Author: Susan Weinschenk
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #31 — The Desire For Control And Choice Is Built In
I’ve just started reading Sheena Iyengar’s new book, The Art of Choosing. I’ve been a fan of Dr. Iyengar’s work for a while. She’s the author of the famous “jam study”, that I talked about in a previous blog. (I’ll do a book review of the new book in a future post). Early in the…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #30 — Our "strong tie" group size is 150 people
Evolutionary anthropologists study social groups in animals. One question they have been trying to answer, is whether there is a limit on how many individuals different species have in their social group. Robin Dunbar studied the relationship between brain (neo-cortex) size and the number of stable relationships that a species had in their social groups.…
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5 Lessons From Theatre You Can Apply to Web Site Design
I just finished a run with my local theatre group (I played Golde in Fiddler on the Roof), and I couldn’t help but make comparisons between putting on a theatre production and designing products, web sites, or anything where a team needs to create something together. 1. It takes a team – In order to…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #29 – Brand Names Talk To Our "Old" Brains
You are planning on buying a new TV. Will you buy a brand you recognize? Or will you go for the unfamiliar “no name” brand that is less expensive? What if you are buying luggage? Talking to the “old brain” — In my book, Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? I write about the…
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How To Test A Web Site Design In An Hour And On a Shoestring Budget
I have a friend who volunteers to be on an advisory board for a land trust conservancy organization. They have been designing a web site for the land trust. But they are all volunteers, and the organization doesn’t have a budget for web site design. They have a programmer donating her time to put together…
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Web Site Bloopers
I’m amazed by the continual “bloopers” I find on websites. Maybe my expectations are too high, but I expect major companies and organizations to fix issues they have with their websites. Here are a few of my favorites: This blooper from Hertz has been going on for months — look at the calendar, it’s wrong……
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #28 — Things that are close together seem to belong together
Do you want a quick and easy way to make any web page easier to use and more intuitive? If you want people to realize that two things “belong” together, then put them near each other (close proximity), and put other things a little further away. Sounds simple, right? Many usability and user experience principles…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #27 — We go below the "fold"
For the last year or so there has been a heated debate about “the fold”. The fold is the idea that there is a place on a web page that is the bottom edge of what people will see when they look at the page in a browser, and that in order to see anything…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #26 — Culture shapes our brains
My entire career I’ve been worried about the fact that most psychology research is conducted on 18-24 year old college students. What if the way 18-24 year old college students react, think, and behave is not the same as everyone else? We are drawing conclusions about PEOPLE in general, but only collecting data from a…
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Book Review of Steve Krug's Rocket Surgery Made Easy
I’ve been a fan of Steve Krug’s since his original book, Don’t Make Me Think, came out about a decade ago. (And Steve was kind enough to write an endorsement for my book, Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? when it came out last year). Steve’s new book is all about user testing of…
