Neil Wehrle

In the 15 or so years I’ve been designing interactive products, I have always tried to involve the intended audience (users) in the course of product development. A recent article by Jared Spool on UIE.com articulates something different that I’ve felt but rarely had the data to support: involve the rest of the team in [...]

The chartbeat dashboard recently underwent its first major revision since launching a year ago. Below is a copy of a post I wrote for the chartbeat blog giving some background into the redesign.
The team has a strong vision for chartbeat, and to bolster our vision I led some quick-and-clean research into how current [...]

William Poundstone unravels a great example of how businesses use “nudges” to direct user (customer) behavior to make choices they otherwise might not.
“Puzzles, anchors, stars, and plowhorses; those are a few of the terms consultants now use when assembling a menu (which is as much an advertisement as anything else). “A star is a popular, [...]

A short but interesting article in the WSJ goes into the use of “nudges” and social pressure to encourage people to modify their behavior. The basic idea is that people don’t always behave rationally or in their best self-interest. While this wasn’t big news to the rest of the world, apparently it is for many [...]

Wired Science has a short discussion about how humans recognize and process facial characteristics and why we sometimes stare at people with facial deformities. An evolutionary response causes our brain to momentarily stumble when we see people that don’t have symmetrical features:
To decide, your eyes sweep over the person’s face, retrieving only parts, mainly just [...]

Douglas Bowman posted today on about his decision to leave Google, where he was a Lead Visual Designer. He sounds torn: on the one hand it is a fast-paced environment where you can define an entirely new practice with the ability to affect millions of users. On the other hand it is a strongly engineering-driven [...]

I’ve always been a proponent of leveraging usability test artifacts (video, transcripts, quotes) to help communicate to decision makers the impact of design decisions. I always do this with great care, since I don’t want to overstate issues I’ve uncovered, while at the same time making clear the human effects of software usability.
Recently, Microsoft partnered [...]

This is a classic feedback loop – just like giving people a scale will help them lose weight, this study gave people feedback and the ability to particiapate in the energy market, and it lowered energy usage.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/technology/10energy.html

I’m fascinated with human behavior, and in particular how people are constantly looking for differences in the world around them. I don’t know if this is an evolutionary response (fight or flight), or is something else. This is a powerful response that allows us to quickly assess what is going on around us, but it [...]

Article in the Atlantic looks at multitasking as a generational and technological phenomenon that may (or should) be peaking . The article is well written and humorous, interspersing personal anecdotes with scientific studies.
“Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our [...]