The Psychology of UX design
Unless we are making automated products there is the involvement of the human brain and we need designers to understand how it influences human behavior
Psychology is an integral part of the User Experience(UX) design process. Understanding how people interact with the product and how their decisions can be influenced or can be manipulated are the topics to be covered by UX designers. Design psychology is a combination of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and human-computer interaction that approaches user experience design through the lens of human behavior.
A designer who doesn’t understand human psychologies is going to be no more successful than an architect who doesn’t understand physics.
— Joe Leech
We will discuss the principles and theories behind the design decisions we can make backed by psychological principles. By understanding how different psychological principles influence human behavior, we can design your products to elicit specific responses and actions from our target users.
Chameleon Effect/Mirroring
As saying goes, “Monkey sees, monkey do” primates including humans are good at imitation. The term states the unconscious mirroring or mimicking of the behavior of people we are in near proximity to. In our experience with products the interaction we make is intimated and instant.
Have you ever picked up a word your friend said and you then said it right back to him? This is a perfect example of the Chameleon effect.
Priming
The fact that exposure to one stimulus influences a subsequent response to a different stimulus. After we have watched a horror movie on TV late at night, you’re more likely to jump up at all the creaks and noises in your house than if you’d watched a comedy.
Priming shapes our behaviors and reactions to the environment and is often an effective shortcut that allows us to take quick decisions. It is also an efficient tool of persuasion, employed extensively in the marketing and advertisement sectors of industry.
Progressive Disclosure
Complex features inside an application should be avoided. Users should be presented with bite and small chunks of information rather than everything at once at front. The main purpose is to lower the chances that users will feel overwhelmed by what they encounter. Progressive disclosure mainly improves 3 of usability’s 5 core components: learnability, the efficiency of use, and error rate.
Von Restorff effect
Coined by German psychiatrist Hedwig von Restorff, who did an experiment and found that when participants were presented with a list of items and one more distinctive than the rest, their memory for the item was improved.
Also known as The Isolation Effect, predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.
Serial position effect
The theory was termed and coined by Herman Ebbinghaus. It describes how the position of an item in a sequence affects recall accuracy.
Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.
Placing the most important information first, and last. Placing the least important information in middle can be a highly effective way to get the user's attention.
Retention Theory
When a user visits your website for the first time, we expect them to stay on the homepage for some period of time before they decide to move to the next step of their destination which is the page they are interested in.
The time they have spent on our homepage will depend on the information they read and see there. If we intend them to move faster we need to design our content/UX Copies(microcopies) and other artifacts in a similar way.
Retention theory is a relation between the proportion of information provided to the users vs time spent on the page.
The focus the users can maintain is limited. They can easily be abstracted by a variety of obstacles. With the help of this technique, we as a designer can estimate the amount of information that can be consumed in a given timeframe helps to determine the timeframe within which the information can be consumed, and predict probable obstacles that will obstruct proper information retention.
With this theory in mind, designers can plan out information and design elements in such a way that users do not have any cognitive barriers.
The Schema Theory
We often like applications and products that organize things for us. Like a structured site with good navigation, information architecture, typeface, colors, and spaces. On the other hand, we do not like and admire sites with a mess of the mentioned independents.
Our choice is justified by psychology, in particular by a phenomenon called Schema theory. According to this theory, our brain likes to organize knowledge units or schemata. These units will form bigger and gradually fill in as we get older. We don't want to make something messy.
In UX design Information chunks also called Chunking, categorization is an important element in design. For a successful product, we need to take into consideration meaningful pieces that are easy to process and consume.
Miller’s Law
The average person can only keep 7 items (±2 more or less) in their working memory. The key concept behind Miller’s Law is ‘chunking’, which means assembling various bits of information into a cohesive gestalt. Chunking is a critical element of information organization and is the basis of today’s user experience design. User experience design is about enhancing the experience that people have while interacting with your product.
