Five Sketches™

The more choices people have, the more likely they’ll choose something utilitarian over something hedonistic.

In an experiment by Aner Sela, Jonah Berger, and Wendy Liu, 20% of 121 participants chose low-fat ice cream when given a simple choice of two, but 37% chose low-fat ice cream when given a choice of ten. In this case, low-fat […]

In the context of UI design, I’ve come across numerous references to gestalt principles in the past few years, but not to 2D-design principles. When you design a user interface, you can apply both sets of principles to ensure users “intuitively” figure things out without any mental, or cognitive, effort.
Gestalt principles
There are plenty of websites that […]

When you have limited resources, how do you prioritise what to provide on an e-commerce website? In the PEW Internet and America Life report, Generations on-line 2009, Jones and Fox present data in a format useful to help you prioritise.
To answer these sample questions, consider the colour coding in the data, below:

Should you do any search-engine optimisation […]

Once again, I’ve learned that I am typical. I tend to format dates the same way as many other people do.  This excerpt from William Hudson’s date study report shows the most common formats:

The report has all sorts of tidbits for interaction designers about date formats, error trapping, leading zeros, and more.
One thing the study doesn’t discuss […]

I’ve been waiting for a full-screen touch UI with haptic response. That is, if the application displays a button on the screen, when I push it with my finger, I want to feel it clicking. Similarly, when I nudge an object, I want to feel its edge on screen.
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