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 […]

Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path explained his view that customer experience is an investment, not a cost, in an article this week on Harvard Business Publishing’s site.
I adapted one of the “linking elephants” illustrations in the Merholz article by adding another row of boxes and text to illustrate what Merholz says: it is design that motivates […]

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 […]

We know that human brains use patterns (or schemata) to figure out the world and decide what to do. This kind of cognitive activity takes place very quickly, which means we can react quickly to the world around us, as long as the pattern holds.
Here’s a pattern (or schema) that your brain may know: to put a card […]