Usabilityweb

Current usability work is an artifact of an earlier computer ecosystem, out of step with contemporary realities. Usability can no longer keep up with computing: the products are too complex, too pervasive, and too easy to build. These trends demonstrate the "new realities" that are making traditional usability difficult, if not irrelevant.

Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings tells Fortune how he got the idea for the DVD-by-mail service that now has more than eight million customers.

We believe that this circuitry has been co-opted through evolution, enabling the brain to exploit the same circuitry to adjust its sensitivity endogenously," says Reynolds. "It doesn't just adjust sensitivity in response to changes in input strength, it also enables the brain to emphasize task-relevant information and suppress neuronal signals driven by task-irrelevant clutter.

Even when you ignore environmental stimuli, your brain may still be sensitive to their content and store information that will influence subsequent decisions,

The ways people react to robots is teaching computer and robotics scientists valuable lessons about how to make technology more user-friendly -- and more human.

Research released recently confirms that taking a 'one size fits all' approach to retailing is no longer relevant in a highly competitive environment where the mass market has been replaced by increased fragmentation amongst consumers. Providing a standardised retail offering to large numbers of people is no longer appropriate for consumers who are increasingly demanding a more tailored and individualised service.

aesthetics, when misused, can severely diminish the quality of experience

During discovery, we review the baseline analytics to look for potential problem issues. We then collaborate with the analytics team to conduct the goals analysis, connecting high-level user and business goals to measurable user behaviors. During design, we collaborate with the optimization team to identify and generate design variants for A/B and multivariate testing. And then post-launch, we supplement analytics data with user surveys and usability testing, providing the "why" for the "what." Then we repeat steps one through four.

Stefan and I sat down with Martin, a Senior Product Manager on the Search team, to find out the process for improving search and where things may be trending. An interesting discussion with the slickest sticky-note you've seen today

The score itself is what most people are interested in - the difference, expressed in a percentage, between those people who are very likely to recommend your brand and those people and the beauty of it is that it can reflect the different levels of engagement and loyalty that customers feel to different types of brand.

More than anything, Google prefers to make design decisions based on what performs well. And as a company, Google cares about being fast, so we want our user experience to be fast. That's not just in terms of front-end latency-how long it takes the page to download-it's also about making people use their computers more efficiently. A lot of our design decisions are really driven by cognitive psychology research that shows that, say, people online read black text against a white background much faster than white against black, or that sans serif fonts are more easily read than serif fonts online.

First, people aren't really interested in what we do; they're interested in the results that we deliver. Second, running around and selling things is not as effective as actually applying your design skills to problems that matter. In many ways, business people look at things and size up the problems. They may avoid complex variables - the who, what, where - simply because they are complicated factors.

Robot and virtual pets are beginning to replace children's interactions with biologically live pets," said Ruckert. "The larger concern is that technological nature will shift the baseline of what people perceive as the full human experience of nature, and that it will contribute to what we call environmental generational amnesia.

What should marketers take away from this research? For one, marketers should be very suspicious of market research that claims to uncover the "why" behind a decision, such as "Why did you buy that Budweiser?" This isn't big news, but the research underscores why it might be difficult or impossible for a consumer to explain the thought process behind a purchase (since most of that process occurred subconsciously).

eyetracking can solve the problem of asking the conscious why because we can derive it looking at perception.