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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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. … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading