Weinschenk, Susan. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2011. Print.

Weinschenk is psychologist and an interface designer. She writes and consults about applied cognitive psychology in the field technology. This little book contains facts about the way humans see, read, remember, think, focus, feel, decide, make mistakes, relate socially, and are motivated. It is exactly the type of knowledge Hoekman advices learning to make good situational scenarios to guide design. This information helps both interface design, and content creation. About 40 % of the facts seemed relevant to my project, both for the web design and for the creation of compelling interviews. Here are some nuggets:

Web Design

• People scan based on past experience and expectations. Incorporate conventions.
• People see cuesthat tell them what to do with an object. The movie player buttons.
• People believe that things closer together belong together. Use chunking, and allow enough space between unrelated items.
• Meanings of colors vary by culture. Does this extrapolate downward to sub-culture, like Evangelical Christian Americans?
• Reading and Comprehending are two different things. Goal is useful information that is understood and acted upon, not text.
• Reading a computer screen is harder than reading paper. Pay attention to fonts/colors/size/line length/etc.
• People process information in bite-sized chunks. Description, instructions, information needs to tight.
• People remember only four items at once. Implications for tags, searches, and organization schemes. Limit choices to a manageable load.
• People create mental models. Design must conform to mental model for ease of use, or it must easily teach a new model.
• People interact with conceptual models. Keep in mind the user, who will be doing and learning from the model/application you create. Limit activity that is unhelpful/difficult/confusing to them, reward activity that helps them achieve goals.
• Well practiced skills don't require conscious action. If immersion is the goal, the architecture of the application needs to be invisible. Conventions.
• People can't actually multi-task.  Immersion is a viable goal.
•  People want more choices and information than they can process. True UCD is about goals and applications that meet those goals, not stated desires.

Interviews

• People are hard-wired for imitation and empathy. The sympathetic of exemplary lives can motivate people to emulate godly attitudes and habits.
• Doing things together bonds people together. Stories of a shared faith-life.
• People expect online interactions to follow social rules. Should resemble church setting sharing, not media iterview.
• Speakers brains and listeners' brains sync up during communication. (mirror neurons) The conversation between myself and listeners is a vital ingredient.
• People can enter a flow state. Edit to hold attention.
• Culture affects how people think. Care about straddling two cultures, individual church affiliation and common Christian and American.
• People process best in story form.
• Anecdotes persuade more than data.
• People use look and feel as their first indicator of trust. (careful set design strategy)
• Pastoral scenes make people happy. Outside interviews?
• The more difficult something is to achieve, the more people like it. Discuss weight matters.
• People make most decisions unconsciously. The act of sharing story impacts decisions.