This week has been somewhat exhaustive. One of the reason for said exhaustion is still the adaptation to the new getting-up time (6:15 rather than 7:30), the other reason is that two replica experiments were set up. There’s a volunteer who will execute the experiments, but the reason she’s a volunteer is that she wants to gain more experience in running experiments. This obviously still leaves me with a host of practical stuff to arrange (such as transporting a 42″ television with a large support, where forgetting to mention the size of the support makes for rather awkward transportation), and the need to provide her with a thorough run-through before the experiments can start.

On the bright side, there’s no need for me to be there while she’s running the experiment and the volunteer will supply all the participants. All I have to do is make sure that they get a reward now; which gives me a new excuse to order more business gifts, since that’s so much easier to arrange than vouchers.

Writing has been in short supply this week, since most of it has proved to be either running around or sitting down and talking to people. The other day, it was standing and listening though, since Donald Norman was into town. Considering he recently published “The design of future things”, this would be an interesting way to see what kind of new material he would cover. The topic of the lecture was announced as “Social Design”, and mainly the end covered new material concerning his eight principles of psychology of waiting (and how to design for it, of course). The design principles he set out are:

  1. emotions dominate
  2. eliminate confusion’
  3. the wait must be appropriate
  4. set expectations, then meet or exceed them
  5. keep people occupied
  6. be fair
  7. end strong, start strong
  8. memory of an event is more important than the experience

Donald Norman updated his pdf on this august 21st, 2008.