A situation with a mixed initiative interaction is one in which the machine can initiate an interaction, but the user can also choose to initiate the interaction. For example, Luminere had the ability to suggest help without being prompted but the user could still have the same interaction by accessing the Help tab. Another...
In situations where people are expected to be aware and recognize an event that doesn’t occur very often, then often people will struggle to recognize the event. This is can be a problem in cases like TSA security checks; the TSA officer has to be vigilant in order to identify dangerous objects in people’s...
Personas refer to “archetypes” created by designers as a way to synthesize one’s observed data. There a numerous subconscious assumptions the different people on design teams may have. Focusing possible assumptions into a “proto-persona” (stereotype) or creating a “persona’ (from observation) can reveal to a team the choices a user might make based on...
Handicap is a general term for restrictions that cause difficulty for certain groups or communities of people. These restrictions hinder the user experience for these groups and causes a disparity between themselves and groups without the handicap. This is in contrast to a disability, which completely prohibits participation in an activity. The concept of...
Discoverability in design refers to the users’ ability to find key information, services, or applications. The quality allows users to locate something they need in order to complete a certain task. It is often referred to what is noticeable to users on a particular web page and can be a challenge in design because...
Each color has two components: hue and luminance. Equiluminant colors differ in hue, but not in brightness. However, when foreground and background colors are equiluminant, the content of the image is hard to perceive. Take for example: Why does this happen? The two colors pink and green are obviously different. This is become...
Attention capture is something that captures our attention even when we have no intention of it. For a long time, people thought pop out was what resulted in attention capture. People thought motion, color, and other features would work with attention capture. But, as we saw with the garish early-2000s ads, these are reliably...
Visual pop-out is what it sounds like: visuals that pop out at you. Generally, effective pop out methods are hue, luminescence, shape/form, and contrast. This doesn’t work in every situation, though. The brain processes visual info in a set of stages, with separate pathways for high level learning. Movement, color differences, shape/form are thus...
The idea behind the Hick Hyman Law is that the time it takes to make a decision is logarithmic in the number of choices we have such that, given n equally probably choices, the average time T required to choose among them is approximately T = a + b log_2(n). Contributed by Luke Xu,...