100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People summary

Every second of every waking moment, your subconscious is dealing with roughly 40 billion pieces of information. However, only 40 percent of this information makes it to your conscious brain. What makes certain knowledge stick, then?

Your brain is only capable of processing information in bite-sized chunks. Therefore, if you’re ever conveying information – whether in a presentation or an ad – make sure you don’t provide too much at once.

The scope of your short-term memory is limited, so embedding information into your long-term memory is difficult.

In order to remember information, people have to use it. By repeating and connecting newfound knowledge to something that you’re already familiar with, it’s more likely that the information will stay in your mind and transition from your short-term to your long-term memory.

Have you ever noticed that, more often than not, when you smile at a stranger, the stranger smiles back? Well, that’s because imitation and empathy come naturally to people.

When you see someone performing an action, the premotor cortex in the front section of your brain activates mirror neurons. As a result, you mirror that person’s behavior. When you see an individual smile, your premotor cortex is responsible for causing you to smile, too.

Most people have had the exasperating experience of reading the same sentence over and over again without taking any information in.

A study undertaken at the University of California found that people think their minds tend to wander 10 percent of the time, when, in actuality, it’s more like 30 percent of the time. It can even be as high as 70 percent – say, if you’re driving on an empty highway.

Most people get a little thrill when a notification pops up on Twitter or Instagram, or when an email arrives. And that thrill is caused by dopamine – a chemical that controls the brain’s pleasure system and, thus, your feelings of enjoyment.

If you want people to experience a flow state while using your design, you have to provide constant feedback. This is especially important when designing online, and one way to do this is to send messages that update people with information on their performance.

Imagine that, after a hearty dinner, you’re sitting in a restaurant looking at the list of desserts. After five minutes of reading, you realize you’ve barely made it halfway through! To some, this profusion of options might seem like heaven. But is it actually such a good thing?

Well, there are two ways of looking at it.