In 1922 at the age of 67 Alfred Wallis began painting. Until that time he had been a deep sea fisherman and later a marine stores dealer, professions hardly considered to be creative. How does someone who’s shown no creative ability for most of his life end up having his paintings hanging in museums?
What is creativity? Are you creative? How can you become more creative?
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Human beings are programmed to like things similar to themselves. When something looks and acts like us, we tend to be biased in its favor. The thing need not be human. When inanimate objects take on human appearance, act like humans, or otherwise take on human characteristics and qualities, we can’t help but feel more of a connection to them.
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In 1915, worried that their straight-sided bottle could be easily confused with those of imitators, the Coca-Cola company set out to create a distinctive new bottle. The design goal was to have a bottle that would be easily recognized and identified with Coca-Cola and one that a person could tell was a Coca-Cola bottle even in the dark when they couldn’t see it.
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As much as we might wish it weren’t so, we know errors are going to happen on our sites and in our applications. So far in this series of posts we’ve looked at the different types of errors that may occur along with some strategies for guiding users to take correct actions. This week we’ll finish up with a discussion of strategies designed to prevent errors and minimize the effects of errors when they do occur.
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When designing websites and other applications are there ways we can guide users to make correct choices, help them interact with our systems, and generally make our systems more usable? A variety of strategies exist to improve our interface designs and today we’ll talk about 2 of them.
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