Psychological Heuristics Useful to Designers (03-14-11)
Wray Herbert, a well-respected science writer, discusses psychological heuristics in his new book, and some of them are useful to designers.
Wray Herbert, a well-respected science writer, discusses psychological heuristics in his new book, and some of them are useful to designers.
Designers often ask users questions during the programming process that require comparison, discussion, and selection of options that are either familiar or novel.
Recent work by Casasanto and Chrysikou supports previous work showing that “Right-and left-handers implicitly associate positive ideas like ‘goodness’ and honesty’ more strongly with their dominant side of space, the side on which they can act more fluently, and negative ideas more strongly with their nondominant hand.”
When people are asked for their opinion about the value of something and the evaluations of others (particularly friends and peers) are known, their opinions often agree with those others.
People designing spaces that will be used in emergency situations will be interested in research recently published by Shackman and his colleagues.
Recent research with mice may have implications for the design of directional signage systems used by humans.
Speed of movement through a space influences memories about that place.
Researchers at the University of New Hampshire and Yale have determined that people place less monetary value on their possessions if they feel more secure interpersonally (i.e., feel accepted and loved by other people).
The placebo effect has an important influence in both medical and design contexts.
Biologists Kimberly Pollard and Daniel Blumstein at UCLA have investigated the behavior of rodents that live in social groups when those animals are in like-species crowds, and feel that their findings can be extrapolated to humans.