I’m working with a company who run auctions for travel upgrades so researching auction psychology and I thought I’d share some links.
Free online psychology courses
Some good options in there…
Get free Psychology courses online from the world’s leading universities. Download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player
7 Practical Facts about the Human Brain I wish Everyone Knew
Some great stuff in here.
Source: 7 Practical Facts about the Human Brain I wish Everyone Knew – Leo Widrich
Research shows Flat Design is harder to use
I’ve been talking about the inherent problems with flat design for a few years now. (Affordance anyone?)
We finally have some evidence that flat design is harder to use:
The results show that a search in flat text mode (compared with the traditional mode) is associated with higher cognitive load.
Source: (PDF) Flat Design vs Traditional Design: Comparative Experimental Study
Twice as hard in-fact and much more error prone:
A search for flat icons takes twice as long as for realistic icons and is also characterized by higher cognitive load. Identifying clickable objects on flat web pages requires more time and is characterised by a significantly greater number of errors.
Here’s a video showing the problem well. This is a user new to flat design and well, you can see how he is struggling:
Psychology and numbers
I get asked a lot about numbers and psychology. Here are some common questions and the answers I give.
Q: Are odd or even numbers more attractive?
Humans “prefer” round numbers.
Evidence:
- Individuals tend to recall odd-ending prices less accurately than even-ending prices
- Expressing a price as odd-ending increases the likelihood that it will be underestimated when recalled
- People prefer to ignore the last available digit for conservation of memory
- Americans cluster their tips around multiples of $5.
- Preference for round prices is so strong that restaurant dinners will calculate an exact tip amount to arrive at a round check total.
- Direct evidence that investors prefer round numbers when buying stocks
- Stock prices cluster on round fractions
Source: Aesthetic preference for even or odd numbers
Not as simple as that of course:
- Prices ending in “9” were more likely to find buyers, relative to the prices ending in “4”
Source: Effects of $9 Price Endings on Retail Sales: Evidence from Field Experiments
Q: What is the right number of items to put in a list / navigation menu / widget?
The psychology of lists, how many items is the best. Spoiler, it’s multiples of 10.
Power of Ten: The Weird Psychology of Rankings
I bust the myth of the magic number 7 +/- 2:
Miller’s number 7 ± 2: Psychology Myth Busting #2 – Joe Leech @mrjoe
The magic number when it comes to items in our heads all at once might be 4: (academic paper)
The magical number 4 in short-term memory: a reconsideration of mental storage capacity
Hick’s Law describes the time it takes for a person to make design is directly related to the number of options they have to choose from. Less options. Faster choice.
Psychological / Cognitive Biases in User Research
An old friend got in touch to ask about confirmation bias in user research and if I had any resources. I shared them with him and I’m sharing them with you.
What is confirmation bias?
Confirmation bias states that we seek out / prefer / are drawn to data that supports our point of view, theory or hypothesis and are reluctant / shy away from / dismiss data that doesn’t support our point of view.
A great primer
Confirmation Bias – It’s Not What We Think We Know That Counts | Interaction Design Foundation
Some real science on confirmation bias
Under what conditions does theory obstruct research progress? – Semantic Scholar
Examples of confirmation bias
Examples and Observations of a Confirmation Bias
Other cognitive biases in user research
- 10 cognitive biases to avoid in User Research (and how to avoid them)
- Availability heuristic
- Fundamental attribution error
I worked as series editor on a fantastic book about User Research last year, well worth a read to improve your research skills:
- Researching UX: user research (Aspects of UX) by Emma Howell and James Lang. Amazon UK | Amazon USA
To our Brain Everything is a Location: A Unified Theory of Neuroscience
I graduated from my Neuroscience BSc back in 1998. The big takeaway from my degree was that as Francis Crick put it back in 1979
There is no theoretical framework for neuroscience
No over-arching theory about we go from neurone to brain. From perception to thinking, deciding, diverting attention. No unified view on how we encode data in our brain. How when we see a coffee is coffee cup, we recognise a coffee cup, we know what to do with a coffee cup, we pick it up and we can predict what’s inside.
Fast forward almost 40 years and it looks like we finally have that theory.
A Framework for Intelligence and Cortical Function Based on Grid Cells in the Neocortex for a neuroscience paper is easy-ish to read and understand.
The theory is simple and elegant. The groups of cells in our neocortex (the big ‘human’ bit of the brain) share a structure with the cells in our hippocampus. The hippocampus has been long known to help us map our body relative to the space around us. Mapping where our hands and feet are and the movements they make.
These Grid Cells in the neocortex use this same spatial encoding to encode objects and concepts. We represent ideas, objects and UIs as objects in space. We are all spatial thinkers.
Grid cells in the neocortex suggest all knowledge is learned and stored in the context of locations and location spaces and that “thinking” is the movement though these location spaces.
Ground breaking stuff. Finally a unified theory of neuroscience.
Sludge Detectives: The “Behavioural Economics Police” Take On Hotel Booking Sites
Love this. The term Sludge is a great one.
Sludge highlights how companies and organizations can and are taking advantage of innate consumer traits and fallibilities, such as inertia and inattention, knowing that they can profit from consumers’ weaknesses and biases.
Regulators are realizing the need to act as a type of “behavioral economics police” to protect consumers from a deluge of sludge.
From: Sludge Detectives: The “BE Police” Take On Hotel Booking Sites – Behavioral Scientist
Humans are Bad at Multitasking
Well of course we are. It’s never been about gender. People are just bad at multi-tasking but really at kidding ourselves we can multitask.
Source: Research: Women and Men Are Equally Bad at Multitasking
The Amazing Psychology of Japanese Train Stations
There are some great behavioural nudges at Japanese (busiest in the world!) railway stations.
Source: The Amazing Psychology of Japanese Train Stations – CityLab
