If you are Dutch and looking to work on awesome gov-tech send me a DM.
42 karma · joined December 22, 2011
If you are Dutch and looking to work on awesome gov-tech send me a DM.
We have 342 municipalities, all buying the same apps (from 3 or 4 vendors) to deliver basic services to their citizens. Common Ground aims to replace all of those with open source solutions.
Apparently many companies were late implementing the security measures and had to take their entire service down 3 weeks after the initial publication of the issue & fix.
Daimler is planning six to nine new electric cars between 2018 and 2024, while also unveiling a new electric model next month on the Paris motor show.
http://startupjuncture.com/2014/04/10/contender-for-food-del...
I personally never thought much of the guys giving the speedreading workshops, they seemed to be acting and came across like secondhand car dealers. Their claims of comprehension with over 1500 words / minute just sound insane. The techniques however are not all nonsense, and I do believe that I have learned to increase my reading speed from +/- 300 to around 500 words per minute.
The most important lesson they thought was 'guiding your eyes'. Our eyes are not that good in following a straight line by themselves, just try to stare straightforward, and make a perfect circle with your eyes: it will more likely be a pentagon or something. When we let our eyes follow our finger drawing a circle however, it is a lot easier. Applying this to reading, simply means using your finger or pen to follow each sentence on the paper. I find it a lot faster to read that way, but I still let myself subvocalize the sentences, for comprehension. Doing this on a 500-600 words/minute rate is a lot more exhausting though, and I only use it for academic articles or textbooks.
According to Swanson (1992) gratification can be categorized in two dimensions: process and content. Process gratification refers to the enjoyment and satisfaction from engaging in communication, content gratification refers to learning information from media content. In other words, motivations such as entertainment, relaxation, escape or just passing time are related to process gratifications (Parker and Plank, 2000). On the other hand information, cognitive and search motives are linked to content gratifications (Stafford and Stafford, 2001; Charney and Greenberg, 2002).
Other studies related to consumer behavior have identified two types of behavior as well. Much like content gratification, utilitarian motives are related to problem solving, goal oriented, task related and rational (Batra and Ahtola, 1991; Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 2001). Contrasting hedonic motives can be compared to process gratification. Hedonic motives are often driven by such things as fun, amusement, enjoyment, arousal, novelty and surprise (Hirschman, 1980; Babin et al. 1994; Hausman, 2000).
Simply put, utilitarian shoppers are those with a purchasing goal, while hedonic shoppers fulfill their needs not simply through the purchase, but in the shopping experience itself (Arnold and Reynolds, 2003). Hedonic shoppers are shopping for shopping sake.
Digging into research on the effect of web aesthetics on buying decisions of consumers, a case can be made for two aspects of aesthetics: aesthetic appeal and aesthetic formality. Aesthetic appeal refers to the attractiveness and creativity of design, while aesthetic formality covers the way information is presented, the clearness and legibility of a website (Schenkman and Jonsson, 2000; Lavie and Tractinsky, 2004).
Now combining these two types of consumers and two aspects of aesthetics, we can argue that the utilitarian shopper is highly motivated by aesthetic formality. He will be more likely to make a purchase when he is not distracted by novel design, and is able to find all the information he needs easily. Hedonic shoppers o the other hand are motivated by aesthetic appeal, and are more likely to make impulse purchases on a website with a high appeal (Constantinides, 2004; Kim and Eastin, 2011; Wang et al 2011).
Now Pinterest is a website typically for hedonic shoppers, and the aesthetic balance is heavily biased towards aesthetic appeal. While a website like apple.com where we can expect shoppers of both types is far more balanced in its aesthetic. On the other end of the scale we can put sites like Craigslist or maybe Ryanair, which you will only visit if you have a certain goal. These sites have an extensive amount of aesthetic formality, and little to no aesthetic appeal.
I will not list the entire list of literature in this post, you should be able to find it on scholar with the authors and year. Just send me a message if you would like to receive the list of articles.
For example, we can observe a thousand white swans in the world, and hypothesize that all swans are white. That is until we encounter that one black swan, and our hypothesis has been falsified.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis