UNDERSTANDING THE BASICS OF HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY : FOR BETTER USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN
“Why do we need to know about the human mind? Because things are designed to be used by people, and without a deep understanding of people, the designs are apt to be faulty, difficult to use, difficult to understand.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
I am constantly fascinated by the intricate connection between human psychology and the design of remarkable user experiences. Knowing the fundamentals of human psychology is essential for generating impactful and compelling experiences that users can understand on a deeper level. In this blog post, let’s understand the basics of human psychology and cognitive science that influences the way we design and ensure engaging user experience.
Beginning with the psychology of experience design, it is a captivating subject, that is at the core of connecting with users. By familiarizing ourselves with how our minds perceive and process data, UX designers can design interfaces that fascinate the eye, improve memory retention, arouse emotions, shape behaviors, and finally, create amazing user experiences.
Our cognitive processes significantly influence how we respond to and interpret experiences. Attention, memory, and decision-making are some of the cognitive processes which shape user experiences.
We live in a period of information overload, and designers must be aware of the limited nature of human attention and design interfaces that catch and hold user attention. by using principles such as visual hierarchy, contrast, and motion, they can guide users’ attention to important elements. the use of bright colors, bold typography, or delicate animations can direct attention to essential features or calls-to-action.
Memory also plays an essential role in UX design. Designers can make information easier to remember and recall by applying principles of cognitive psychology. grouping data into smaller chunks helps users remember and comprehend complex information more easily. for example, breaking down a checkout process into smaller, manageable steps, can help reduce cognitive load and make it simpler for users to remember.
Decision-making is an integral part of user experiences. Understanding the psychology behind decision-making can help designers create experiences that make decision-making easier for users. strategies such as simplifying choices, reducing decision fatigue, and leveraging framing effects can help guide users towards desired actions. By utilizing these cognitive principles, designers can design intuitive and engaging experiences that improve user satisfaction and usability.
Emotions are a powerful motivator in user experiences.
By implementing emotional design principles, designers can elicit certain emotional responses and create stronger connections with users. Colors, typography, imagery, and sound can evoke particular emotions and set the tone for the overall experience. for instance, warm colors like red and orange may arouse feelings of excitement or enthusiasm, while cool colors like blue and green can create a sense of tranquillity or trust. By strategically using these elements, designers can create experiences that emotionally resonate with users and leave a lasting impression.
Empathy is another essential aspect of emotional engagement in UX design. Understanding users’ emotions, requirements, and motivations allows designers to create user-centered and empathetic experiences. carrying out user research, such as interviews and empathy mapping, helps gain insights into users’ emotional states and issues. By empathizing with users, designers can create experiences that address their issues effectively and evoke positive emotions.
Storytelling is a potent tool for emotional engagement. By weaving stories, visuals, and interactive elements, designers can create experiences that engage users on an emotional level. For example, a travel website can use captivating images, personal anecdotes, and user testimonials to arouse excitement and desire to explore new destinations.
Feedback and micro-interactions also play a role in emotional engagement. Providing immediate and positive feedback through micro-interactions enhances the user experience. A simple animation or sound effect that follows a successful action can create a feeling of success and satisfaction, fostering positive emotional connections with the interface.
Understanding human behavior is critical in UX design. By utilizing theories from behavioral psychology, designers can influence user behavior and guide them towards desired actions.
Operant conditioning, which suggests that behaviors are determined by their consequences, can be applied in UX design. By giving immediate and positive reinforcement for desired user actions, designers can persuade users to engage with the product or service. Notifications or rewards for completing particular actions, such as making a purchase, can reinforce user behavior and drive continued engagement.
Social proof is another strong psychological principle. People often rely on the actions and behaviors of others to decide their own. By including social proof elements, such as reviews, testimonials, or user ratings, designers can influence user behavior and build trust. Platforms like Airbnb use social proof by displaying reviews and ratings from past guests, increasing the chances of bookings by showcasing positive experiences.
An important component of user behavior is habit building. By establishing distinct cues and offering quick rewards, designers can promote the development of habits. Fitness applications frequently use habit formation to encourage users to keep up a regular exercise schedule by delivering reminders or offering rewards for finishing daily workouts.
User behavior can also be influenced by the concept of scarcity and the fear of missing out (FOMO). Limited-time deals, countdown clocks, and exclusive access are some of the ways that designers can evoke a feeling of urgency and scarcity. These methods can create a sense of urgency and motivate consumers to act right away.
