Author: Susan Weinschenk
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4 STEPS TO DESIGNING A GREAT USER EXPERIENCE
If you want to design a great user experience for your product you have to first create a great conceptual model design that either blends well with the users’ current mental models and/or helps them create a brand new mental model. Instead of jumping into detailed user interface design, I challenge you to do high…
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Our Top 5 Most Popular Posts
We are always interested in which of our blog posts are the most read. Below is a list of the top 5 from reviewing our analytics of the blog. I thought the post about all capital letters and whether they are inherently harder to read would be in the top 5 and it is. Always…
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5 Things to keep in mind when designing for humans
These are not the only things to think about when designing, but these 5 are some of the most important principles: Remember: the more you know about people the better you design.
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100 More Things #150: WHEN PEOPLE FEEL CONNECTED, THEY WORK HARDER
Gregory Walton is a professor at Stanford who has studied the important effects of belonging on behavior. In one of his experiments, Walton (2012) found that when college students believed they shared a birthday with another student, they were more motivated to complete a task with that student and performed better on the task than…
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100 More Things #149: OXYTOCIN IS THE BONDING CHEMICAL
Singing and theater are favorite hobbies of mine. At various points in my life I have sung in a choir, played in concert bands, played in a marching band, played and sang in jazz ensembles, and acted and sang in musical theater productions. It’s great fun on many levels, but one of things that makes…
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100 More Things #148: SURPRISE, BUT NOT SHOCK, ENCOURAGES SHARING
In his book Contagious, Jonah Berger talks about New York Times online articles that get shared. Articles that had elicited strong emotion, whether positive or negative, were shared the most. Jennifer Aaker talks about emotion and passion as being components of what makes messages go viral in her book The Dragonfly Effect.In his research, Teixeira…
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100 More Things #147: JOY AND SURPRISE GRAB AND HOLD ATTENTION IN VIDEO ADS
Teixeira’s research shows that joy and surprise are the emotions that keep people watching a video ad. Because people don’t like ads and want to skip them, ads that stimulate both joy and surprise early on are the ones that grab and hold attention best. Teixeira used software that analyzes facial expressions to research the…
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100 More Things #146: PEOPLE DON’T LIKE VIDEO ADS
Companies spend a lot of money on video marketing and video advertising, so it’s not surprising that there’s a significant body of research on these subjects. Thales Teixeira from Harvard Business School is one of the people conducting research on video ads.People are inundated with advertising: TV ads, billboards on the road, ads at the…
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100 More Things #145: EMOTIONS ARE CONTAGIOUS
I recently went to an improv theater performance. I’d had a busy week, and it was fairly late at night. I was tired and not that excited to be there. In fact, I’d been thinking of not going at all. As the room began to fill up before the performance started, I noticed that almost…
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100 More Things #144: CHANGE THE STORY AND YOU WILL CHANGE THE BEHAVIOR
In his book Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, Timothy Wilson describes a large body of impressive research on how stories can cause longterm behavior change. Wilson has people rewrite a self-story. He calls this technique “story-editing.” Story-editing has been used to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder and teens at risk. The…
