The Institute for Government has released some excellent reports on Influencing Behaviour through Public Policy. They explain and provide case studies for concepts that show how behaviour can be influenced – all of which is relevant to designers / UX professionals.
NMA report that French Connection are launching a click-to-buy store within YouTube.
I love the new recipe pages created by one of my favourite brands, Abel and Cole. They not only show a great recipe but offer persuasive reasons to choose their products and support their purchase journey by listing the ingredients at the bottom making it easy to add them to your basket.
Foursquare received industry attention again this week after McDonalds announced a Foursquare campaign they ran had resulted in a 33% increase in footfall in one day. This was quickly refuted by ReadWriteRead who showed that this couldn’t possibly be true and in fact the statistic referred to check-ins, but this is still great publicity for the location based app.
I enjoyed this old clip from Yes Minister showing how (if you are unscrupulous) you can get the answers you want from a survey.
Adidas ran a social media & online PR campaign to launch their new football boots. This involved flying Footballer of the Year, Lionel Messi, into 3 locations in East London which were announced through official teasers on their Facebook page throughout the day and on news sites with inevitable noise on Twitter. The event turned out to be a partial disaster, with the organisers cutting short the first location and not even making it to the last because of crowd control issues. Regardless of the online coverage, for the many kids that turned up and were disappointed, this is surely a dent in their perception of both the adidas and Messi brands.
And finally, Twitter announce their interface redesign which will be rolled out over the next few weeks. It aims to make it easier to view embedded media, related content and user profiles, extending the interface into two panels. This will hopefully provide an improved experience for those using the website rather than 3rd party Twitter apps.
Jen Williams 