Susan Weinschenk - 100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People

You wake up in the morning and while you sip your coffee, you slip on your headset. A few gestures with your hand and fingers and you are skimming the news and your calendar on the screen that has appeared in front of you. As you walk to the train to go to work, you run your hand down your arm to call someone at your office.

When you get to work you might spend some time in the immersive room. Data appears on a screen, you hear sounds, and feel pulses through the vibrating floor, or a vest you have put on over your clothes. Your unconscious processes these sensory data so that you can make decisions. Thats not so far in the future. Thats what is about to become mainstream in the next 12 years.

This is a great time for designersthere are so many things that can, and need, to be designed! We still need software and websites and mobile apps, and now we also need to design how people will use technology that lives in clothing, headsets, and robots.

Technology is growing and changing, and what we know about people has also exploded. When I wrote the first 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, it was 2011. I had summed up the essential information on what designers need to know about people in those 100 things. If you had asked me then if I thought there were another 100 things people need to know, I would have probably laughed and said, of course not!

But a lot has happened in the last four years. Our understanding of the brain and the body has exploded almost as fast as the technology has exploded. Now we know that:

How we read online is different than how we read text on a page.

We are not born with brains that know how to readour brains repurpose other areas of the brain to learn how to read.

Our unconscious processes big data better than our conscious mind does, and we can actually use something called sensory addition to feed data to the unconscious.

Our peripheral vision decides where our central vision should look.

Older people arent slow to learn and use technology because they cant remember, but more because they arent confident about their memories.

People who are blind can see by hooking up a camera to their tongues.

And, well, 94 other amazing things.

I hope you enjoy this book as much as Ive enjoyed researching and writing it. I cant wait to see what we all design in the next few years. And I hope that this book will help you design so that your creations fit the way people learn, work, think, and play.

Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D.

Edgar, Wisconsin, USA

July 16, 2015

How People See

Recent research offers exciting insights into how people see and how the brain interprets visual data. Now, instead of arguing about opinions, you can present the latest industry findings on everything from shapes to color to visual appeal when you present your designs.

1 People Prefer Curved Shapes

Have you ever wondered why clients always prefer logos with curves rather than more daring and modern logos with interesting angles? Have you noticed that your favorite smartphones, tablets, and laptops tend to have rounded corners? Whats the big deal with those curves and rounded corners?

People prefer objects with curvesa preference thats evident even in brain scans. This field of study is called neuroaesthetics.

Does the Couch Have Curves?

Moshe Bar is the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. He and his team used images of everyday and abstract objects to see if people had a preference for objects with curves. In one of their early studies, Bar and Maital Neta (2006) showed people 140 pairs of objects. Some objects were concrete, such as watches or couches (the A objects in ), some were abstract (the B objects), and some had both curves and edges (the C objects). The C objects acted as baseline controls.

FIGURE 1.1 Original images used by Moshe Bar (http://barlab.mgh.harvard.edu/publications.htm).

People gave higher liking ratings to the objects with curves. Bar and Netas theory was that the sharp and angled images conveyed a sense of threat.