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.
If you have more than one option and the choices are functionally the same then choose the simpler option.
Mental processing in your user is similar to processing in a computer – the more processor you devote to different processes, the slower and less responsive it will become. Try not to distract your user too much with flashing images and animations unless that’s exactly what they’ve come to see.
Hick’s Law states that the time is take to make a decision increases as the number of choices increases. If you give your user too many options then you site or application may become too time-consuming to be of use.
Be careful what you ask from your users – if you’re not specific enough, then you could easily end up with the wrong result. Try using two fields for ‘First name’ and ‘Surname’ instead of just one for ‘Name’ – the results you’d get from the second option would vary too wildly to be of …
Always remember that beauty in design is a direct result of simplified function.