People perceive attractive interfaces as easier to use, and forgive small problems in them more readily.
Law · Perception
Tag
research
Entries tagged research, drawn from across the library. Tags cut through the section structure, which is where most of the useful connections are.
45 entries across 5 sections
Type
Category
Level
45 entries
Two gaps break interfaces: not knowing how to do the thing, and not knowing whether it worked.
Principle · Interaction
Users act on their belief about how the system works, not on how it actually works.
Mental model · Understanding
People prefer things to stay as they are, which is why every redesign starts with a deficit.
Cognitive bias · Judgement
Once you know how something works you cannot accurately imagine not knowing, which is why teams misjudge their own interfaces.
Cognitive bias · Judgement
People seek and weight evidence that supports what they already believe, which quietly corrupts research findings.
Cognitive bias · Research integrity
Analysing only the people who made it through hides everything the failures would have told you.
Cognitive bias · Research integrity
People judge how likely something is by how easily an example comes to mind, which favours the recent and the vivid.
Cognitive bias · Judgement
A strong impression in one area spills over into unrelated judgements about the same thing.
Cognitive bias · Judgement
Repeated exposure to something increases preference for it, which is why redesigns feel wrong before they feel right.
Psychology · Perception
Watching people attempt real tasks, which is the most direct evidence available about whether a design works.
Research method · Evaluative
Experts reviewing an interface against a defined set of principles, which is fast and cheap but not a substitute for users.
Research method · Evaluative
Structured conversations about what people actually did, which is far more reliable than what they say they will do.
Research method · Generative
Good for measuring how widespread something is, and poor for discovering what that something is.
Research method · Quantitative
Asking users to group content, which reveals their mental model of a domain rather than your org chart.
Research method · Information architecture
Testing whether people can find things in a structure, with no visual design to confound the result.
Research method · Information architecture
Measuring where people click first, which predicts task success better than almost any other single measure.
Research method · Evaluative
Showing a design briefly and asking what people remember, which tests hierarchy and clarity of message.
Research method · Evaluative
Comparing variants with real traffic, which tells you what happened without telling you why.
Research method · Quantitative
Measuring what people do at scale, which tells you where problems are and never why they exist.
Research method · Quantitative
Measuring progression through a sequence, where the largest drop is rarely the biggest opportunity.
Research method · Quantitative
Watching people work in their own environment, which surfaces the context that interviews miss.
Research method · Generative
Participants record their own experience over time, which captures things a single session cannot.
Research method · Generative
Turning raw observations into findings, which is where most of the value and most of the bias enters.
Research method · Analysis
Organising, labelling and structuring content so people can find it, which determines navigation rather than following from it.
Research method · Information architecture
Fast, informal testing with whoever is available, which is far better than no testing and worse than proper recruitment.
Research method · Evaluative
Measuring where people look, which is expensive, frequently over-interpreted, and occasionally irreplaceable.
Research method · Evaluative
Framing user needs as the progress someone is trying to make, which separates the need from any particular solution.
Research method · Generative
Study how others solved the same problem to learn the conventions your users already hold, not to assemble a feature list.
Research method · Evaluative
Group individual observations until themes emerge from the data instead of from the categories you brought with you.
Research method · Analysis
Working out what problem to solve before deciding how, which is where most product failure is actually prevented.
Workflow · Practice
Choosing how finished a prototype needs to look, which is decided by the question you are asking rather than by taste.
Workflow · Practice
Turn a pile of research into one statement narrow enough to design against and wide enough to allow more than one answer.
Workflow · Process
Pick one behavioural measure per goal, pair it with a quality measure, and decide the threshold before you look.
Workflow · Process
Assisted coding of qualitative data, which speeds up the first pass and must not replace the analysis.
AI workflow · Research
Defines the question, the method and the decision the research will inform, before any data is collected.
Template · Research
A structured set of questions anchored in past behaviour rather than in hypothetical intention.
Template · Research
A research-grounded description of a user type, focused on goals and behaviour rather than demographics.
Template · Research
The stages a person moves through, with what they do, think and feel, and where the experience breaks.
Template · Research
A session script with tasks phrased as goals, and moderator prompts that do not lead.
Template · Research
Research repository for storing, tagging and searching qualitative data across studies.
Tool · research
Research analysis and repository tooling focused on the synthesis step itself.
Tool · research
Participant recruitment from a panel, plus tooling for managing your own participant pool.
Tool · research
General assistant with strong long-document handling, useful for synthesis, writing and structured review.
Tool · ai