100 Things: Every Designer Needs to Know About People

If a problem requires “out of the box” thinking, then you need to remove it temporarily from conscious awareness.

• Always provide progress indicators so people know how much time something is going to take.

• If possible, make the amount of time it takes to do a task or bring up information consistent, so people can adjust their expectations accordingly.

• To make a process seem shorter, break it up into steps and have people think less. It’s mental processing that makes something seem to take a long time.

If You Don’t Provide Categories, People will Create Their Own

A mental model is the representation that a person has in his mind about the object he is interacting with. A conceptual model is the actual model that is given to the person through the design and interface of the actual product.

“A mental model represents a person’s thought process for how something works (i.e., a person’s understanding of the surrounding world). Mental models are based on incomplete facts, past experiences, and even intuitive perceptions. They help shape actions and behavior, influence what people pay attention to in complicated situations, and define how people approach and solve problems.”

from a human factors point of view, the order of the loads from most “expensive” to least is:

• Cognitive

• Visual

• Motor

The number of clicks is not important. People are very willing to click multiple times. In fact, they won’t even notice they’re clicking if they’re getting the right amount of information at each click to keep them going down the path. Think progressive disclosure; don’t count clicks.

• Eliminate memory load whenever possible. Many user interface design guidelines and interface features have evolved over the years to mitigate issues with human memory.

• Try not to require people to recall information. It’s much easier for them to recognize information than recall it from memory.

Words are processed in different parts of the brain depending on what you’re doing with them. Viewing or reading words, listening, speaking, generating verbs—all of these word activities engage different parts of the brain

When you read you don’t absorb exact letters and words and then interpret them later. You anticipate what will come next. The more previous knowledge you have, the easier it is to anticipate and interpret.