UX Book Review: 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People by Susan M. WeinSchenk, Ph.D.
100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People
By Susan M. Weinschenk, PhD
Dr. Weinschenk, the author of this interesting book, runs a blog connected to the magazine Psychology Today, which I think explains the glossy, easy-to-digest format she employs. The title is a bit click-baity, but the list is nicely organized into sections that pertain to what the user might want to accomplish, such as how people see, how they think, how people read, remember, and what motivates people. Dr. Weinschenk presents each item on the list with an easily digestible format involving major points and takeaways. The information, though presented simply, is usually relevant and supported with documented research, and the book contains a healthy bibliography, which is always welcome on my shelf.
I find 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People to be a helpful jumping off point when I’m building a case for a UX opinion. Some of the items on the list are fairly obvious or well-known, such as item #57, “People are inherently lazy”. This is kicking in an open door if I ever saw it, but it’s incredibly important to remember this when you’re building a website or an application. For example, if you’re working on an interface that teaches kids how to read, or adults how to speak another language, you should remember that the user is already doing something challenging, and they don’t need an additional layer of frustration from trying to figure out how to use the app itself. If you’re selling something, you want to make it as easy as possible for someone to be able to buy it, because they’re probably one frustrating moment away from switching to Amazon, anyway.
Many of the items are less known and delightfully weird, such as item #5, “People imagine objects titled and at a slight angle above”. She goes on to cite the study by Stephen Palmer (1981) which draws this conclusion (no pun intended) based on asking people to draw things. People tend to draw smallish at this sort of angle. As a person with fair to middling drawing skills, I can say that when I draw items from this angle, I have a better chance of them looking like the things I am trying to draw. Furthermore, it’s definitely easier to give them a sort of 3D appearance than if you draw objects as if they were at eye level. So I’m not entirely convinced of this item on the list, but the idea is really interesting.
I don’t think the size of the object was in question, either. People don’t draw trees from the same angle as a coffee cup, nor do they draw people or horses that way, for incredibly obvious reasons. We usually see a coffee cup from a slight angle above, as it sits on a table in front of us, either at waist or knee level.
Now I want to read the study to see if this point was considered.
I think this book is fairly successful in that it lures one in with it’s come-hither easy-on-the-eyes layouts and then bam, you’re reading “Canonical perspective and the perception of objects” by Palmer, Rosch, and Chase. Then I’m looking up related studies and I have added three tabs to the 16 I already had on my browser. That’s the way it happens, folks.
I found the section on motivation to be the most useful and applicable to design, though each section has at least a few truly indispensable concepts. I’d love to have some back and forth with Dr. Weinschenk, particularly about optimal failure rates in learning situations in the context of #81 “The more difficult something is to achieve, the more people like it.” The concept is interesting and speaks to exclusivity, so Weinschenk emphasizes that this applies to in-group behavior (belonging to an exclusive club) or bragging rights (climbing Mount Everest or earning a black belt).
Quite a few of these ideas are echoes of studies I read about in graduate school, but it’s good to have so many relevant concepts in one volume. I think this book would be extremely useful for digital entrepreneurs, graphic designers or software developers who want to have a quick reference for UX concepts.
Final verdict: Useful, Keeping it on my shelf.