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.

“A new mouse-free interface, Tobii Gaze, attempts to revolutionize the way we interact with devices. The gesture-based system incorporates eye-tracking to direct an on-screen pointer and works in conjunction with touch pad input for fine-tuning.”

Watch it in action at engadget.

Boxie, a robot created by Alexander Reben at the MIT Media Lab, relies on its adorableness rather than artificial intelligence to approach people and get them to answer interview questions on camera…all while being inexpensive, rugged, and lightweight. Frankly, it’s a masterful execution of persuasive design that’s also somehow reminiscient of Amazon.com’s box design.

Come for the infectious cuteness, stay for the dancing engineer.

“The country selector. It’s there when you create an account for a new Web service, check out of an e-commerce store or sign up for a conference. The normal design? A drop-down list with all of the available countries.

However, when conducting a large session of user testing on check-out usability, we consistently found usability issues with the massive country selector drop-downs. Jakob Nielsen reported similar issues as far back as 2000 and 2007 when testing drop-downs with a large number of options, such as state and country lists.

So, this past summer we set out to redesign the country selector. This article focuses on the four design iterations we went through before arriving at the solution (free jQuery plugin included).”

View the usability problems of traditional drop-down country selectors at Smashing Magazine.