Hot answers tagged perception
95
Make sure that you focus on goals.
Don't ask what your users want or need in terms of functionality or form. Find out what they need (or want) to achieve .. that way the parameters you use to define and solve the problem will be much clearer and focused.
Questions to ask your users might run along the lines of;
what they need to achieve.
how they ...
52
broken?
"If not even the spelling is correct, how can I trust this works correctly?" This is especially troublesome for web sites that want to hold private data. I might not even want to give you my e-mail.
dead?
When obvious errors remain online for a long time, this suggests that
you don't care to fix them (lack of respect)
you are technically ...
40
A checkmark represents something positive - usually 'good' or 'correct', so you shouldn't use it to represent something negative like 'serious violation'. I would focus on using either a X or a warning sign, with a preference for the warning sign.
Icon aside, I don't see any good reason to have columns for both 'serious violation' and 'Overall alert'. The ...
29
Remember that irrespective of the domain, it's the bit before the @ that is the reference by which you addressing the person, so you can detach the username from the domain name.
js@johnsmith.com keeps things nice and simple, but rather anonymous - who is js exactly
john@johnsmith.com has redundancy, yes, but keeps it on a personal level which is nice and ...
29
I had a customer a few years back who had gone through several stages of improvements to the way their system worked.
Initially they managed everything in Excel and it kind of worked, but it started getting a bit bloated and rather out of hand - well you can imagine the problems!
Then they got a team of developers in-house to improve the situation. How? ...
22
Which is more important depends on what you are designing. My general guidelines would be:
Intuitive matters mast when you're designing an app that people aren't going to invest time into learning. It's important that they get a win as soon as possible, and that means that they need to be able to use the product with little or no time learning it. Think of ...
22
Yes this will leave a bad impression.
And remember, first impressions are very important. I would get this corrected as soon as possible. Not only will it make the site/company look unprofessional, but it will be difficult to understand. No offense intended, but I actually had to read this question a couple times to fully understand what you were saying ...
21
On closer inspection of your question, I am revising my answer. What you're trying to convey is "Does this company have a failure (i.e. non-compliance to some standard)? Yes or No". In which case, color is irrelevant, it's not a failure, and a check mark is somewhat standard.
Consider a table where multiple types of the same thing, like a tablet computer, ...
20
Spelling mistakes can have quite a large impact on your site's visitors. A quote from the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility
Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site's credibility more than most people imagine. It's also important to keep your site up and running.
Typos make your site look amateurish, just like broken links or unavailable ...
19
I can think of four broad techniques for tackling this issue.
Firstly, it looks to me that you could probably get away with increasing the size of your UI components and copy. Text really needs to be 14px or above to be well-readable anyway, so there are practical benefits to doing this beyond just aesthetics.
Secondly, if you feel a page seems 'orphaned', ...
18
Here's the thing about downvotes; almost no one downvotes. And another thing: some people downvote anything. Don't believe me? Check out this chart from when Youtube stopped using 5 star ratings:
For the most part people are much, much more willing to note what they like, not what they dislike, at least in simple rating systems (fully written reviews tend ...
17
One isn't better than the other. They are simply different.
There is a lot of evidence that your eye will pick out objects styled to look like they are 3D faster than perfectly flat objects. In addition seeing an object that looks sort of 3D will give it some level of affordance that wouldn't be there otherwise. The problems that the Windows Metro ...
15
I find just using the colors as the demarkation a bit harder to understand. You can use a vertical rule to act as a placeholder for the goal, YTD or annual, depending on the day.
Your focus should be the goal and how much over or under you are. What I mean is there is not enough value of showing the actual numbers when you are just bother to about the ...
15
I would use a red exclamation point as the Icon in the column (similar to the Icon JohnGB used. My first thought was to rename the column so you could use a red X. For example if you renamed it to 'Conforming', 'In Good Standing', 'No Violations', or 'Playing By the Rules', then you could use a red X to indicate that the company is NOT conforming, or has a ...
14
I believe the cause is that handwriting generally has a higher x-height than printed type.
That makes all-caps handwriting look more like printed small-caps, which are generally not considered rude, and actually end up looking formal.
