Thoughts and sketches on humans, nature, running, and the end of the world
I am reading The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinberg (have you noticed how I always talk about books before I finish reading them? And BTW, thanks to Jared Spool and Kyle Pero for the book suggestion). By “consulting” Weinberg means “how to convince others that you can help them and how to be...
In the introduction of Freakonomics – A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything, we are told that Steven D. Levitt is a young, successful, and serious–if controversial–economist. We should believe what Levitt writes because he has the right credentials: he is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. But soon...
Often I hear these broad blanket statements on what people do or don’t do online: “people don’t read,” “people don’t scroll,” “people don’t wait.” It’s usually from those who have just enough knowledge of usability to be dangerous, but sometimes, alas, I’ve heard usability people uttering them. When I hear statements like this I’ll...
In my previous life in Academia, I did research in selective attention for many years. It was interesting to observe how much of the internal mechanisms that guide our behavior are inaccessible to our conscious self. Our rational mind is surprisingly limited and it’s not such a great tool when dealing with complex and multidimensional...
I’ve just finished reading The paradox of choice by Barry Schwartz. The main thesis of the book is that having too many choices, together with feeling pressured to make the best choice rather than a “good enough” choice makes us unhappy. The more choices we have, the more time and effort we spend weighting...
I’ve just finished listening for the second time to the audiobook version of Malcolm Gladwell‘s Blink. The book discusses psychological resesarch around rapid cognition and snap decisions and has plenty of findings and concepts relevant to usability and market research (with some good evidence of the limits of “just asking people what they feel...