David Belman Wants Emotion

David Belman, one of the founders of Three Spot addressed the WWWW Art Director's Club conference and took us on a 10-year tour from 1997 -2007 of Web design.

And he's not happy about where we have ended up.

• Time spent online has dropped.
• The "character" of sites has flattened if not evaporated.
• We have given up on developing a branded user experience...

David is on to something. I just don't think that we have left the branded user experience completely behind. RGA was also at the podium later and shared their ubiquitous Nike work which is a best-practice branded user experience. There is a tremendous amount of sameness out there.

David ran Seth Godin's one second test: can we recognize brands in :01? It works when we look at an iPod but not so much when we look at Web sites. He cleverly compared NYTimes.com. the Washington Post.com and Miami Herald without their mastheads - hard to distinguish them apart.

David feels we have lost something in our discipline over the years - the impact and emotion. Navigation has become generic. Thousands of pages of content becomes an overwhelming vat of stuff.

43% of users start at the search field within a site. Is this a barometer of some type of failure in design?

Blogs miss out on creating a visual, emotional experience. His point is really about visual design but I think he's wrong. I would argue that the templatization of blogs is a small price to pay for the deomocratization of the publishing platform. And if David wants emotion, just read Birdie Jaworksi's post on her Star Trek convention with her son. I cried.

Still, David's recommendations are real and smart:

1. Make a promise and then keep it
2. Use what you've got (Use your brand equity like Tony the Tiger or VW cars)
3. Have a heart: Connect
4. User directed doesn't equal direction less: people wnat a narrative line
5. Delivering data doesn't equal delivering brand
6. Just because they did it, doesn't mean you should
7. Create an opportunity for users to have an emotional experience with someone they know

I am a big fan of Three Spot.

Comments

[MJ]

John, I enjoyed David's presentation too. Thanks for introducing him to me a few years back. It was compelling and thought-provoking, but I left thinking that the stakes are now too high with rampant attention scarcity. Methodically building brands and icons to soften the bumpy patches in product, pricing, etc. is not the modern marketplace. Your recent Volvo example is perfect. How much have they spent on their brand to build up some trust and admiration from you? All to lose it in one ill-conceived campaign!

For David, we may just be in a design slump while we sort out how to manage all of this information. Then again, maybe an MIA (Masters in Information Architecture)is the new MFA that replaced the MBA.

[Jim Dowling]

Great post John and fascinating stuff from David