Walking through doors, and their effect on memory
Have you ever walked into a room and completely forgotten what you came in for? Judging by the various websites and Facebook pages dedicated to the phenomenon, “Roomnesia” is a familiar occurrence.
Recent research by Gabriel Radvansky et al [1] goes some way to explain this phenomenon and in doing so, suggests methods to overcome the temporary amnesia we suffer. In this post I’ll outline his research, his team’s findings and discuss the application to the field of user experience design. more »
In defence of Flash
Excuse the provocative heading – but there is a least one good reason to have Flash installed, and that’s Glitch.
Adobe’s recent headline-grabbing decisions to drop development of the mobile Flash player obviously hasn’t passed the developers of this great game by. One of the best things about Glitch is the sense of humour and clearly the good folks at Tiny Speck have this in spades. more »
Psychology and the user experience, Part Two
In the first part of the Psychology and the user experience, we discussed Weibull distributions and their application to site visit durations. In this next part, we’ll look at some psychological principles applicable to our field. The following concepts are unashamedly taken from Susan Weinschenk’s excellent article The Psychologists View of UX Design, UX Magazine:
Psychology and the user experience, Part One
In the first of two posts on psychology and the user experience, we consider a new piece of research that confirms what all web people already know: you only have seconds to make an impact. more »
Brighton UX Camp, Oct 1 2011
Despite the soaring October temperatures and clear blue skies, fifty or so committed (no jokes) UXers met for the first Brighton UX Camp at the fourth floor offices of Cogapp in Brighton.
Handy Finder Shortcut
I prefer to use the keyboard when possible, so I’m a sucker for keyboard shortcuts.
Mac OS X Finder certainly has its detractors but I find it useful enough to not bother installing alternatives.
One shortcut that I really think it missing though is moving keyboard focus to Finder’s Sidebar more »
Content Management Systems
Content Management Systems attract their fair share of criticism. Certainly, like any tool, they can be abused – but they can also work very well, allowing large teams to manage complex websites across different locations and timezones. Poor training and poor implementation is not the fault of the CMS vendor (necessarily).
But sometimes, you see some code that defies any sense. more »
Dumbing Down
I’ve recently been reviewing some remote usability test videos for one of our clients. This post isn’t about remote testing, usability tests or specific providers but the testing has thrown up some interesting findings. (Just as an aside, we use a variety of tools for the remote site tests – mainly whatusersdo.com and www.usertesting.com. Nate Bolt, co-author of Remote Research, has a great list of remote testing tools. If you’re interested, you should take a look at the Tools section at the website that accompanies the book.)
The sites I’ve been reviewing sell holidays on the water; sailing, river boats, power boats, etc. in some amazing locations. A few users had a bit of trouble with the language used on the sites, namely the words “berth” and “flotilla”. Not a huge amount of trouble but enough to worry them sufficiently for doubt to enter their minds. And doubt is not something you want to engender in customers who are preparing to spend upwards of a couple of thousand pounds.
Ways of Working
I came across a couple of great quotes on how to work with clients in my RSS stream today:
“If you do good work for good clients, it will lead to other good work for other good clients. If you do bad work for bad clients, it will lead to other bad work for other bad clients.” Michael Beirut via johnnyholland.tv
Not only does bad work lead to more bad work, it makes it increasingly difficult to argue that what you’ve been asked to do is bad.
And then from Jeffrey Zeldman (see blog post for full unedited version):
“I’ve trained my cats to think they’re in charge… Initially I feed them each half a small can of salmon… [then] I feed them each a half can of whitefish, exactly as I always intended to. They finish with gusto, convinced that they’ve won. I am so in client services.”Jeffrey Zeldman via Zeldman.com
And that’s what makes it so much fun!
On having good manners – a website Code of Conduct
User research, user experience design, user focused design; the aim is to always keep the user at the centre of the design process – and without doubt, this is an admirable goal. But always try to keep in mind – the user is a person too.
I access the internet all the time on my phone and my computer, and I never feel like a user. I feel like a personJulie Dodd, Head of UX & Design @publiczone [via currybetdotnet]
I heartily agree!
Have you ever been at a meeting where a particular solution is proposed and although many people openly admit “that really annoys me” or “I hate it when they do that”, that feature, or trick, still gets implemented? This is often excused by ‘business requirements’, or the difficulty of doing it another way. However I think the problem really lies in not having enough respect for one’s customers and for not accepting that they are real people (people who find your solution annoying).
I recently had the pleasure of seeing Dr Harry Brignull present his Dark Patterns. These dark patterns, he argues, are more than just the product of lazy designers or misguided business requirements. Dark Patterns are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.
(The Dark Patterns library is a great resource and if you haven’t been through it, you really should). Nov ’11 update: Harry’s recently been featured on A List Apart.
This started me thinking that actually, a lot of these poor experiences (whether they are deliberate or the result of laziness) are actually the result of having very little respect for your users/customers/audience. And that by having better online manners and treating people with more courtesy, we can help focus the work required to fix them.
Of course the worrying thing about dark patterns is that they have been deliberately designed to fool people (often out of their money). So heartfelt pleas aren’t likely to dissuade their creators from such practices. However, Dark Patterns is starting to have some success by publicly naming and shaming errant companies into action. See, for example, the heartening response from Audible following their listing. But maybe what we need is a more defined ‘Code of conduct’ or maybe a badge to wear with pride in our footers?
I read with interest that super model Erin O’Connor has recently been speaking out against the fashion world lying to women. Having put up with airbrushing and trickery in fashion advertising for many years, several key players have called for industry regulation against these practices. Their suggestions include kite-marking to show digital tampering or a “golden star” system rewarding the use unaltered photographs.
Whilst I don’t want to draw a comparison between poor web usability and fashion’s obsession with youth and perfection (and the harm this can do to young women), perhaps we should be looking at similar schemes that reward respectful, person-centered, website owners?
