Let’s say I asked you to remember this list of words: Apple Table Peach Window Chair Pear Orange Fork Mango And then later on I asked you to reconstruct the list from memory. That is called a “recall” memory task. Now let’s say I bring you into a kitchen and ask you what items in…
Category Archives: usability
100 Things You Should Know About People: #83 — People Will Use Shortcuts Only If They Are Easy
Do you use keyboard shortcuts when you are typing on the computer? Do you have some you use, but not others? For example, as I’ve been writing my new book on my computer, I use the keyboard shortcuts for cut and paste about 100 times a day. But I never use the keyboard shortcut to…
100 Things You Should Know About People #79 — People of Different Ages Have Different Error Strategies
Let’s say you study two people using a smartphone that has an advanced still and video camera. One is 22 years old, and the other is 47 years old. Neither of them has used this smartphone/camera before. You give them a set of tasks to do. Will there be a difference between them? Will they…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #77 — Not All Mistakes Are Bad
You buy a new digital camera and you start learning how to use it. Chances are that in the first few days of using it you will make a lot of mistakes –press the wrong buttons, forget where things are in the menus, and so on. We tend to think that mistakes are bad and…
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: #61 — People Learn Best By Example
Let’s say you are a marketing person and you are going to send out an email to your customers about a new product offering. And let’s assume that you use a web application like MailChimp to create and distribute your emails. Here are some directions from the MailChimp web site on how to build an…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #60 — Cognitive “Loads” Are The Most “Expensive”
You are paying bills at your online banking website. You have to think about what bills need to be paid when, look up your balance, decide how much to pay on your credit cards, and push the right buttons to get the payments processed. As you do this task, you are thinking and remembering (cognitive),…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #35 — People Make Mistakes
I used to collect computer error messages. It was kind of a hobby. I’ve got a great collection of them, some of them going back to the old character based computer screens. Most of them are not error messages that were trying to be humorous. Most of them were written by computer programmers that were…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #34 — Too Much Stress Results In Poor Performance
A few days ago I found myself in a hotel room outside of Chicago with my 19 year old daughter moaning and sometimes howling in pain. She’d been sick for a week, each day with a new symptom, and this morning her eardrum felt like it was going to burst. We decided that I should…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #33: Bite-Sized Chunks Of Info Are Best
I am about to head to Portugal for a week, and I was interested in exploring different possible destinations in Portugal. I may not have much time for touring (I’m going to speak at the UXLX conference there), but if I did have time, where should I go? I have to admit to pretty much…