user experience
I’ve long believed that the design of your software has a profound impact on how users behave within your software. But there are two sides to this story: * Encouraging the “right” things by making those things intentionally easy to do. * Discouraging the “wrong” things by making those things intentionally
psychology
The Dan Ariely books, Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, profoundly influenced the way I design my massively multiplayer typing games. These books offer science in the small about human behavior, and stark insights into user behavior – and by that I mean our own behavior. All detectives are by
psychology
Despite popular assertions to the contrary, science tells us that money can buy happiness. To a point. Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience — the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy,
psychology
We reflexively instruct our children to always tell the truth. It's even encoded into Boy Scout Law [http://www.inquiry.net/ideals/scout_law/chart.htm]. It's what adults do, isn't it? But do we? Isn't telling the truth too much and
psychology
I recently read Predictably Irrational. It's a fascinating examination of why human beings are wired and conditioned to react irrationally. We human beings are a selfish bunch, so it's all the more surprising to see how easily we can be manipulated to behave in ways that
psychology
The seminal 1956 George Miller paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information is a true classic. In it, Miller observed that the results of a number of 1950s era experiments in short-term memory had something in common: most people could
psychology
A research paper from two psychologists at Cornell offers an interesting insight: For example, consider the ability to write grammatical English. The skills that enable one to construct a grammatical sentence are the same skills necessary to recognize a grammatical sentence, and thus are the same skills necessary to determine