Category: psychology
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The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #112 — More nouns = more clicks
If you’ve ever had to name a button on a website, app, or landing page, then you’ve probably had the moment where you’re going back and forth between options. Do I name the button “Sign up” or “Register”? Do I use “Donate Now” or “Be a Donor”? Is there a way to word requests, or buttons that encourages people…
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The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #111 — 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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Human Tech — Check out the new podcast
Just a quick announcement to let you know we’ve started a new weekly podcast called HumanTech. I’m hosting this podcast with my (amazing) son, Guthrie. Here’s the description at iTunes: HumanTech — A podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. We explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect…
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The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #109 — People Prefer Symmetry
Take any object—a photo of a face or a drawing of a circle or a seashell—and draw a line down the middle either horizontally or vertically. If the two halves on either side of the line are identical, then the object is symmetrical. People rate symmetrical faces as more attractive. The theory is that this…
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The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #107 — Laughter Helps Us Learn
Let’s say you decide to let your 18-month-old daughter play some learning games on your tablet. You have a couple of apps you’ve downloaded and you’re trying to decide which one to give to her: The one that introduces number and letter concepts with music but is pretty serious? Or the one that makes her…
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The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #106 — People Prefer Objects With Curves
Do people prefer logos with curves rather than logos with interesting angles? Have you noticed that your favorite smartphones, tablets, and laptops tend to have rounded corners?People prefer objects with curves—a preference that’s evident even in brain scans. This field of study is called neuroaesthetics. Bar and Neta showed concrete and abstract images with and…
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The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #105 — Video Games Increase Perceptual Learning
When my son was about 6 years old, we were shopping one day in a large department store when we walked by a section of demo video games. A group of 10-to 13-year-olds were intensely playing the games and my son was fascinated. I was one of “those parents” who didn’t allow any video games in…
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The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #104 — Shopping, Dopamine, & Anticipation
Let’s say that you’re the CEO of a large retail clothing brand. You have stores throughout the world, and you have a website. People buy shirts, pants, skirts, belts, and so on at your stores and at your site. If you want people to enjoy the shopping process with your brand, and to be excited…
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100 MORE Things
Some of you who read my blog may know about my book 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People. The book came from a series of blog posts by a similar name that I started several years ago. Thank you to everyone that helped that book be as successful as it has been.…
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The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #103 — Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder’s Age, Gender, And Geography
Which of these search engine home pages do you find most visually appealing?: Naver.com is the search engine for South Korea. Google is the search engine for lots of other places. Whether you found the Google design more visually appealing or whether you found the Naver design more visually appealing has a lot to do…