Gestalt Principles
Under the gestalt principle, we have many other principles under it. We will have a brief discussion about it here below:
- Negative Space:
Leaving white space around our design where the blanks in the image will create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the simplest terms, gestalt theory is based on the idea that the human brain will attempt to simplify and organize complex images or designs that consist of many elements, by subconsciously arranging the parts into an organized system that creates a whole, rather than just a series of disparate elements. Our brains are built to see structure and patterns in order for us to better understand the environment that we’re living in.
- Similarity:
In gestalt, similar elements are visually grouped regardless of proximity to each other. They can be grouped by color, shape, or size. Similarity can be used to tie together that might not be next to each other.
- Continuity:
The human eye will follow the smoothest path when viewing lines, regardless of how the lines were actually drawn. This continuation can be a valuable tool when the goal is to guide a visitor’s eye in a certain direction.
- Closure:
The principle reflects that the brain will fill the missing parts of a design or image to create a whole. In simple words, complex shapes are which can be seen in the logo of Adobe, Sun Microsystem, NBC, USA Network, etc.
- Proximity:
This principle refers to how close are the elements to one another. In UX design proximity is used in order to get users to group certain things together. By placing things together users will perceive them related.
- Figure and ground :
Similar to the closure principle in that it takes advantage of the negative space. Our brain will distinguish the objects in the foreground of the image. This is really handy when designers want to stress a focal point.
- Common Fate:
The principle states that the group of elements moving in a direction will be perceived as a group in itself. If we see a flock of birds flying in a particular direction we would group them together and consider them a single stimulus.
Cognitive load
Refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in a person’s working memory. It is the amount of thought you need to excise in order to complete the task.
Cognitive load is the amount of thought you need to exercise in order to complete a specific task.
Hick’s Law
Hick’s Law describes that the time it takes for a person to make a decision depends on the choices available to him or her. So if the number of choices increases, the time to make a decision increases logarithmically.
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
Fitt’s Law
This law states that the amount of time required for a person to move a pointer (e.g., mouse cursor) to a target area is a function of the distance to the target divided by the size of the target. Thus, the longer the distance and the smaller the target’s size, the longer it takes.
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
This law can be influenced by making conversion of interactive buttons, especially on finger-operated mobile devices, and also smaller buttons which are more difficult to click and would take more time-consuming. The distance between a user’s task/attention area and the task-related button should be kept as short as possible in distance.
Aesthetic Usability Effect
It refers to users’ tendency to perceive attractive products as more usable. People tend to believe that things that look better will work better — even if they aren’t actually more effective or efficient.
Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.
A positive emotional response to the visual design will make them more tolerant of minor usability issues.
Dual Coding Theory
This theory was proposed by Paivio who attempts to give equal weight to verbal and non-verbal processing. Paivio (1986) states: “Human cognition is unique in that it has become specialized for dealing simultaneously with language and with nonverbal objects and events. This makes users easier to remember important things from our website by taking advantage of the dual-coding system.
We create a visual image for words in our minds based on our experiences and perception of the real world. Think of “sports” our brain automatically images the ball, a sports person comes into our mind. By pairing words with the images, it makes them easier to recall upon mentioning them.
Investment Loops
We, humans, are attracted to receiving rewards and we always seek them. Habit-forming products collect information about user behavior and preferences with every session to craft an experience based on a loop of a trigger, action, reward, and investment. With some actions, it receives a reward which increases more likelihood of using the application even more. The reward can be in a form of making a purchase to get discount coupons, referring a friend, profile completion, etc.
Gut Checking
Generally, we don’t thousand of dollars of eye-tracking software or an electroencephalogram to tell if a design is working. But 5-second tests are a powerful tool that determines whether or not your designs are instantly understandable.
In this 5-second test, the participant views a site or app for 5 seconds, then responds to questions about the subject matter and design. If the users are unable to refer back to the images the participants give their impression of the purpose and function of the product. Our product will have all the functionality of our user desires but if the brain can’t grasp it instantly it needs to move on.
Psychology of Persuasion
This law derives from the famous book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini where he has a list of principles like Reciprocity, Consistency, Social Proofing, Authority, and Scarcity.
