100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter)

Think about affordance cues when you design. By giving people cues about what they can do with a particular object, you make it more likely that they will take that action.

Be cautious about how you interpret eye-tracking data. Don’t ascribe too much importance to it or use it as the main basis for design decisions.

What you think people are going to see on your Web page may not be what they do see. It might depend on their background, knowledge, familiarity with what they are looking at, and expectations.

It’s always a good idea to organize information for your audience as much as possible. Keep in mind the four-item rule from the “How People Remember” chapter.

If you’re designing an application, you may have control over the sounds that occur when a people take certain actions, for example, making a mistake, reaching a goal, or donating money.

Design with forgetting in mind. If some information is really important, don’t rely on people to remember it. Provide it for them in your design, or have a way for them to easily look it up.

Deliberate and cognitive creativity requires a high degree of knowledge and lots of time. If you want people to show this type of creativity, you have to make sure you are providing enough prerequisite information. You need to give resources of where people can go to get the information they need to be creative. You also need to give them enough ti

If you want to be sure that people notice a change in their visual fields, add additional visual cues (such as blinking) or auditory cues (such as a beep).

Eliminate memory load whenever possible. Many user interface design guidelines and interface features have evolved over the years to mitigate issues with human memory.