and clicks, it’s unfortunate that those are the things that people do not remember when they love something. Perhaps the CEO of Raytheon had it right:

“We remember one-third of what we read, half of what people tell us, but 100% of what we feel.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.