Susan Weinschenk

the totality of your audience’s experience is profoundly impacted by what you know—or don’t know—about them

Half of the brain’s resources are dedicated to seeing and interpreting what we see.

if you are paying attention to one thing, and you don’t expect changes to appear, then you can easily miss changes that do occur.

The rule of thumb is that wherever you use color to give specific meaning, you need a redundant coding scheme, for example, color and line thickness, so that people who are color-blind will be able to decipher the code without needing to see specific colors.

New information is assimilated more thoroughly when it is plugged into existing cognitive structures.

When you read you don’t absorb exact letters and words and then interpret them later. You anticipate what will come next. The more previous knowledge you have, the easier it is to anticipate and interpret.

Words are processed in different parts of the brain depending on what you’re doing with them. Viewing or reading words, listening, speaking, generating verbs—all of these word activities engage different parts of the brain

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

• Try not to require people to recall information. It’s much easier for them to recognize information than recall it from memory.

The number of clicks is not important. People are very willing to click multiple times. In fact, they won’t even notice they’re clicking if they’re getting the right amount of information at each click to keep them going down the path. Think progressive disclosure; don’t count clicks.

from a human factors point of view, the order of the loads from most “expensive” to least is:

• Cognitive

• Visual

• Motor