BizImage.net - Division of Windermere Design

Monday, August 1, 2011

Educate on web-site and office

Patients are becoming ever more savvy about their medical care, wanting to know as much as possible. If you provide educational video on your site and in your office about your specialty that truly educates patients,not sells, it adds value to both your practice and the offices that refer their patients to you. Visit us at Bizimage.net

Image is Everything

Your image is not simply the materials you create with your logo, but also includes your building, your staff, and how everyone interacts with patients. Using a designer to create the right office atmosphere can provide vast amounts of marketing and public relations benefit. Couple this with professional staff who are dressed in matching attire and know the professional protocols set forward in answering the phone and interacting with patients and you have set yourself up for success. Visit us at BIzimage.net

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Inattentional blindness

Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is the phenomenon of not being able to perceive things that are in plain sight. It is caused by an absence of attention to the unseen object and is clear evidence of the importance of attention for perceiving. Without attention we are as if functionally blind. It is closely related to change blindness, which refers to our inability to perceive changes to features in scenes to which we are not attending. It is also related to the Attentional Blink, a phenomenon which occurs when we are searching for two particular target items in a rapidly presented list of items. We often fail to perceive the second target if it occurs between 150 and 400 msec after the first. This also is due to our failure to attend to the second target while attention is absorbed by the first one.

The term inattentional blindness was coined by Arien Mack and Irvin Rock in 1992. It was used as the title of Mack and Rock's book published by MIT Press in 1998. The book describes the discovery of Inattentional Blindness and the procedure used for revealing it.

The best-known study demonstrating inattentional blindness is the Invisible gorilla test, which was conducted by Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University. Their study, a revised version of earlier studies conducted by Ulric Neisser, Neisser and Becklen, 1975, asked subjects to watch a short video in which two groups of people (wearing black and white t-shirts) pass a basketball around. The subjects are told to either count the number of passes made by one of the teams or to keep count of bounce passes vs. aerial passes. In different versions of the video a woman walks through the scene carrying an umbrella, or wearing a full gorilla suit.^[1] After watching the video the subjects are asked if they saw anything out of the ordinary take place. In most groups, 50% of the subjects did not report seeing the gorilla. The failure to perceive the gorilla or the woman carrying an umbrella is attributed to the failure to attend to it while engaged in the difficult task of counting the number of passes of the ball. These results indicate that the relationship between what is in one's visual field and perception is based much more significantly on attention than was previously thought.

Another experiment was carried out by Steve Most, Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris, and Brian Scholl. They had objects moving randomly on a computer screen. Participants were instructed to attend to the black objects and ignore the white, or vice versa. After several trials, a red cross unexpectedly appeared and traveled across the display, remaining on the computer screen for five seconds. The results of the experiment showed that even though the cross was distinctive from the black and white objects both in color and shape, about a third of participants missed it. They had found that people may be attentionally tuned to certain perceptual dimensions, such as brightness or shape.

The basic Simons study was re-used on British television as a public safety advert designed to point out the potential dangers to cyclists caused by inattentional blindness in motorists. In the advert the gorilla is replaced by a moonwalking bear.

NASA conducted an experiment in a flight simulator in which commercial pilots were tested to see if they would notice distractions on a runway during simulated landings.^[2] Those who were trained pilots did not notice and landed directly on top of the distraction 1/4 of the time, while untrained pilots didn't know what to expect of a typical landing and thus saw the distraction.^[2]

Banner blindness

Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors on a website ignore banner-like information.

The term "banner blindness" was coined by Benway and Lane^[1] as a result of website usability tests where a majority of the test subjects either consciously or unconsciously ignored information that was presented in banners. Subjects were given tasks to search information on a website.

The information that was overlooked included both external advertisement banners and internal navigational banners, e.g. quick links. The placement of the banners on a web page had little effect on whether or not the subjects noticed them. The result of the study contradicted the popular web design guideline that larger, colourful and animated elements on a website are more likely to be seen by users.

However, in an experiment by Bayles^[2] the results showed that users generally noticed web banners. This was proven by e.g. eye-tracking tests. The experiment concentrated on how users perceived a single web page and what they could recognise and recall of it afterwards. It has been argued that experiments like this without real-world tasks have poor methodology, and produce poor results.^[3]

Pagendarm and Schaumburg^[4] argued that a possible explanation for the banner blindness phenomenon lay in the way users interacted with websites. Users tend to either search for specific information or aimlessly browse from one page to the next. Users have constructed web related cognitive schemata for different tasks on the web. This hypothesis was also suggested by Norman.^[5] When searching for specific information on a website, users focus only on the parts of the page where they would assume the relevant information could be, i.e. small text and hyperlinks. Large colourful or animated banners and other graphics are in this case ignored. Usability tests that compared the perception of banners between groups of subjects searching for specific information and subjects aimlessly browsing seem to support this theory.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

It's finally here! Final Cut X

It's finally here! Final Cut X .

Here at Windermere Design, we will be sequestering ourselves over the next few days to discover all the new bells and whistles in order to provide the same caliber of production on Final Cut X as we have delivered with the other versions of Final Cut for the past 10 years, http://www.youtube.com/user/bizimage1 to view some of our video production. Stay tuned!

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Ignite Your Talent

BY BETSY JORDAN OF ACCELERA CONSULTING. A WINDERMERE DESIGN CONSULTING PARTNER.

Greetings!

Successful people (meaning those who are living lives that are full, meaningful and abundant) have one significant trait in common. That trait is not intelligence, empathy or even drive. It is ownership of their lives.

They fully leverage all that they have, all that they are and all that they have been.

It is your responsibility to leverage all that you've got. Take ownership of yourself, your talents and the tasks in front of you. Be the best you can be; do the best you can.

Own your life and your career. That is how you succeed.

Ignite Your Talent How to Own Your Life, Career and Success We don't choose our gifts or talents but we can choose how well we steward them to help ourselves and others. The following are seven tips to own your life and career so that you will have the kind of success that creates value in your life and the lives of others. 1. Do not let other people define who you are. Your sense of self and source of strength has to come from the inside so you do not experience a foundation shift each time public opinion of you changes. 2. Do not let other people drain your lifeblood, energy and capacity. Take inventory of the people in your life. Keep those that support, encourage and challenge you and let go of those who suck the living daylights out of you. 3. Do not let your past define you, but transform you. All of us have had dysfunctions of some kind in our past, whether from childhood hurts, marriage issues or personal failure. Instead of asking "why" these things happen, ask "to what end" so that you can grow from the pain and thus help others better. 4. Take a hold of your gifts and talents without apology. There is no reason to feel bad if you think faster than others, sing better, or do complicated math problems in your head. Embrace what you bring to the world. 5. Leverage your talents, passion and personal story into a way of adding dramatic value to others. Find the path between who you are and those who could benefit from your unique gifting. What you have to offer has a place and is needed. Find those who need you with urgency. 6. Take responsibility for how you contribute to the well-being and self-esteem of others. What you do and say has tremendous impact on others. Be cognizant of this reality when interacting with others. Be purposeful to build others up and avoid tearing them down. 7. Protect what you have with all that you've got. Who you are and what you have to offer is a treasure. Watch yourself if you want to give your expertise away for less than its worth because you either a) want to be liked or b) do not feel that you can ask for equitable compensation. Protect yourself from those who might want to use you or bring harm to you. Start now to fully embrace all aspects of your life - the good, the bad and the not so pretty. By owning all that you are you put yourself in the best position to achieve what matters most to you.

Ignite your Spirit "My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment." Oprah Winfrey

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