Five Sketches™

Last week, while waiting for friends, I picked up a community newspaper in hopes of finding a puzzle to help me pass the time. I found a sudoku puzzle.
A sudoku puzzle consists of nine 3×3 squares, sprinkled with a few starter numbers. The player must fill in all the blanks by referring to the numbers that are already […]

Last year I worked with a team most of whose members were on a different continent. Since my job as a usability analyst and interaction designer often requires me to influence, motivate, and give feedback about work already completed, I quickly adopted online video—mainly Skype—in order to see the non-verbal communication cues of my teammates.
In the […]

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 […]

The WordPress community recently ran a poll. Users were asked to choose one of 11 visual designs. The leading design got only 18% of the vote, which gives rise to such questions as:

Is this a meaningful win? The leader only barely beat the next three designs, and 82% voted for other designs.

I don’t know about the 18% versus 82%. I […]