Joshua Porter talked about the various biases that people have and how being aware of them can make our sites more effective. You might want to encourage more people to sign up to your site, or to incourage people to behave constructively in a forum. Understanding our natural social biases can help you do this and it's not evil as long as you've got good intentions.

He opened by showing us a video of a lift experiment where a test subject copies what the other people in the lift are doing. This starts with the direction he's facing in the lift and ends with him taking his hat off, and even putting it back on when everyone else does. So, if people tend to do what the majority do, then on a social site we can show off our power users so they're more prominent and see as the norm and this will lead new users to mimic them.

People are more averse to loss than they are in favour of gains. So, avoiding a loss is a more powerful suggestion than gaining a benefit. It won't always be appropriate, but he suggested that you frame site features as avoiding a loss, if you want to make them more appealing.

One of my favourite biases was the ownership bias. We feel more strongly about things that we own. There was an experiment with two randomly chosen groups of people. One group was asked to say how much they would pay for a mug on the table and another group were given the mug for drinks while they did a range of activities, then they were asked how much they'd pay for it. The people who were given the mug, on average thought it was three times as valuable.

This lead him to talk about the sign up problem. When you're asking someone to sign up for your service, you're typically asking them to change their behaviour and stop using another service. As they currently feel like they own that service they think it's three times better than it really is. As we own the service that we're trying to make them use, we value our service about 3 times as much as we should. So, when you add these two affects together there is a nine times difference to overcome, so your new service better be really good indeed, or we try to cushion the amount of behaviour change that is required.

Someone suggested in the questions that using socialogy in this way was evil. Joshua countered it pretty well. It can be evil if you use it to sell evil things that people don't need. However, if you offer a service that you really believe in then you need to think about this stuff if you want to succeed.

If this sounds interesting, there are MP3s and transcripts of the dConstruct talks.

Photo credit to: Jason Garber.

If you know me then you may have been lucky enough to know my friend Peter Bamford. Pete died a few weeks ago shortly after having a heart operation. I’ve wanted to write something about him for a while, but it’s taken me a while till I felt like I could, and I know that I can’t write anything that will do him justice.

Pete was the most enthusiastic person I have every met and he threw himself into everything he did. Ever a geek, he overflowed with project ideas, and although he could never do all of them he had a bloody good go. Never satisfied with just doing one, he always had countless projects on the go. His latest projects included building an LED watch, making a website to help new musicians sell their work and creating visuals for music nights. This was alongside the actual paying work he took on as a freelance web and flash developer.

He didn’t let all this geekery distract him from what he knew was most important in life; his wife, family and friends. You couldn’t wish for a better friend and I know I am one of many who thinks that. He was one of the friendliest people I have ever met. He was genuinely interested in what everyone was doing. His enthusiasm really shone through, and you always felt better about yourself after talking to him. He had so many friends and knew so many people. Even if you hadn’t met him many times, his friendliness and excited enthusiasm made him stand out. He’s not the sort of person who you’d forget.

He wasn’t just friendly and excitable. He was there when you needed him. When I’ve been down, his wife Anna and him have been there for me. They made me realise how lucky I was to have such good friends and what a good place the world can be, even when times are tough.

With so many friends and projects I don’t know how Pete managed to keep up. It wasn’t unusual for a Pete weekend to involve travelling hundreds of miles, to several different cities so he could perform his visuals and still see all his friends and go to any events they’d organised. He always made sure he came to see my stuff when it was shown and I hope he knew how much I appreciated it.

As I expected, this short piece of writing doesn’t do Pete justice. He was a wonderful friend, I miss him, and I am a better person for having known him.

Aleks Krotoski gave a talk at d-Construct this year called 'Playing the Web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place'. This is my summary of what she said and the bits of her talk that I liked the best.

Aleks talked about the shared goals of the web and games industry, how we could learn from each other, but how we don't seem to talk much to each other. The games industry needs to learn to build better community and could learn a lot from what the web has accomplished. We need to learn to achieve the 'stickiness' that the games industry has acheived. I'm not completely sure what stickiness means, but I think it's about producing an engaging experience that brings people coming back for more.

One way to make the web more engaging would be to make it more playful. Games keep you playing by making you work towards a goal; dangling carrots and letting you acheive smaller goals along the way. They reward you with points and other incentives for doing well, and the good ones make you want to play longer and do better.

She also talked about how huge games had become and how some had been unsuccessful because people felt they were too big. People still want the freedom, so it's important to give the illusion of infitinte possibilites, but to funnel people towards a goal, while giving them the chance to explore around the edges.

I really like the idea of making websites more playful and fun. It's something that's too easy to forget. I'm also interested in how web sites use incentives to keep users coming back and encouraging them to use a site more.

Photo credit to: Cyberdees

When I first went freelance I created some origami business cards that included instructions on how to make the card into an origami crane. They were very well received, but people struggled to follow the instructions and very few were successfully turned into the form that had been intended.

So, to help people I've created some video instructions. This takes you step by step through the process and lets you return to any step that you might have missed the first time through.

You can find the video instructions here:

• Origami crane - video instructions