Human irrationality, 3D HTML, and more – The Monday December 20th Roundup

Christmas is coming and the VKI blog is going on hiatus. We will still have a few posts here and there (I am sure Michael will keep posting) but post count will be down, as our staff will be away.

This week, however, we have a plethora of posts on everything from Adwords quality score to human irrationality to 3D engines made in HTML5.

• We start the week with ClickEquations and 11 questions about quality score.
• Next up, Michael Gray has an explanation of “Evergreen Content“. Not sure exactly how this differs from “content”… but I suppose we need a cute name for anything.

• This is AWESOME: How to create a 3D engine in HTML5. It’s not complex, nor feature rich, but it’s a start.
• So, we all know that you can also CSS3 to create custom animations, but you can also use it to dissolve between background images. Forum One explains how.

• Avinash has three more advanced segments for analyzing your site. He starts with a neat idea: ignore failures, focus on successes. Look at what people who are visiting your site are doing, then see how you can convince others to do that.

• One of the harder parts of usability testing is getting the design team on board. Christine Perfetti explains that, quite often, getting the design team into conducting user tests (even just quick and dirty ones) can have a much better result than a couple of professionally designed tests.
• Can adding delays increase perceived value? Dan Ariely claims yes, and 90 Percent of Everything posts comments from Hacker News on whether this could work.

• From TEDxWoodsHole, Dan Ariely discusses why we have so much trouble doing something that will be good for us in the future.Additionally, here is a video of his talk:
• A fantastic piece from the Guardian on correlation versus causation: apparently there is a strong correlation between mobile phone towers and births per year. Could mobile phone towers increase fertility? Or perhaps could areas with more mobile phone towers have larger populations, and thus more births per year…