I saw something in my facebook feed that I hadn’t seen before: a media player for an entire album. I had a quick listen and really liked what I heard. All the links point to bandcamp, where you can purchase the release.

$5? I clicked buy without thinking about it much.

The payment options are good: I can use a card or paypal, thereby avoiding entering my card details. The price is the same regardless of format. Once I had paid, the download started automatically.

If I had one criticism, I’d say that the price should be advertised in the facebook player: that might have tipped the balance for some people.

Well done bandcamp for designing the player, Asthmatic Kitty for the music and the progressive pricing (and I suppose facebook for allowing this kind of media in the news feed!). If only other labels would wake up to these approaches: it really is about the experience.

Can anyone figure out the new pricing without tilting their head? I suppose you could print it… but that rather defeats the point of this whole computer business doesn’t it?

I’ve recommended dropbox to a lot of people, but groups who start using it usually end up wondering if they can really afford to pay quite so much for every single user ($99 p/a).

When exploring the pricing on their site, I came across this voting system. I hope they act on it: its a great way to keep your users happy.

Our brains have ways of explaining and resolving this (cognitive dissonance), often telling ourselves little fictions to protect our egos:

“Oh… that will never happen to me.” or “That’s just the way (insert individual name) behaved this once. “

I think that this problem weighs heavily on the design world: designs are so often a product of how we imagine or desire people will use our designs, as opposed to how they actually do use them (see previous post).

UX design attempts to be objective about this (through research and testing), but the subjective attitude is so deeply entrenched in all of us that it’s hard to counter. As our industry matures I hope we’ll slowly change our ways.

By asking myself and a team:

how can you assume that? Have you seen this behaviour, or did you imagine it?

– we can start to deconstruct the assumptions that we’re imposing on a design.

Articles like this one from Flow are a good way forward: 4 ways to combat usability testing avoidance

Do you know of any other resources for ‘resetting the brain’? Comments welcome.

(taken from the excellent XKCD)

Nothing quite illustrates the discrepancy between what users get and what they want like this diagram.

I’ve been very frustrated by the glacial progress made in how to financially credit creators online. The music biz is badly in need of an alternative way to show your appreciation for the music you like (one that’s not buying the album!).

Flattr seems to be a good way forward. It works like this: imagine every time you clicked ‘like’ on facebook, a share of a fixed monthly donation was given to the creator. This overcomes the experience barrier that’s held micropayments back: instead of payment forms, a single click will suffice. You don’t even need to care about the amount.

Any money not used from your fixed monthly donation is given to charity. All round goodness! Good to see the pirates are still ahead of industries (the creators are ex-pirate bay).

Users don’t care about an artist’s tour dates in general when searching, they only care about the ones that apply to them.

I’ve been waiting for something like this for a while, although I’ve no idea why it thinks I’m in Crowthorne, or where that is! Upcoming and last.fm do something similar, but you need to be quite invested already to be notified.

Really looking forward to it.

http://2010.uxbrighton.org.uk/

I wonder if this little icebreaker actually works on the public. How much freedom do the employees get to choose what it says? Its a nice way to transform anonymous, mundane interactions into something more, but does it work?