Egocentrism is something that we largely grow out of in childhood. There’s a famous test in developmental psychology called Piaget’s 3 mountains task (shown below). When you give it to 2-6 year old children, most of them fail. As soon
Instead of writing a silly post for April fools day, I’ve instead decided to highlight some fascinating academic research from MIT that looks at novel input mechanisms and issues of user control. This paper (pdf) was published at CHI a
It’s funny to think about how big a step back voicemail took when it moved from desktop answering machines to mobile phones. Image credit: Hold all my calls by Furryscaly Back in the 1980s, if you didn’t get to the
On User Involvement: On ROI: On PowerPoint: On Pricing: On playing catch-up: On software bugs vs usability issues:
Here’s a classic piece of psychology research that should get you thinking about the strangely malleable nature of human memory: Loftus & Palmer (1974) on the reconstructive nature of human memory (PDF). The research paper is pretty dry, so I’ll
Email verification is often needed as a step in user registration. It plays the role of an identity check – to confirm that the person registering genuinely owns the email address given. If you run a site that uses email
Back in January, Paul Thurston (@paulthurston) and Nick Marsh (@choosenick) gave a great talk on Service Design at UX Brighton. They make some really interesting points about the differences between UX & SD, and strategic (“thinking”) vs tactical (“doing”) work.
I’ve just finished setting up uxurls.com – a user experience aggregator. It’s a really simple popurls clone, intended for people who are too busy to set themselves up with their own RSS reader, or just fancy a quick glance at
Here’s a nice antipattern from the Odeon (UK), who show us how to annoy 99.9% of users in an effort to help the 0.1% who enter their email addresses incorrectly. So, here I am registering on odeon.co.uk… Oh look, I
Do you ever think about the impact of the experimenter effect (or Hawthorne effect) when you’re running face to face user research? Here’s a quick test. First, go and check your Analytics package to see how many users check your
If you’ve played either of the recent Call of Duty “Modern Warfare” games, you’ll be aware of the disturbingly realistic air attacks you can carry out on other players. Call of Duty 4 (Computer game): It seems that the grainy
→ From Evan’s article Ten Rules for Web Startups (2005). → Found via InspireUX.com
We all know that design influences people emotionally, but have you ever considered the possibility that possibility that design alone can actually influence the health of your users? This article by Steve Silberman on wired.com (August ’09) discusses the psychology
This lovely image from a recent Erskine Labs blog post reminded me of the charmingly tragic story of the Sinclair C5. Spurred on by his immense success in the computing industry with the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX spectrum, Clive Sinclair
I think we all “get” simplicity these days, but nevertheless this quote from Paul Graham really sums it up: It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity. You’d think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something
Well, it’s almost 2010, so I’m going to pre-empt the glut of 2009 retrospectives by getting mine out there first. In the past year I’ve written almost 100 posts on 90percentofeverything.com, and received over 400 comments. If there’s one thing
I admit that Google’s new “fade in” feature is pleasant in a bland sort of way, and seems to be a good move from a branding point of view – but what interests me is that they claim their Multivariate
Romeo and Juliet by Frank Dicksee When a barrier is placed between a person and their desires, those desires become intensified. This is because the barrier prevents them from experiencing their desires in the flesh – warts and all –
You may have noticed that posts 90percentofeverything.com have dried a bit lately. This is mainly because I’m doing various other cool things, including working on some super-secret projects at Madgex, spending more time with my family, and watching my 18
The default widget library supplied with Axure occupies an uncomfortable middle ground – it looks like it’s just badly designed high fidelity, rather than intentionally lo-fi. This sketchy Axure widget library by Kevin Wick gets around the problem by giving