More and more of our experience online is personalized. Search engines, news outlets and social media sites have become quite smart at giving us what we want. Perhaps Ali, one of the hundreds of people I've interviewed about our emotional attachment to technology, put it best: "Netflix's recommendations have become so right for me that even though I know it's an algorithm, it feels like a... Read More
When technical performance optimizations reach certain limits, psychology and perception management might help us to push the limits further. Waiting can consist of active and passive phases; for the user to perceive a wait as a shorter one, we increase the active phase and reduce the passive phase of the wait. But what do we do when the event is a purely passive wait, with no active phase at... Read More
Time can be analyzed from two different points: objective and psychological. When we talk about time that can be measured with a stopwatch, we’re talking about objective time, or clock time. Objective time, though, is usually different from how users perceive time while waiting for or interacting with a website or app.
When we talk about the user’s perception of time, we mean... Read More
You probably have a great product. You’ve done your usability deeds and you have a few core customers who regularly use your product. However, it just doesn’t stick out from the competition. It has a high bounce rate, only few users return, users abandon your product faster than you would like and, in general, users never get far enough to experience all that your product has to offer.
... Read More
According to Ian Carrington, Google’s mobile and social advertising sales director, speaking at Mobile Marketing Live back in 2012, more people in the world have access to a smartphone than a toothbrush.
With that in mind, it’s perhaps not very surprising that there’s no shortage of information about how people interact with websites on mobile. From specific usability testing and scrutiny... Read More
Those of us who consider ourselves developers, including me, are very task-oriented. We like to be guided towards optimal results, and we find ourselves uncomfortable when there is no clear path to follow. That is why we all want to know how to do things; we like step-by-step tutorials and how-tos. However, such guidelines are based on certain theories, deep knowledge and experience.
For... Read More
Kids spend a lot of time online, and their cognitive and physical limitations present many challenges to them when they do so. Pair that with poorly designed content and dark patterns, and you have a bad mix. As designers on the web, we have a responsibility to create things that empower kids and make them smarter, not the opposite.
This article will give you some insights about what kids... Read More
People have many tough decisions to make; whether they should use your application or website to accomplish a task shouldn’t be one of them. Your design team can take advantage of our knowledge of the human mind and human behavior by accounting for a number of heuristics, or mental shortcuts, that researchers have identified.
You might be familiar with the term “heuristic” from the UX... Read More
No person is immune from the influence of the people and groups they encounter. As much as we would like to think that every thought we have is original, that every opinion we express is informed by facts alone, the truth is that we use others around us as a reference point for much of our attitudes and behavior. This isn’t a bad thing; it’s human nature.
Knowing how groups influence... Read More