The key to creating well-received designs lies in how efficiently designers structure information architecture for user convenience. Designers need to make sure that, people can find and understand information by making it easy to navigate and organizing it in a logical way with clear labels, categories and hierarchies. If the way information is organized is easy to understand, people don’t have to work as hard to use it and it becomes easier to use.
Apart from these, there are set of UX rules that works as guiding principles to create good UX designs. If you’re new to designing or marketing products, or if you have experience, there are basic rules about how people use products that you should understand.
These rules for designing products help us understand how users think and what they want from a product.
These rules were compiled by a designer named Jon Yablonski and can be found in his book and website called Laws of UX. We will show you examples to help you use each law better and incorporating accessibility principles, designers ensure that experiences are inclusive and usable for all users. Factors like color contrast, keyboard accessibility, and alternative text for images contribute to inclusive design.
These rules for designing products help us understand how users think and what they want from a product. These rules were compiled by a designer named Jon Yablonski and can be found in his book and website called Laws of UX. We will show you examples to help you use each law better.
Hick’s Law:
Hick’s Law states that the time taken to make a decision increase as the number of options increases.
Applying this law to user experience design, it becomes essential to minimize cognitive load by simplifying choices. An excellent example of this principle is found in the Spotify app, which presents users with a limited number of options to streamline their decision-making process. By reducing the number of choices, users can navigate the app effortlessly and enjoy their music without feeling overwhelmed.
Fitts’s Law:
Fitts’s Law suggests that the time required to reach a target is determined by its size and distance.
In UI/UX design, this law emphasizes the importance of designing elements that are easy to interact with. Take the Duolingo language learning app, for instance. By incorporating large, easily tappable buttons for selecting answers, Duolingo reduces the effort required for users to respond quickly and accurately. This implementation enhances the user experience by making the learning process more efficient and enjoyable.
Jakob’s Law:
Jakob’s Law asserts that users’ mental models are shaped by their past experiences with other websites and digital interfaces.
As designers we can leverage this law to create familiar user experiences.
Miller’s Law:
Miller’s Law suggests that the average human can hold around seven (plus or minus two) items in their working memory.
It is crucial to understand these limitations and avoid overwhelming users with excessive information. The Evernote note-taking app exemplifies this law by offering users the ability to organize their notes into notebooks. By grouping related information together, Evernote helps users manage their content effectively within the constraints of their working memory.
Gestalt Principles:
Gestalt Principles, such as proximity, similarity, and closure, provide valuable insights into how humans perceive and organize visual information. These principles guide designers in creating cohesive and visually appealing interfaces. A notable example is the Headspace meditation app, which applies the principle of proximity by grouping relevant settings and options together. By visually organizing information, Headspace simplifies the user experience, allowing users to focus on their meditation practice.
Aesthetic-Usability Effect
People think websites that look good are easier to use..
So, first impressions matter. make sure yours is a visually appealing one.
In fact, scientists found that the way a website looks is really important. When people first look at a site, they care a lot about how it’s aesthetics. People liked websites that looked really good, and didn’t like ones that looked bad.
Doherty Threshold
When humans and computers interact with each other, it’s best if they can respond to each other quickly. This should take less than 400 milliseconds, so no one has to wait too long for the other to reply.
The Doherty Threshold is about making sure your design responds quickly when needed. The plan is to keep your user interested by making them feel like they are in control of what is happening during the interaction. Imagine if every time you click something, you get a response. It makes you feel like you’re the one in control, and that makes you want to keep using it.
It’s best to show a quick response when someone does something on your website or application so they know they can keep using it easily. If your application is too slow, people may leave because they think the design isn’t working and it’s stopping them from doing things. Make sure that the design keeps users interested, even if it takes a while to complete. You can use progress bars and animations to show users that something is happening behind the scenes.
Goal-gradient effect
People work faster when they are close to achieving their goal.
For example, how Dropbox welcomes new users. It uses a list to show users how much of the job is done, which motivates them to finish the onboarding process.
Designers need to show users how far they have come and what still needs to be done to keep them interested.
Law of Prägnanz
People simplify complicated or unclear pictures because understanding them requires a lot of thinking.
User prefers simplicity so they don’t get overwhelmed. For e.g. Call to action (CTA) buttons are usually rectangle because they work better than more complicated shapes.
Occam’s Razor
Choose a simple design.
Occam’s Razor is useful when you’re selecting between different design ideas. The aim is to pick the easiest design out of all the choices available.
If you don’t have a basic version, try to take out things that won’t make the design worse. This resonates with what German designer, Dieter Rams, says: “Good design is as little design as possible.”