It's also true that all-caps used on the web now carries the connotation of screaming by convention (as mentioned by Juan ...
13
Time is only one of the factors that affect whether an app feels responsive. However there are decent guidelines that give you a rough idea of how people perceive response.
Jakob Nielsen has written a good article on Response times that I use as a rough guide. It states that:
0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is ...
12
I've come across this before and the following image illustrates just part of the problem:
I've found that one way to find out what a user actually needs is to really understand the user's requirements, to the point where you can put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself "What would I need in this position?"*
The other thing I've found that helps is ...
11
While some internet marketeers have stated that the appearance of being more secure can have a measurable effect on sale completions, I doubt that this would matter for sites that aren't directly selling something.
You also have to keep in mind that HTTPS connections are slower than HTTP, and so people will likely find your site slower. Amazon found that ...
10
A lock is the most commonly used that I have seen, as privacy generally is about locking away or hiding information.
Some usable examples are:
The recent MEGA logo (copyrighted I'm sure) is a great example, but not one that you can easily use. It does however show a growing understanding of a lock representing privacy.
10
Good Design
In general, having a well designed site will give a sense of security. If the site looks like has been thrown together in a couple of hours, it is not going to inspire much trust in the user. Compare the 2 sites below, which looks more trustworthy?
Trust Icons
You can also increase the appearance of trust by adding icons related to security. ...
10
All capital handwriting is easier to read because it takes more time to write and forces the author to slow down. This increases legibility by requiring the writer to compose each individual letter one at a time. The variations for capital letters are less compared to lower case or cursive characters. Architects and engineers developed their particular ...
10
Having your cursor slanted would be a UX improvement over a permanently vertical cursor. Many word processors already do this. Here are some examples from MS Word:
It gives additional feedback to a user that the text they enter will be italic, and it is visually less confusing when selecting text. At the same time, I can't think of any reason that it ...
10
From a UX perspective, there is no reason that the sum has to be 100. You may be thinking in terms of percentages, but it is trivial to scale them up or down to make the net effect 100.
What usually matters in weighting is the weight of a single item relative to the total weight. You can easily calculate this, so there is no need to burden a user with ...
10
I had a very similar problem recently, and did some user testing on it. The main thing that came out of it was that we should avoid colours that have a common meaning. So yellow was a bad option, and green represented 'good', not 'acceptable'.
In the end we used grey as the neutral background colour, blue as the progress for 'expectation'; green as ...
9
Plenty of good arguments and research here: Myth #25: Aesthetics are not important if you have good usability
My favorite quote from this article: «A study on the role of aesthetics concludes that, though attractive things may not score higher in performance, people perceive attractive things as more usable»
9
Abdul, there is one other thing to be aware of.
There are many established websites with high visitor counts that contain spelling and grammatical errors - but a spelling mistake on those sites is different from a spelling mistake on other sites (such as yours).
When your site is established and well-respected (like BBC News) typos are bad, but users will ...
9
It depends what sort of people you want to contact you. I would suggest contact@johnsmith.com as a general one, especially on the website. Buisness cards you might want to try md@johnsmith.com or design@johnsmith.com. You can use the email to suggest that there might be a few more people than just you behind it.
Of course, you might want to take it on a ...
9
In a nutshell, the evidence suggests that users see rounded shapes as more 'friendly' than sharp shapes, and that sharp shapes, appearing slightly dangerous, garner more attention.
Some go further and suggest that, as a rule, you should give almost all your divs and content rounded edges except for call-to-action buttons, which attract more attention when ...
9
You aren't as likely to discover their needs by analyzing their reactions to something that you've built. I agree with codeinthehole - research that independently of your ideas.
Some questions that might be helpful:
What's a random day in their life like? When / where do they use tools similar to yours?
What do they need to know beforehand in order to ...
9
There is of course an awful lot of research on color and color perception. Most relevant to your purpose is perhaps the work Cynthia Brewer did on ColorBrewer. You can find the resulting tool at http://colorbrewer2.org/ It was originally designed to help choose color for maps but it can also be used for statistical graphs (it's built in Hadley Wickham's ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
