Author: Susan Weinschenk
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What Makes a City Usable?
Last week I was in Portland Oregon for the Usability Professional’s Association Conference. It’s my second time in Portland, and I was struck again with how comfortable Portland feels. A common phrase I kept hearing on this trip while talking with people from the conference was, “Have you been to Portland before? It seems like…
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7 Ways Mr. Fire Can Use Neuro Web Design to Turn Up The Heat
Dr. Joe Vitale is Mr. Fire and when I got an email from him saying “I love your book” we talked first by email and then by phone. Joe interviewed me for his subscriber base, and during the interview he asked if I had looked at his site from a Neuro Web Design point of…
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5 Steps to More Creativity Using Brain Science
Want to be more creative? Whether you are an artist, writer, scientist, web designer, marketer, sales person or business executive, being more creative means you’ll come up with more and better ideas and have more fun while you are doing it. If you want to have more creative ideas you need to work with, not…
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Be Like Obama
An article from Time on April 2, 2009 describes how President Obama used a secret group of behavioral scientists to craft his campaign, and how he continues to use the group to implement policy changes in the government and consumer changes in behavior. This secret group includes many of the well known names in the…
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Use Community to Encourage Self Service
I was speaking today with a friend/colleague about their project to try and get people to use a support website for technical help rather than call the help desk. She asked me how they could get people to use the website instead of call in. People will call in if the help desk is really…
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A Quick Summary of Some Interesting Research
Now that March is here, I thought I’d summarize and link to some great research I found during the last month…. There are gender differences in brain activity when people view something the describe as beautiful. For men it is the right hemisphere that is active, but for women both right and left hemispheres light…
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Sell with Stories
It’s all about stories. Finca is a micro loan company. You give them some money and they loan it to people around the world who are trying to improve their lives. It’s a great organization doing vital work. Their website has good photos, but they could be even more effective if they would focus focus…
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A University Gets Neuro Savvy
With the economy the way it is right now I am guessing that colleges and universities are doing whatever they can to attract and keep students. Perhaps that is why we are seeing what is obviously a lot of effort being put into university websites. Even small, less well known colleges. I happened upon one…
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New Research Shows Herd Behavior When Shopping Online
In my book, Neuro Web Design: What makes them click, I have a chapter on Social Validation: When we are uncertain we look to others to see what our behavior should be. Now some new research tests this idea online. In a series of research studies by Chen (see end for full reference), visitors to…
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Don’t Personalize: Cluster Instead!
In a TED video filmed in 2004 and published in 2006, Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink and Outliers) talks about human variability. The talk is entitled “What we can learn from spaghetti sauce” because he discusses the evolution of commercial spaghetti sauces from only a few varieties to hundreds (at the time of the filming…
