Sitback Blog

Human capacity to perceive and process information is limited. If you think about how many thousands of stimuli we come into contact with each day, it's a wonder we can function at all!

To cope with this overload of information, we as humans have evolved a number of strategies to help us function within our busy world. As Experience Designers, understanding these strategies can help us conduct better research resulting in more accurate observations, and design interfaces that are easier to use and require less mental effort (i.e. cognitive load).

This article focuses specifically on cognitive biases, what they are, and how we can address them.

While ensuring the information architecture, structure and other major building blocks of a website are optimised is extremely important, it’s also worthwhile to get the little details right as they have the potential to delight your users and leave a long-lasting impression.

In our last UX Tip #96 Increase user research participant attendance we looked at a few simple methods you can use to help increase attendance rates at your user experience research sessions, one of which was around rewarding your participants. Today we'd like to focus on that specific point in a little more detail.

User Testing sessions are only as good as the users you're testing; if they don't show up at the right time, or worse still, if they don't show up at all, this can have real time and cost implications. While we don't have a foolproof plan to guarantee your participants will show up, there are a few techniques you can use to reduce no-shows.

A good mobile design is not just about how easy tasks are to perform (i.e. usability), but also how comfortable it is to interact with (i.e. ergonomics).

This is of particular importance for touchscreen devices when the entire screen could be a touch-target.

Here are a few things to keep in mind to ensure your mobile design is ergonomic:

User experience design is often concerned with helping users make the right decisions, both for them and your business. Understanding the cognitive style, or thinking style, of users can give us insights into how they make decisions, allowing us to design better experiences.

Research has shown that when using web forms that follow usability best practice, users are almost twice as likely to submit with no errors on the first try (78% of submissions are successful on the first try for form that follow best practices, compared to only 42% for forms violating them).

What do you think of when you see the Apple logo?

Creative people are often stereotyped as those who know how to draw, design or use certain types of software like the Adobe suite. However, the definition of creativity is much broader; it is defined as:

People often refer to the magic number 7 when talking about short term memory.