Help! I need your ideas / questions / thoughts

[HAWK]

I’m pretty pumped to wrap up our theme for the month with an appearance in our Slack channel by the one and only Susan Weinschenk.

I’ve really enjoyed reading Susan’s book. It is easily digestible and full of really fascinating and useful facts.

Who has read it (or followed my fact tweeting on Twitter)?

You may have also noticed that I’ve posted a couple of discussions that came up for me:

Above the fold? Yes or no?

The first discussion on the table for our November theme is a contentious one if Twitter is anything to go by. Susan says "Put the most important information (or things you want people to focus on) in the top third of the screen or in the middle." But is above the fold a myth that should stay in the '90s where it belongs? What are your thoughts?

Black on White or Grey on Grey?

Second discussion on the table for our November theme is one that I think about often in my work when I'm helping clients to customise their forums. Susan says: Black text on white is the most readable. My personal experience is that dark grey on light grey is more readable because the contrast is less jarring. Take our forum (out-of-the-box Discourse) vs this forum as examples. What are your thoughts?

For those that have been reading the book or have read it previously, I’d really value your ideas for some questions to put to Susan.

Even if you haven’t and you’re interested in psychology and brain hacks, you’re still super welcome (and encouraged) to contribute.

Throw your questions / thoughts / ideas / challenges down in this topic. I’d love to distill down our thinking as a community so that I can make Susan’s session really valuable.

[jacquidow]

I am really interested in the psychology around usability testing.

1. How does a formal usability test change how a person reacts or responds?

2. What things should we be looking out for when observing? (How to read people)

[Lukcha]

If Susan has them, I’d love to hear reader feedback and any interesting stories she’s collected about how designers have applied these #100things to their products to get a meaningful outcome.

[AshleaMcKay]

My question would be around neurodiversity inclusion in research and design since I (being autistic) and a lot of other people out there have brains that work quite differently eg we use different parts of our brains for different things and we process information differently.

I’d like to hear Susan’s perspective on how psychology might be able to help neurotypical people understand neurodiversity better. How do we help people understand something they can’t see? Something that goes against the concept of ‘normal’ and ‘socially acceptable’ and can’t just be ‘fixed’ or ‘changed’ because it’s a very real lifelong condition and well, it’s actually not a bad thing to be