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The Human Mind and Usability: How Your Customers Think
- New York: Thursday, March 1
- Las Vegas: Wednesday, March 14
- Edinburgh: Tuesday, March 20
- San Francisco: Wednesday, April 4
- Amsterdam: Tuesday, April 24
Marieke McCloskey
Raluca Budiu
Hoa Loranger
Full-Day Training Course
People are more predictable than you might think. This course covers the most relevant concepts from
cognitive psychology and human factors that serve as the basis for usability principles. Understanding the
foundations of human cognition can help you anticipate people’s reactions and make more effective
design decisions.
What You’ll Learn
- How humans process information and how you can use that to your advantage
- Human capabilities and limitations, and the implications for Web design
- How perception and cognition influence Web behavior
- The cognitive cost of a bad design
- Concepts to help you decide when to adapt to standard practices and when to bend the rules
Course Outline
- Introduction
- Origins of human factors, cognitive psychology, and human computer interaction
- Stepping beyond usability guidelines
- Attention: How well do people focus on elements in their environment?
- Cognitive load: The effects of stress, interruptions, and multitasking
- Multiple sensory inputs
- Adaptation to information overload
- Visual perception: How do people perceive the world?
- Visual acuity and discerning fine detail
- Visual salience: Typography, legibility, and color and contrast sensitivity
- Gestalt psychology: Perceiving groups of elements as whole objects
- Eye gaze patterns
- Memory & Knowledge: Vast, but imperfect
- Memory capacity
- Short term vs. long term memory
- Working memory
- Recognition vs. recall, and why it matters
- Law of practice and forgetting
- Associative priming and information scent: How users select what links to click on
- Strategies for information retrieval
- Mental models
- Language: Factors that influence reading and comprehension
- Word & sentence processing: Word order
- Types of readers: Normal reading vs. skimming
- Scanning: Where people look and don’t look
- Improving readability
- Problem solving and decision making: Humans are not always rational
- The decision-making process
- Reducing interaction cost
- Persuasion: perceived value, loss aversion, scarcity, positive framing
- Social psychology: How groups change individual behavior
- Social proof and how it applies to testimonials, reviews, popularity
- Group pressure
- Power of roles; what roles do users play online?
- Emotions and design: Emotion-driven behavior
- Aesthetics and first impressions
- Universal principles
- Pleasurable and desirable experiences
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lecture, video exercises, and discussions. Real-world
examples (mainly from websites) are used to illustrate points throughout the day.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
This course is for anyone involved in interface design decisions who do not have formal
training in cognitive psychology or human factors, but would like a better grounding in the theory that
determines which designs work best. This is a basic course on cognitive psychology and human factors;
there are no prerequisites.
Instructors
Marieke McCloskey is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group.
She works with clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials about user
experience, usability research methods, writing for the Web, Intranet design, and the
psychology of users. McCloskey has conducted usability studies, including eyetracking,
in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
She has been a researcher and co-author of several NN/g reports, including
College Students on the Web and
Intranet Usability Guidelines
Before joining NN/g, McCloskey was an Information Architect in the Digital Media Group at the
National Football League, where she worked on several large-scale website redesign projects.
She has also worked as a psychometrician at Massachusetts General Hospital. McCloskey holds an
M.A. in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University, where she explored the use of
neuroimaging to study human behavior and cognition, and a B.S. from University College
Utrecht, in The Netherlands. McCloskey is based in Los Angeles, California.
Presenting in New York, Edinburgh, and Amsterdam.
Raluca Budiu is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. At NN/g she consults
for clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials on mobile usability, usability of touch devices,
cognitive psychology for designers, and principles of human computer interaction. She coauthored the NN/g
reports on mobile usability, iPad usability, and the usability of children’s websites. Budiu previously worked
at Xerox PARC, doing research in human-computer interaction. At PARC, she built computational models of how people
search for information in visualizations of large data structures. She also explored new ways of measuring
information scent and conducted research on interfaces for social bookmarking systems and on the cognitive benefits
of tagging. Budiu was also a user researcher at Microsoft Corporation, where she explored future directions and
made strategic recommendations for incorporating user-generated content and social web features into MSN. Budiu
has authored more than 20 articles and conference presentations on human-computer interaction, psychology, and
cognitive science. She holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Presenting in Las Vegas.
Hoa Loranger is a Director at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the San Diego office. Loranger has
consulted with many large, well-known companies in such areas as finance, customer support, intranets,
e-commerce, entertainment, and technology. She has conducted international usability research worldwide and has given
keynote presentations and tutorials on a wide range of topics, including user testing, paper prototyping, and fundamentals
of Web usability. She coauthored the book Prioritizing Web Usability
(New Riders Press) and has written reports on design for Flash-based
applications, investor relations,
“about us” pages,
B2B websites,
location finders, and
teens.
Before joining NN/g, she served as human factors lead for Intuit’s Consumer Tax and Small Business Division,
where her group was responsible for user-interaction and visual design for the TurboTax product line. At TRW
(now part of Northrop Grumman), she specialized in both hardware and software systems, including navigational
applications and computer configurations in military vehicles. Loranger earned an M.A. in human factors and applied
experimental psychology from California State University, Northridge, and a B.A. in psychology from University of California, Irvine.
Presenting in San Francisco.
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