This post about positive flooding on Anne Zelenka’s blog has really stuck in my mind for some reason.
Firstly, even though I’m a dragon-hided cynic when it comes to ‘feel-good’ Hallmark-style managing, Anne’s core point is down-to-earth and practical – if you’re positive with your team, you’ll get positive back. So I’m tracking how often I say a even simple “Well done!” And it isn’t anywhere near often enough. Anne’s benchmark of five positive messages a day seems like a good starting point.
Secondly, it also applies to user experience. The lesson of del.icio.us and Facebook is that users will go through any number of clicks if each response is rewarding in some way. (Slightly more cynically, slot machines could be argued to work on the same psychological basis.) The end objective may even become irrelevant. This ties in nicely with Bokardo’s del.icio.us principle, probably the best social networking design principle ever conceptualised. And outlying all of this is the reminder that our users don’t owe us any headspace – we have to earn it.
I’m keeping all these thoughts in mind as we try and build our new ‘content organiser’ to leverage both the living expertise contained in nearly a hundred careers information and guidance professionals and the sheer bulk of ’stuff’ we have to offer people. not to mention the not insignificant numbers of users we already have. We’re getting somewhere and it’s exciting. But it’s not open for business yet. But I digress…
Speaking of user experience, Climb To The Stars has a great post on Satisfaction, a kind of user-interface feedback providing aggregator. I haven’t done much more than prod at it gently yet but I love the idea.
Filed under: design, management, user experience | Tagged: positivity, user experience, user experience design