In short: aim to keep it simple, stupid, which is, interestingly, a rule in itself too.
Parkinson’s Law
A task will inflate to take up all the available time.
This law means you should limit the time it takes to complete a task to what users expect it’ll take.
Let’s assume, users expect to fill in forms within five minutes, Anything that makes the time shorter is good, but when it takes longer than expected, that’s not a good user experience.
Peak-End Rule
People base their opinion of an experience on how they felt during the most important moments and at the end, rather than considering the overall experience. Consider a recent project that was enjoyable for you. You probably remember the really exciting parts and how good it felt when you finished it.
This is also the case for how a person uses something. Remember that you need to concentrate on the most significant and last parts of a customer’s experience.
Adding a fun animation or picture at the end of a good experience on a website can make the user feel even happier. Actually, it can make the whole experience unforgettable as well.
Postel’s Law
Be flexible in what you accept from your users and limit what you ask of them. Postel’s law is also known as the robustness principle. This means two things.
Use what people give you. If someone says they are from the US instead of saying United States, just change the answer yourself so all the answers have the same format.
Just ask for a little bit of information. This means you only ask for important things to make people take action, like Netflix does. Filling in a long form to get an eBook or service is bad and makes people not want to do it.
Serial Position Effect
People remember the first and last things in a sequence the most.
The Serial Position Effect says that if you put the most important things in a design on the very left or very right side, it can help people remember them better. Put the not-so-important things in the middle.
Research shows why this is very important. Studies show that people read online information in a zigzag, lawn-mower-like, or F-shaped pattern. They always look at the most important parts, so if you put important information there, people will notice it.
Number two, people usually remember the first and last things the most. In tests where people were given a list of words, they tended to remember the words at the very beginning and end of the list.
Tesler’s Law
Tesler’s Law means that every system has some amount of complexity that cannot be avoided or removed.
I agree that every design is a little bit hard to understand. Your job is to make things simpler. If you make it easy to use, people can concentrate on their work instead of trying to understand how to use the design.
Todoist is a tool that helps you make lists of things to do and is a good example of this type of tool. The app is easy to use because it helps users take things slow and only shows a few options at a time.
Von Restorff Effect
The Von Restorff effect means that people remember things better if they look or seem different from similar things around them.
Hedwig von Restorff, the psychiatrist behind this UX law noticed, that if you want people to notice something, you should put it in a different style. CTA buttons usually have a different color than the rest of the design.
Zeigarnik Effect
People tend to remember things they didn’t finish doing than those they finished doing.
Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik, a doctor who studied the mind, discovered the Zeigarnik Effect by looking at how remembering things is affected by whether or not we finished doing them. Tasks that were not finished or stopped were easier to remember than tasks that were finished.
Starting a job makes us feel uneasy when we can’t finish it or when something comes up and we have to stop. This stress makes you remember what you need to do, and it goes away when you finish the job.
Here are some practical things for you to remember:
· Make sure your designs are easy to understand and navigate by creating them with simple, organized layouts based on how the human brain works. Avoid making things too complicated or cluttered.
· Make sure your designs look good and are easy to use. People like things that are attractive and easy to look at.
· Always put the button for users to click within their easy reach. It should be big enough to be clicked easily and should work in a way that makes taking action very easy. Remember to make it look different compared to the other design parts.
· Make sure your designs work well on all devices so users can easily move around the website. Use progress bars and animations to demonstrate ongoing work and enhance the sense of progress.
· To make things easier, make sure there are not too many options, things to pick from or steps to complete.
· Think carefully about how you group things because people will assume that things that are close together go together. To make a good design that works well, you can group things together using colors, lines, shapes, and more.
· When you have fewer resources, concentrate on the parts of your product that people use the most.
· Put important things on the far ends of your design to help people remember them better.
· Make sure that things don’t take too much time for users to do.
· Your design work is finished when you can’t take away anything more.
Understanding the human psychology behind experience design is crucial for creating exceptional and impactful experiences. By incorporating principles from cognitive psychology, emotional engagement, behavioral psychology, and user-centered design, designers can create intuitive, engaging, and memorable experiences. The application of these theories in modern-day design allows designers to create experiences that resonate with users on a deep emotional level, drive desired behaviors, and ultimately deliver outstanding user experiences.
By blending human psychology, cognitive science and creativity, experience designers can shape the future of user-centric design, creating experiences that not only fulfil functional needs but also leave a lasting impact on users’ lives. So, let’s embrace the power of psychology in experience design and craft remarkable experiences that inspire, engage, and delight users.
