Behaviour

Two very different hiring techniques

Interesting that these two stories were posted on the same day as they demonstrate the gaping chasm between hiring practices. The French love affair with graphology: What would you do if you went for a job, and the HR person said one of the criteria for selection was a favourable analysis of your handwriting? Personally […]

Side effects of robots

I bought a Roomba a few weeks ago and the effect it’s had on my life has been quite startling.  It’s completely changed the way I think about household chores, but not necessarily in the way you would expect. I’m somewhat of a dichotomy.  I abhor mess but am not inherently a tidy person.  This causes me a problem. […]

How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices?

Everything changes with touchscreens. On today’s smartphones, almost the entire front surface is a screen. Users need to be able to see the whole screen, and may also need to touch any part of it to provide input. Since my old data was mostly from observations of users in the lab—using keyboard-centric devices in too […]

Focus

The BBC has a great piece up about radiologists, specifically those who examine scans of lungs for cancerous growths, who missed a dancing gorilla that had been added to the scan.  This doesn’t represent a failure on their part.  Far from it. This experiment is based on the “Basketball Gorilla” experiment where  participants are asked […]