kath straub's Page

HFI newsletter subscribers read smarter … when their copy was formatted with ReadSmart.



Last month’s newsletter was an experiment. Did you figure that out? At the end of the newsletter there was an invitation to participate in a survey. The survey had a mix of questions. We asked how you felt about the PDF format. You suggested topics you would like to read about. And then we asked about the content of the… Continue

Cold and lonely. These two concepts seemed permanently paired in the English language. So do warm and fuzzy.



And new studies suggests that the linguistic link between emotional experience and physical sensation might not be so accidental. University of Toronto researchers Zhong and Lonardelli found that study participants describing a personal experience of social rejection or exclusion actually felt colder than others who remembered inclusive experiences. People describing negative… Continue

Q: How many participants do we need for our cardsort?



Tullis and Woods conducted a real data simulation study to determine the practically optimal number of participants need for cardsorting.



First they collected data from a large set of users–168 people to be exact. Then they ran cardsort “studies” of different sizes by randomly drawing data for individual participants from the larger data set. Since it was all mathematical–based on similarity scores within data pairs and… Continue

There are many claims out there (some made by me!) about how visual hierarchy, gestalt and composition might be used in design to guide users attention around a web page or through a gui task flow ....



One of the oft made claims is that if someone else is clearly looking at something ... our eyes tend to follow that same path. I wonder if we can put this claim to a test.



If, in your meanderings through the web, you have or run across examples in which eyes are clearly… Continue