NEW YORK — Have you ever tried using an app once, only to immediately hit “delete” because it made your brain hurt?
Firat Parlak, founder, Awesome UX & UI Design Agency+, and his company are taking an innovative approach to app development to fix just that.
“How we can be responsible as UX [user experience] designers? We have responsibility when it comes to humanizing tech,” Parlak said at Inman’s Hacker Connect conference.
What’s missing is attention to emotional intelligence, which can accomplish or address the following when baked into design:
- Make info easy to scan (users can’t multitask)
- Account for user mistakes
- Make up for the unreliability of human memory (you can’t trust it)
- Play to human emotions and senses (UI — user interface — sounds and UI animations)
- Understand how decisions are emotional not logical
While normal app design comes from a visual and logical standpoint (think Post-its, asking questions and conducting interviews) Parlak is designing with neurosicence, using EEG (electroencephalogram) tech that reads brain signals and can extract quantitive data. This method puts the human first, Parlak argues.
In a world and industry where apps are dime a dozen, constantly being introduced, revamped or eliminated, smaller developers and startups trying to compete with well-established real estate industry apps like Zillow Premier Agent, Redfin, Homesnap, realtor.com, Quicken Loans and Trulia might take heed of the role emotional intelligence can play in an enjoyable UX.
The video below, displayed at the Hacker Connect presentation, shows how Parlak’s company is using EEG headsets to collect brain signals and inform UX.
Awesome UX & UI Design Agency+ has guided 130 tech startups and was first design program for a prison community at San Quentin State Prison.
Parlak said when he’s teaching design to inmates, one of the first things he realized was: How do you teach user experience to someone who someone who’s never held a cell phone?
By starting with the human experience.
Hacker Connect was created by and for the real estate technology community at the beginning of Inman Connect. The group includes 370 engineers, developers, designers, product managers, database architects, webmasters, and technology executives from across the real estate space.
