Evolve Lighting

UX concept

Background

Very much simplified User Experience Design has two main objectives. Firstly to reduce negative experiences and secondly to amplify or create positive experiences.

Avoiding negative experiences is also known as good usability. Most usability issues are a result of functions or design decisions that were made at some point in the process. The best time to fix them is at the very end of the process - and we'll do that in our testing and bug fixing stage.
To create or amplify positive experiences is a lot harder and more abstract. And to have them in full effect they need to be considered right from the start. Therefore we've developed a concept in harmony with the look and feel with which we'd like your website to have a positive emotional effect on your users. Which in return will create a more engaging and more memorable website.

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Concept description

Our main goal was to make the theme of lighting come alive. And we thought what better way, than to give people the possibility to change the direction the light is coming from.

To indicate the light direction we want to use two effects.

Shadows under floating boxes. We've already included boxes like that into the look and feel. They are a common style that works well for the technical, professional and innovative feel we are aiming for. And even without the effect these would serve their purpose well.
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White spot-light area on a light grey background. This gradient makes the area around the cursor appear a tiny bit lighter. It's very important to make the effects subtle, yet noticeable. It should encourage users to play around with it but should never distract from the content.

The fact that every user input changes the site will be surprising to a portion of users. This unexpected website-behaviours will result in a moment of interest. (Why is this happening?) And hopefully users will play around with it for a second before continuing with the task they came to the website for.

All this has the potential to create a more memorable interaction that is linked to a positive emotional memory.

While this works quite well with cursor input we have to change the effect for mobile devices. On mobile we'd only use the device's accelerometer to change the shadows. We'll probably not display the white spot-light like area on mobile devices.