The Human Mind and Usability: How Your Customers Think
- Atlanta: Monday, February 22
- New York: Thursday, March 25
- Chicago: Saturday, April 24
- London: Monday, May 17
Hoa Loranger
Raluca Budiu
Full-Day Tutorial
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
- The origins of human factors and cognitive psychology
- Stepping beyond usability guidelines
- The implications of human factors in Web design
- Visual perception and attention: How well are humans paying attention?
- Cognitive load: The effects of stress, interruptions, and multitasking
- Multiple sensory inputs
- Adaptation to information overload
- Visual acuity and discerning fine detail
- Visual salience: Typography, legibility, and color and contrast sensitivity
- Eye gaze patterns, text, layout, and ads
- Reading and comprehension: Factors that influence comprehension
- Scanning: Where we look and don’t look
- Pattern recognition
- Writing style
- Word order
- Improving readability
- Information foraging theory: How are we like animals?
- Human memory: Vast, but imperfect
- Memory capacity
- Short term vs. long term memory
- Recognition vs. recall, and why it matters
- Working memory
- Procedural vs. declarative memory
- Learning and forgetting
- Strategies for information retrieval
- Problem solving: Humans are not always rational
- The decision-making process
- Factors affecting information processing
- Perception vs. reality
- Creating structure and recognizing patterns
- Motor actions: Moving the mouse, pressing the keys
- How humans acquire targets
- Factors influencing motor speed
- Movement accuracy
- Arranging components
- Reducing error rates and increasing efficiency
- Individual differences: What’s biological and what’s learned
- Innate capabilities, what’s hard wired
- Differences in working memory
- Visual learners vs. verbal learners: Different problem-solving strategies
- Emotions and design: Emotion-driven behavior
- Aesthetics and first impressions
- Pleasurable and desirable experiences
- Motivation
- Social psychology
- Groups
- Social influence
- Persuasion and social communication
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
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, ecommerce,
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 MA in human factors and applied experimental psychology from California State University,
Northridge, and a BA in psychology from University of California, Irvine.
Presenting in Atlanta, New York, and London.
Raluca Budiu is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group, where she presents
tutorials on academic research findings, mobile usability, and cognitive psychology for designers, and conducts
research worldwide on usability for mobile websites and children’s websites. She coauthored the
NN/g report on mobile usability. Previously, Budiu worked at
Xerox PARC, doing HCI research. 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 HCI, psychology, and cognitive science. She has a PhD from Carnegie
Mellon University.
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