Month: April 2010
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Scores and Comparisons: Most Persuasive Feedback Method
Numeric and normative feedback (scores and comparative information) is more persuasive and effective than text feedback with only “self-relevant data”, regardless of the source. That’s according to a 2006 study looking at the best methods for providing feedback to ‘leaders’: This study investigated the influence of feedback format (text versus numeric/normative) on leaders’ reactions to…
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Underestimating Others’ Willingness to Help
We vastly underestimate how likely people are to provide assistance when asked, in both social settings and when soliciting funds. That’s the verdict coming from research conducted by associate professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Frank Flynn. Flynn found that we underestimate how much others are willing to provide in…
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Succeeding With Freemium (Case Studies)
A look at how to succeed with freemium, through a number of case studies: Experiment with different freemium models: When Pandora offered 10 hours of free radio before requiring users to pay an annual subscription, the vast majority of their users left once their allocation of free time expired. The company then experimented with a…
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Sleep for Creativity
Dreams are not “meaningless narratives” but are “layered with significance and substance”, laments insomniac Jonah Lehrer as he considers the importance of dreaming for creativity: A group of students was given a tedious task that involved transforming a long list of number strings into a new set of number strings. This required the subjects to…
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Information Foraging and The Fold
Even though users are now accustomed to scrolling down web pages, we know that the fold still exists and is important–and how we can design to take advantage of it. In light of this, Jakob Nielsen has conducted research to see what prompts users use to decide whether to scroll or not (the answer: the information…