Woman Fired Becuase of Captial Letters

Email has taken over the workplace. But should it be used to fired someone? Sure, maybe if they content in the email was questionable, but what about if someone used captial letters or color. A recent article in the New Zealand Herald describes a story where a woman was fired because she used captial letters in her email. More specifically, the employees thought that many of her emails were too "confrontational".

One reason why you might want to use color, or alter the text size of a letter, is to bring attention to a specific item. The saliency of that item, compared to others, is much greater and people are more likely to see it. However, captial letters also have the contention that people are yelling; and red color general means that people are angry.

So what should you do if you don't want to get fired, but do want people to notice a message. I would put it the message at the front of the email, and in the title as well. Also, you could use characters, such a '*' to demark important items. Or you could put blank spaces / paragraphs between important items. While it seems strange peform these items, perhaps it could save your job.

The Rapt Book

The New York Times had an article discussing the Rapt book. The article discusses typically ways to reduce the distractions of the day, such as starting on the most important items in the morning or wearing ear plugs while traveling around town. However, it also discusses future ways that we may improve our attention such as using direct manipulation via light. I was also told of a technique that use electrical currents to alter brain function, and thus performance.

I was aware of techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation to direct influence brain activity for the purposes of understanding cognition, but these others techniques to enhance performance were new to me. I am not sure, how I feel about them. An interesting question to ponder is: If you could improve your attention would it matter to you if you had to take a pill or use a device that emitted something into your brain. For myself, I will continue to think about this, but not worry until I see these devices on sale at Walmart.

You fingers can now do much more.

Our fingers have long played an important role in our lives: They are great tools for eating, for playing an instrument, and for those finger pokes—seen in the classic slap-stick comedy routines.

With the advent of the multi-touch technology, however, our fingers are doing much more. Technology is also using the finger "tap/touch", as a method to interact with a variety of devices. The touch screens of: laptops, restaurants, and smart phones are such examples. Or consider the iPod touch. Users can perform different actions using a finger tip combo. Pinch two fingers together, and the image scales out; spread two fingers apart and the image scales in.

A recent article in BBC news, described the future for our fingertips. The author (Darren Waters) argues that the day of the mouse, keyboard, and desktop graphical interface are numbered. However, Mr. Waters also notes that while current technology exists to read and interpret these finger gestures, a significant hurdle still exists: "part of the challenge is about developing a codified understanding of such actions [read and interpreting human gestures]. In other words, we lack standards-a common method by which we all individuals understand the system operates.

To understand the importance of standards and finger gestures, consider the annoyance you may experience ever time you purchase a new phone. The process of going through and learning the menu structure, and organization scheme of the phone can be a headache. Now, what happens if you have to unlearn previous gestures, and learn new gestures to perform common tasks. Most likely that will invoke a specific kind of gesture that these devices may not respond well to.

Those pesky passwords, and user names too! Oh my.

Another interesting aspect of the Jared Spool article is that they discovered:

"45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested psaswords, to find out it reached 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested."

This size, frequency, and effect of forgetting ones password are remarkable. I must admit, I ran into this problem myself with Amazon, when I had problem tracking a package. I contacted Amazon, and it soon become clear that I had a multiple accounts. It appears now, that I was not the only one. Not only do many people it have multiple accounts, but they also appear to forget their passwords associated with those accounts.

The factors that lead to people forgetting their user accounts and passwords is not clear. For example, is it because they have multiple online accounts with different names and passwords; or is it because they have not visited the site recently. Whatever the cause or casuses of the password issues, the result is clear, people decided it was not worth the hassle and even though the requested their password they decided to move on.

The 300 million button

People (outside the human factors field, of course) sometimes question why it is necessary to perform usability tests. Furthermore, they often ask what benefit qualitative feedback provides? Well, I ran across one article that talked about the benefits of a usability testing. Jared Spool, an author of one of the articles, wrote:

"The results [of removing a registering button]: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000?

While, such examination may not always yield such great return, it is an excellent example of the potential.

Sleep and Daylight Savings

There are two primary debates surrounding daylight saving time. First, and the most well know is the energy debate . The second, and less well known, is the sleep debate. A New York Times article highlights this debate, and argues that perhaps we should not be switching our time, but rather continue to sleep.

Spelling matters for Job Resumes!

Spelling and grammatical errors annoy my wife, and apparently can also influence what people think about your resume. Dan Munger, at his blog, Cognitive Daily , performed a informal survey / experiment about people thoughts about resumes. Dr. Munger asked readers to rate two hypothetical job candidates (i.e. resumes) for a communications assistant position in a large neuroscience lab.

A couple of different factors were examined. One variable pitted education against experience. Findings showed that most respondents -- nearly 80 percent out of over 800 who completed the survey -- selected experience over education, preferring Suzanne over Emily.

But that was not the real purpose of the study. The real purpose was: to examine whether people should you put more effort into the overall look of a resume or into proofreading to fix typographical errors? Respondents were shown one of the following three conditions: attractive / accurate, attractive / typos, or ugly / accurate. The results revealed that ratings were significantly lower for the resume with typos compared to both the attractive and ugly resumes.

The take home message of the experiment was, "If you have a limited amount of time to work on your resume, you should spend it proofreading, not making it look prettier"