HUMAN Experience Design

Culture is a hot-button word of mine, because most people are at a loss to define it. However, it plays a very important part in everything that everyone does. In grad school I thought, and argued, that my professors’ definitions of culture were preposterous. A lot of the academic literature and research on culture has serious flaws that academia seems to ignore out of convenience.

The issue with coming up with a working definition of culture is context. An archaeologist and a linguist might be looking for different things. Different ways of defining and looking at culture may be useful, but not interchangeable.

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What do handwriting analysis, the Ouija board, pendulums, and dowsing have in common with human experience design? Answer: the ideomotor reponse.

Ideomotor action describes motions that are made without conscious volition. More importantly, these motions are made in accordance with belief and expectation. The movements might be simple, such as a twitch, or extremely complex - like handwriting.

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There are approximately 232,000,000 Internet users in North America, and Apple sold about 500,000 iPhones last week. That means that around .21% of all North American Internet users have iPhones. While it’s a little early to look at iPhone browser statistics, some major US sites that I am aware of are getting about 0.04% of their traffic from iPhones.

This may indicate that most iPhone users do not use the device for primary Internet access. I’m guessing that this number will go up, but not too high unless the AT&T service that iPhones work on stops sucking. Apparently the service in most areas will have the speed of dial up - ouch!

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Web accessibility is about ensuring access to web content to people with varying abilities, using varied technology. Many people think of web accessibility as making their web pages able to be read by screen readers for the blind, but it’s so much more than that.

Assitive technology does include screen readers, but also screen magnifiers, and methods for people with motor-related disabilities. Accessibility guidelines also cover people with colorblindness.

Making sure your web site is accessible is not just a nice thing to do - it happens to make great business sense.

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