Ruth Stalker-Firth

Last summer I found myself exploring an early Iron Age home at The Crannog Centre on Loch Tay. The Crannog was cosy, as its focal point was the Iron Age hearth - a large open fire. During the day the inhabitants would peel back wicker shutters to let in fresh air whilst they tended to their animals, making food and clothing and ground spelt for bread.

Today, wearing a woolly jumper and eating spelt pasta, with my back to the radiator, it seems to me that our needs and motivations have changed little since the Iron Age. (more…)

Like many usability consultants I have spent hours locked in rooms with strangers saying: “What do you think about this web page?” It is boring way to earn a living especially as you often know the answers and could tell clients without asking the questions.

Alas, most clients only believe opinions about their websites when it comes from random users - not you, the expert. Luckily the industry takes Jakob Nielson’s advice on testing: five users only to establish a pattern of responses (and because it’s cheap). Although, if we were really serious, we would need 30 users to talk about the statistical significance of our results.

Some of this boredom could be avoided (and client money saved) if everyone employed the patterns which already exist in users’ heads to create more intuitive webpages and GUIs. Cognitive science, the study of mind and intelligence, enables us to understand what makes our users tick. (more…)

I am typing this as I listen to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. I love all kinds of music but can only work whilst listening to jazz and baroque. Researchers have show that baroque music creates a mentally stimulating environment in which the brain can work. Apparently, it has a calming affect on brainwaves. J S Bach always lifts my mood and I love that fiction writer Douglas Adams in Dirk Golightly’s Holistic Detective Agency attributed Bach’s music to aliens who ‘helped’ the poet Coleridge to write Kubla Khan - a poem partly about inspiration and genius. Amongst the theories explored in Adams’s fiction is Jung’s collective unconsciousness. Jung says that mankind has a reservoir of experiences that anyone can dip into, which is why people come up with the same ideas simultaneously, yet independently. One example of this is the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin developed his idea of natural selection over 20 years but didn’t publish it until Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to Darwin with the same theory he had developed on his own. (more…)