Other HCI & Social Sciences References

Aesthetic-Usability Effect — aesthetically pleasing experiences empower usability and increase the user’s willingness to learn and adapt.

Emotion-Memory Link — emotionally charged events persist in our memories beyond the product’s base functional value. We remember things that make us feel a certain way.

Ownership Effect — users place more value in experiences where they feel a sense of personalized ownership, as if the experience/product is an extension of themselves.

Query Effect - People can make up an opinion about anything, and they’ll do so if asked. You can thus get users to comment at great length about something that doesn’t matter, and which they wouldn’t have given a second thought to if left to their own devices.

Order Effect - Order effects refer to differences in research participants’ responses that result from the order (e.g., first, second, third) in which the experimental materials are presented to them. Order effects can occur in any kind of research.

Occam’s Razor A problem-solving principle states that among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove to provide better predictions, but—in the absence of differences in predictive ability—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.

Pareto Principle Also known as the 80/20 rule.

Parkinson’s Law Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.

Sturgeon’s Law “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” Sturgeon’s law tells us the easy way to do things is to make them crappy. It’s very hard to make something good. There’s a decision to be made –which option will you choose. When you take the easy way out, you generally produce crap.

Created by: Joe Steinkamp | Last updated by: Joe Steinkamp