Behavioral Science, Brain Science, And Design, By Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D.
If you stand in any aisle in any retail store in the USA you will be inundated with choices. Whether you are buying candy, cereal, TVs, jeans, you name it, you will likely have a huge number of items to choose from. This is because people want lots of choices. If you ask someone whether …
Do you ever feel like you are addicted to email or twitter or texting? Do you find it impossible to ignore your email if you see that there are messages in your inbox? Have you ever gone to Google to look up some information and 30 minutes later you realize that you’ve been reading and …
I know it’s popular to think that you are multi-tasking, but the research is clear that people actually can’t multi-task, with one specific exception. One thing at a time — For many years the psychology research has shown that people can only attend to one task at a time. Let me be even more specific. …
Continue reading “100 Things You Should Know About People: #7 — You Actually Can't Multi-Task”
Try this task — Think back to a particular event that happened at least 5 years ago. Maybe it was a wedding, or a family gathering, or a dinner you went to with friends, or a vacation. Pick one for our purposes here, and remember the event. Remember the people, and where you were and …
Continue reading “100 things You Should Know About People: #6 — You Reconstruct Your Memories”
You are thinking of buying a TV. You do some research on what TV to buy and then you go online to purchase one. What factors are involved in this decision making process? It’s not what you think — I cover this topic in my book Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? You like …
Why you should believe the research in this blog post even though it’s from 1981 — Whenever I talk about “old” research some people start right away to dismiss it. It’s easy to think that research done in the 1990s or 1980s, or heavens! the 1970s! couldn’t hold any interest for us now. I heartily …
7 + – 2??? 3 or 4??? Those of you who have been in the field of usability or user experience for a few years have probably heard the phrase “The Magic Number 7 Plus Or Minus 2”. This refers, actually, to what I would call an urban legend. Here’s the legend part: Legend: “A …
Have you ever had to decide how wide a column of text you should use on a screen? Should you use a wide column with 100 characters per line? or a short column with 50 characters per line? It turns out that the answer depends on whether you want people to read faster or whether …
I’ve decided to start a series called 100 Things You Should Know about People. As in: 100 things you should know if you are going to design an effective and persuasive website, web application or software application. Or maybe just 100 things that everyone should know about humans! The order that I’ll present these 100 …
Continue reading “100 Things You Should Know about People: #1– You Have "Inattention Blindness"”