UX Designers are increasingly being tasked with the design of an application that fulfils a perceived greater need, one that influences or changes behaviour. To do this effectively, you need to fully understand the motivation, ability and triggers that are required to meet your objective. This is the advice of BJ Fogg, a Stanford innovator and psychologist with a focus on behaviour change and persuasion via technology. He says if you’re missing one of these behaviours, change will not occur. For ...

There was a time, not so long ago, when South Africans wouldn’t touch Renault products. While this is a sweeping statement, and such statements can be dangerous, it is to most extents the truth. They were and are still fighting a poor brand image – fighting off criticism of poor quality, expensive to service and lethargic and disinterested after sales service. To its credit Renault South Africa (and Renault worldwide) have accepted wrongdoing in the past and have set about instituting ...

The Red Bull Stratos jump was pretty exciting. A man falling from space makes for compelling viewing. Smirnoff invested in technology that enabled a few disabled participants to create a music track, using the few movements they could make. This became a moving documentary, MindTunes. These Content Marketing examples come from brands that associate themselves with experience, with a sense of adventure or with connecting to other people. But what do you do if your brand produces Tupperware? Or blenders? ...

It sounds like the kind of pitch that would leave any investor with a disbelieving smile and a pile of cash stashed safely in a bank account that isn’t yours. You want to start an online social photo printing service? In South Africa? A country which has a tiny ecommerce industry and less than a million Instagram users — because the most-owned smartphone (BlackBerry) doesn’t even support the hipster app? Ha. Next, please. It sounds crazy, but it’s working for Nifty250. ...

The internet can sometimes be a confusing place -- I mean, how do you keep up with all the cats? Pet food brand Friskies has solution: rank them. The company recently launched the Friskies 50, which it is calling the "definitive guide to the most influential cats on the internet". The dedicated site measures each cat's social media reach, engagement rates across platforms as well as mentions in traditional news articles and slots them into the list accordingly. It also provides ...

Facebook's running a new survey about on its newsfeed. The topic, appropriately enough, is its newsfeed and whether or not the posts from pages on the platform feel like adverts. Once you've agreed to take the survey, which was spotted by AllFacebook's David Cohen, you'll see a dialogue box like the one below, which says: On the next few pages, you’ll see some Facebook posts. Above each post, there will be a statement and a rating scale. Rate how much ...

Both the next generation gaming consoles, Sony’s PS4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One are out and we’ve seen some really interesting performance comparisons. But what if you want a gaming machine that does more than just gaming and media playback? The custom AMD GPUs used in the PS4 and Xbox One are close to a Radeon HD 7870 or an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti at best. Meaning that none of these consoles can run games at resolutions higher than 1080p, let ...

The need for companies to have a presence on social media is pretty much accepted wisdom now. Sure there are a few outliers who think that it's all just a passing fad, but for the most part people get that they need to be there. The thing is, being on a social platform and using a social platform effectively are two very different things. In fact, new research suggests that a lot of brands are getting some fairly fundamental things wrong. ...

At Google’s I/O conference last month, the internet giant unveiled Android One – an initiative that will help connect (at least) the next billion people. This is not a charitable move. Rather, as the number of smartphones globally head to 2-billion in the next 12 months, everyone competing in the space faces the real risk of running out of growth. For Google, this risk is even more acute. Beyond the close on 2-billion people already using smartphones, the next billion ...

Communications continue to evolve alongside technology and shifts in social sharing. Mobile technology, for example, now dominates a marketplace that once relied on pagers and flip phones to spread information. Today's communication platforms include an array of social media channels that furnish countless opportunities to make yourself heard, so more and more people are boarding the bandwagon to spread their sentiments. Facebook and other sites sustain real-time connections between users who continually post and scrape information about ...