hFIDO Blog

1. People make up their minds about you in the first 30 seconds of meeting you. Here’s the kicker: it’s an unconscious decision. They’ve already decided how they feel about you, but they just don’t know it yet.
2. Most people get nervous delivering speeches. Even thinking about delivering speeches makes people sweat. Unfortunately, they unconsciously communicate that nervousness to the audience, and the audience reads it as an attack, again unconsciously.
3. Once an audience believes it’s under attack, it stops listening and prepares (unconsciously) for flight.
4. Most presentations fail because the speaker presents information to the audience in a way that unintentionally ensures it will be instantly forgotten. Here is the surprising alternative: by changing a few sentences at the beginning of your talk, you can increase audience retention by four or five-fold.
5. To increase your charisma, focus on a single emotion that you feel about your content or the person you’re meeting, for three minutes before the beginning of your meeting, speech, or presentation.
6. BONUS! People believe non-verbal communication over verbal communication every time.

Learn more communication theory from Dr. Nick Morgan via his blog and videos.

“Diego Mendes is a Research Associate at the Design and Usability Center at Bentley College. He has worked in the branding and revamping of large educational institutions, the design of social media marketing campaigns and successful consumer products. He is interested in researching human interaction with smart interfaces across a range of different products. He also answered these [five] questions about careers in user experience.”

Read the full article at Onward Search.

“Mashable commissioned EyeTrackShop, a startup that performs heatmap studies for marketers, to see where people look on popular social media sites. They covered everything from Facebook and Twitter to Pinterest and Reddit, and though the sample size is pretty small and doesn’t always include the business pages, the results are interesting nonetheless.

Social media networks showed the most attention garnered to the top left sections of the page — where titles, names, and the first status update reside. That means you should make it easy for people to identify who you are by choosing a name that clearly identifies who you are (and if you’re on Google+, an awesome tagline) so you pass a user’s blink test.”

Read the full article on Mashable.

Our very own Dan Berlin is hosting a webinar covering “Best Practices for Consistent Capture of Usability Test Data” on Tuesday, January 31 from 1-2 PM (ET). This seminar is for experience designers seeking to improve their data collection methods and foster straightforward data solicitation, moderation techniques, and capture of usability test data. Best practices will be shared for capturing usability test data in consistent and comparable ways to ensure that your collected data leads to actionable insights.

An Experience Research Director at Mad*Pow, Dan received his BA in Psychology from Brandeis University, spent seven years supporting hard-to-use interfaces at a cable technology firm, jumped into the world of usability through the MBA and MS in Human Factors in Information Design program at Bentley University, and then spent his first two years in the field at a digital marketing agency building a usability research practice and investigating neuromarketing techniques.

Attendance is FREE so register for the event while you can.