Michael Leis

Got to see an excellent talk this weekend called Facing Up to the Uncanny Valley. If you’re not familiar with the term, it is a feeling of creepyness you get when a computer created person gets between 96% and 99% indistinguishably real. While we can project empathy and emotion on a simpler figure (think stick [...]

More and more I’m getting the feeling brand marketers hold the assumption that when a person clicks “like” on your page or site that it is the equivalent of subscribing to you, like email or Twitter. In reality, it’s a lot like this Flight of the Conchords song:

Ever get a gift from someone that you weren’t expecting? What’s your next reaction? If you’re like me, it’s the feeling like you have to do something in return. In game mechanics, Amy Jo Kim would call that the implied exchange. In terms of behavioral economics, it’s about surprising your customers with gifts like Zappos’ [...]

Everyone and their mom and their Website has decided that the best way to get social, or to get their content to go “viral” is by adding a button that says “share” on it. I’ve been going back and forth lately on the value of this word to people who may actually want to send [...]

In one of the sadder moments of SXSW, as I was feverishly typing away on a live post about Gaming the Crowd: Turning Work Into Play presented by Andy Baio when the WordPress iPhone app crashed. Worse yet, Mr. Baio has not published the slides. Hope he will soon, because he presented a lot of [...]

We are entering a world where controlling a computer goes beyond a keyboard and mouse. The Wii, iPhone, iPad, bluetooth, wi-fi, microsoft surface, multitouch. The computing paradigms are changing. We’re looking at clips of Iron Man and Minority report of future computing systems and interfaces. Topics around: being human, casual computing, gesture, physicality, sociality.

User Experience as a field, and Website creation in general can stand to learn a thing or two from distinctly old-media craft: namely screenwriting and film theory. This year, I’m lucky enough to be joined by Cindy Chastain in proposing to present the topic at SXSW 2010 on exactly how to do that. To expand [...]

IDEA2009 runs September 15 and 16 in Toronto where the world’s foremost thinkers and practitioners will gather: sharing the big ideas that inspire, and practical solutions that improve the way people’s lives converge with technology. Whether you’re a designer, strategist, writer, UX professional, IA, or working in anything interactive, you should attend IDEA2009. Create the [...]