BlogSat

As friends know, I use the Facebook birthday reminder feature quite a bit to remind me to wish folks on their birthday. So it was annoying a couple of weeks ago, when I almost missed a really good friend's birthday (after wishing a few others :)) simply because the default setting on Facebook stops at showing just five friends' birthdays for the day. You need to click on " See more" to see the rest. I understand the logic and the UX choice: the little birthday widget just shows you the next five birthdays from your list of friends (Nicely-spaced; works for most users; makes sure the ad below stays above the fold ) But on days when you have more than 5 friends with a birthday, which happens more often than most people think , its pretty easy to miss a few friends, because as as user you get used to seeing five birthdays with only a few being today and most on the following days. So a couple of suggested tweaks to fix this for folks like me: By default, always show mo...

I found this great preso on "Seductive Interactions" over at NoteandPoint . The style is great, and so is a lot of the content. The preso reminds us about the basic tendencies of users (Slide 71) e.g., users are curious users are lazy users like to be guided users respond to organization ...etc etc. It also talks about some basic psychological tools that designers have to influence their users (Slide 138) including social proof reciprocity imagery ...etc. etc. The key is recognizing which of the tools you can use to influence human behavior to achieve the goals you have (Slide 140.)