Temptation Bundling and Commitment Devices are rather like the carrot and the stick of personal motivation; Temptation Bundling is where you only allow yourself a particular treat when you’ve done something you don’t particularly like doing (like only watching your favourite trashy tv soap while working out at the gym). Whereas Commitment Devices are ways …
Apps, websites and other softwares should be available to everyone regardless of their abilities; a system should work equally well for a sighted person using a standard mouse and screen, as it should for a blind person using a Braille output or screen reader. There are other issues too; audio cues won’t work for deaf people, features that …
Whenever the subject of information flow in forms was raised I discovered conflicting evidence for vertical or horizontal flows, ordering and grouping. In trying to establish the definitive answer I carried out three different user tests: a sort test where users were asked to arrange data into a two-column structure, a flow direction test where users were asked to …
Back in the 1970’s, 3 friends clubbed together to buy themselves a TV for the house they shared. Each of them managed to save £10 for the TV so out they went. Eventually they came across a shop that had, in the window, an excellent model with 3 preset channel buttons plus 1 spare. It …
I’ve been doing some accessibility testing recently and came across WebbIE 3 If you’re testing against visual impairments then it’s worth checking WebbIE 3 out. In their own words: “WebbIE re-presents the information from a web page in an accessible format suitable for a screen reader.” Basically, this browser will strip pages down to just the content …
We judge our past experiences almost entirely by their peaks (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended. A group of doctors were considering how to make colonoscopies less painful and uncomfortable but reached the conclusion that, while it was not actually possible to make it less uncomfortable because of the nature of the procedure and …
Forms are an integral part of the internet – they’re interesting things too. Forms can be used to help people engage more with your site/application ranging from requesting an email newsletter to signing up for your shiniest, most expensive membership deal. The problem is that so many people get it wrong when they design and …
The other day I was reading something that happened to mention Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was a 17th-century English philosopher. He saw humans as ego-driven, power-hungry machines whose seeming good intentions all mask entirely self-serving motives. The impact of this idea was so strong that even today, more than 300 years later, we still find it …
Read more ““The ‘Free’ Issue” or “How 17th Century Philosophy Affects UX””
As with most mornings, this morning’s trawl through my Twitter feed, emails and blog subscription turned up lots of stuff about accessibility, UX, design and web development but there was one thing that caught my attention more than everything else. http://uxmag.com/strategy/why-we-need-storytellers-at-the-heart-of-product-development Having skim-read this article, one thing occurred to me – we don’t just need …
Similar to ‘Interference Effects’, this is a measure of how much relevant to irrelevant content you have on a page. More ‘signal’ and less ‘noise’ is better.