I actually can’t remember how I came upon the book Gamestorming. I probably read a review of it on one of the blogs I regularly read. I ordered the book and started reading it right before I was going to leave for a trip to meet with a client team. The book is full of…
Category Archives: design
Do people have relationships with forms?: Podcast with author Caroline Jarrett
I met Caroline Jarrett in 2010 in Lisbon Portugal, where we were both speaking at a conference. Caroline is a usability consultant in the UK, and she specializes in designing forms. She has a great book, Forms That Work. In this podcast Caroline and I have a fun conversation about designing usable forms. You can listen…
7 Tips to Get A Team To Implement Your Recommendations: Tip #2
This is the 2nd in a series on how to get a team to implement your recommendations. Tip #1 was: Hide Your top 3 Recommendations. Now for Tip #2. The context is that you want to see your recommendations implemented. How can you present them to a team so that they will be acted on…
7 Tips to Get A Team To Implement Your Recommendations: Tip #1
Have you ever found yourself in a meeting trying to convince a team to implement your recommendations? Perhaps you are a web designer who wants the team to move ahead with your design, or you are a user experience professional who has recommended a re-design to make a product more usable. You work hard and…
Losing Sleep Over Poor Design
I’m writing this from the CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) conference in Vancouver, BC. I’d like to enjoy Vancouver, but I’m having a hard time doing so because I have a Sony clock radio in my hotel that keeps waking me up. The alarm goes off at 5:50 am every day. I can’t figure out how to…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #93 — Titles Provide Context
Read this paragraph: First you sort the items into like categories. Using color for sorting is common, but you can also use other characteristics, such as texture or type of handling needed. Once you have sorted the items, you are ready to use the equipment. You want to process each category from the sorting separately….
100 Things You Should Know About People: #73 — 1st Screening About Trusting A Website Is Based On The “Look And Feel”
There isn’t a lot of actual research on trust and website design. There are a lot of opinions, but not necessarily much real data. Research by Elizabeth Sillence and team (2004) provides some solid data, at least in regard to health websites. Sillence researched how people decide whether and which health websites to trust. Participants in…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #52: People Create Mental Models
Imagine that you’ve never seen an iPad, but I’ve just handed one to you and told you that you can read books on it. Before you turn on the iPad, before you use it, you have a model in your head of what reading a book on the iPad will be like. You have assumptions about…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #43 — People Expect Online Interactions to Follow Social Rules
When people interact with each other they follow rules and guidelines for social interaction. Here’s an example: Let’s say I go to a café and I see you sitting by the window. We know each other, and so I come up to you and say, “Hi Richard, how are you doing today?” I expect you…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #36 — People are Inherently Lazy
Ok, I’ll admit it, I am exaggerating a little bit when I say people are inherently lazy. What I really mean is that people will do the least amount of work possible to get a task done. Is lazy another word for efficient? – Over eons of evolution humans have learned that they will survive…