Psychology In UX Design

Psychology In UX:

The human factor:

Describes the range of variables humans bring to their product. 

Interactions before world war I, the objective was to fit the humans in the machine that started being used in war that changed. Suddenly. Untrained soldiers had to learn how to fly.

Aviation psychology was introduced, and an attempt was made to mold the machine to fit the human. 

Unfortunately, in the early 1900s, technology just needed to be better.

Yet during world war ii, the sheer number of men and women needed for the war effort made it impossible to choose specific people for specific tasks. Aviation design had to consider human factors.

In this case, human factors were the pilots varying skill levels. If we were robots, some computer genius could just program us to be expert flyers. But we’re only human and not everyone flying a warplane was an ace pilot. To account for this human factor, we had to adapt the plane to the pilot, and by world war ii, we finally had the tech to do it.

 

Common human factors that inform design:

• Impatience
• limited memory 
• needing analogies
• limited concentration
• changes in need
• needing motivation
•  Prejudices fears
•  making errors
• misjudgment

EX: the business email shorthand TLDR has caught on in the last couple of years. It’s an acronym you might find at the start of a very long email. a TLDR is a summary highlighting the email you need to know without any excess content. 

So what does TLDR stand for? Too long didn’t read the email. 

Writer factors in the human tendencies of Impatience, limited concentration, Need for motivation, and little memory.

Here are psychological concepts that can help you design with the human factor in mind.

 

psychological concepts:

Mental model:

 Are internal maps that allow humans to predict how something will work

EX: when you face a door, your mental model tells you, “you can open the door.” Once the door is opened, you can leave the room. Opening the door is expected to end with you being able to leave the room. A mental model breaks when you can’t go through the open door. For example, there’s a solid brick wall behind it.

Feedback loops:

Feedback loops refer to the user’s outcome at the end of a process.

EX: if you enter a dark room and flip a light switch, the space will either brighten or won’t. Positive feedback would be the light coming on. In contrast, negative feedback would be nothing happening. the more positive feedback a user gets when completing the action, the more they will expect the outcome to be positive. The same is true with negative feedback. If your user takes action, it is important to get confirmation that the action worked or didn’t.

Despite all the limitations the human factors put on UX designers. It also gives us opportunities to create even better user experiences.

 

Psychological phenomena:

Human beings can be complicated. We’re always making associations between what we think and see. for example, humans usually prefer red over blue. Why? 

A 2005 study of the Olympic games might give us a clue.

For one-on-one combat-style competitions like wrestling or boxing, Olympic rules randomly give one athlete a blue uniform and the other a red one. Researchers discovered that Olympians in red won a statistically higher portion of their matches than those in blue. The study attributed these findings to the human tendency to associate red with dominance and aggression. Because of that association, the athletes wearing red were thought to be in a better mindset for a fight. The right outfit really can make all the difference.

But it’s not just color preferences that make humans so complex. Every day whether we know it or not, we experience examples of psychological phenomena.

 

Let’s check out some that can be especially useful to UX designers:

Von Restorf Effect or isolation effect:

 States that when multiple similar objects are present the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.

Think back to the childhood games you used to play. remember those spot-the-difference puzzles. the puzzles were made up of images. There could be a picture of three cows.

The first two cows are white with black spots and look generic. They fit a young child’s definition of a cow, but cow number three has no spots.

 The Von Restorf effect tells us that the unique cow without spots will be the one we remember.

 In UX design, this is why the call to action buttons. Look different from the other buttons on a site or app because we want them to stand out.

position effect:

When given a list of items, people are likelier to remember the first few and the last few. While the things in the middle tend to blur. This is why most applications and websites position the most important user actions toward the far right or far left of a navigation bar.

Hick’s law:

States that the more options a user have, the longer it takes to decide.

We can experience hicks law in action in the potato chip aisle of any grocery store.

Rows and rows of different potato chips. Even if you narrow your choice to one brand, you still have to decide between different flavors.

In other words, if the number of choices increases, the time to make a decision increases proportionally.

As a user, you might think that giving your user many choices enhances their experience, but hicks law tells us we may be making their decisions harder.

You don’t want to exploit the user. You only want to encourage them.

You want to avoid overpowering the user. You want to empower them.

With a little psychology, creativity, and empathy, what starts as a limitation can be a benefit.

Check out my behnace or my portfolio for examples.