Research: Human Factors Research

People have now read and referred to my 2013 column How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices? almost too much for my comfort. Why? Because, since I wrote that column, I have continued to do research, put my findings into practice for real products, written additional articles, and presented on that topic. In the years since then, I’ve learned a lot more about how people hold and touch their phones and tablets—a lot of which I didn’t expect. And that’s the problem with my old columns. I made some assumptions that were based on observations of the usage of desktop PCs, standards for older types of interactions, and anecdotes or misrepresented data. However, through my later research and better analysis, I’ve been able to discard all of those erroneous assumptions and reveal the truth.

All too often, I see people referring to my oldest, least-accurate columns on this topic. Sometimes readers combine my obsolete data with other out-of-date information, then draw their own incorrect conclusions. I hope put a stop to that now with this updated overview of everything I know about how people interact with touchscreen devices and how you can use that information to design better digital products. Read More

If you were to describe what a face is, what would you say? Would you talk about its features? Or would you talk about its function? We interpret the majority of the things a human face does unconsciously.

Faces Express Who People Are

I’m guessing that you probably said the main role of faces is to let us identify and recognize people, which is true. But faces do much more. People’s faces

• reveal their identity, age, and gender to others
• show their genetic inheritance
• portray a variety of emotions—for example, anger, disgust, happiness
• identify their ethnicity
• influence the behavior of others

Read More

This is the second of my two articles for UXmatters, summarizing some of what researchers have discovered about human perception and cognition over the past thirty years. These articles are not meant to be comprehensive; they are just an overview of what I learned while preparing to write my new book: Designing with the Mind in Mind. The first article in this series focused on visual perception, while this article focuses on cognition and cognitive / perceptual speed. Read More