Category: research
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Book Review: John Medina's Brain Rules
Here’s a quick review of John Medina’s book, Brain Rules. First the video, and then below that I have a short text review. John Medina makes no mystery of the 12 Rules. He has them listed on the back cover of the book. At first glance they look a little simplistic: Exercise — Rule #1: …
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #20 — Your Attention Is Riveted By Pictures Of People
Second only to movement (animation, video), pictures of a human face capture attention in any medium, including websites. Pictures of a human face not only capture attention, but keep the attention on that part of the screen even when the picture goes away. We start young — With some creative experiments it has been proven…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #19 — It’s a Myth That All Capital Letters Are Inherently Harder to Read
WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IS COMMONLY BELIEVED, BUT NOT TRUE — You read by recognizing the shapes of words and groups of words. Words that are in all capital letters all have the same shape: a rectangle of a certain size. This makes words displayed in all uppercase harder…
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Eyetracking Studies — 7 Traps to Avoid
In my last post I talked about eyetracking. I don’t actually do a lot of eyetracking work, but this past week I was asked to give a talk on a panel about eyetracking at the SES (Search Engine Strategy) conference in Chicago, so it is kind of on my mind. So one more post about…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #18 — What People Look At On a Picture Or Screen Depends On What You Say To Them
Eye tracking is a technology that allows you to see and record what a person is looking at, and for how long. One way it is used is to study web sites to see where people are looking on a web page, where they look first, second, etc. It’s a pretty interesting technology, one of…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #17 — Your Unconscious Knows 1st
You are shopping for a new computer and the salesperson you are talking to is offering you what seems to be a good deal. And yet there is a part of you that feels uncomfortable and isn’t sure if this is the right computer, or the right deal, or the right store for you. If…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #16 — The Ability To Delay Gratification Or Not Starts Young
You want to buy that Kindle, but you are thinking maybe you should wait for a while. Maybe you should see if the price comes down after the holiday shopping season, or maybe you should make sure that you have enough cash to pay all of your credit card bills before you spend money on…
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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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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…
