In the case of spaghetti sauce, at least, we cannot always explain what we want. Especially when asked about our preferences, we are more likely to list what is currently known and popular than ask for something that hasn’t yet been done or isn’t widely available (even if that is what we would prefer).

How do you like your spaghetti sauce? Thin, spicy, chunky, traditional …

The point of the talk is variability — one product cannot meet the needs of all users. In the food industry that revelation ultimately led to the 500 kinds of sauce we now face at the supermarket. (See Barry Schwartz’s talk for more on choice overload.)

Gladwell’s talk was a good reminder to me to stray away from open-ended questions when conducting user research. A question like “What kind of features do you want in this system?” is only going to yield a list of features that are already well-established, even bad ones.

Continued… see the whole scary story on Mint.com.

In UI terms, a lightbox draws the user’s attention to a dialog box, error message, or other design element in the middle of the screen by dimming the rest of the screen.

Yes, the lightbox has some benefits. It shows you an Important Message within the context of the page you were just looking at. It doesn’t get blocked by popup killers. And it looks super-cool, especially when used as a slideshow.

But lightboxes are starting to crop up everywhere. In my Yahoo mail (I hope the developer got paid a lot for that), in half the applications I interact with, even in my own website (OK, I put it there, but that was 2 years ago when it was very cool and cutting edge).

Is anyone else starting to suffer from lightbox fatigue?