These principles tend to dictate the ways we behave in society and we can use them to identify human behaviors.
Reciprocity: The principle states people don’t like being indebted to others. If they are given something, they shall feel obligated to reciprocate on some level. Offering free ebooks, blog posts, podcasts, or other free content in return for the user’s email address is a good example of reciprocity in real life.
Authority: The principle of authority says most of us realize we can’t be experts at everything. Our best bet is to rely on the testimony of experts. Accordingly, we allow experts and those considered the “authority” on any given topic to influence us. People generally tend to obey experts and authoritative figures of high status as they regard them as trustworthy. Associations with successful companies are often mentioned to establish a certain level of respect and credibility for the company.
Consistency: This law is about the behavior of people who want to be consistent in their decision-making process. In the study done by Cialdini, two groups of volunteers went door to door, asking homeowners if they’d be willing to display a giant billboard reading “Drive Carefully” on their front lawn.
The first group’s visit was simply a cold call. The second group preceded their visit with an initial visit, requesting that homeowners display a tiny sign on their lawn reading “Be A Safe Driver.”
The second group had a 450% higher success rate. This is an example of consistency as homeowners felt obligated to remain consistent in that instance.
Social Proofing: People don’t always know why they behave the way they do. Is everyone dancing? More people gonna dance. Is everyone watching that video? More people gonna click it. Is everyone buying your product? You can’t stop the people training. In e-commerce, websites we use social proof such as ratings, reviews, and recommendations to attract other users and guide them in making their purchase decisions. Amazon has a section of “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” to make items more relatable to you and get users to think “If they need it, I need it too”.
Curiosity Gap: It is the difference between what users know and what they need to know that might be the necessary stimulus that prompts them to fill the knowledge gap. Behavioral economist George Loewenstein explains in his Information-Gap Theory that “curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.” As UX designers we are trained to communicate information in the most efficient way, not withhold it.
For example, Linkedin used to show you a graph of your profile views that was greyed out with a dialog box prompting you to get a premium account to access this data. Linkedin’s design was leveraging user's curiosity quite effectively by showing them this graph was available and within their reach, they just needed to upgrade their account to get the graph, fill their information gap and satisfy their curiosity.
Scarcity: It is one of my personal favorites in shaping the behavior of people. The principle of scarcity says that if it’s limited, people want it more. If there are fewer people who will get it is more intriguing people.
That is why in some shops we have limited edition apparels to get more attraction of customers.
Change Blindness: It occurs when a change in visual representation takes place but the observer does not notice the change.
Memory Limitation
Memory is not always reliable. The way we store information is reconstructed by our thoughts, feelings beliefs, and surrounding environment.
Our working memory capacity is around 10–15 seconds, remembering only 3–4 items at a time.
Studies have shown that people often create false memories in which they either remember things that didn’t happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. Since memory is suggestive and malleable, it’s important to build designs based on the brain’s habit, or mental models (more on mental models in the next post) because they are easier to remember.
Provide user assistance and feedback where possible and an undo option to reduce user frustration when they make mistakes. Personalize experiences to cater to our user’s preferences.
Zeigarnik Effect
A task in progress creates a specific tension that can only be resolved upon completion. People remember incomplete or interrupted tasks rather than complete ones. Missing information causes stress that makes incomplete tasks more accessible and easier to remember. With the help of this effect, we could design our products by providing the indicators that will increase the chances of users completing the required task and discovering additional content.
Peak End Rule
We tend to recall the most intense events most easily. This applies to both positive and negative memories. We economize our memories by prioritizing peak moments and end moments. Actually, we don’t remember experiences accurately; we tend to recall the highlights and how things end. We remember brief moments of intense pleasure more fondly than experiences where we are mildly comfortable throughout.
Mere Exposure Effect
This psychological term shows that people tend to develop a preference for something because they are familiar with them. This social psychology happens to all of us, the more often we see someone in no successive period of time, the more likely we’ll find that person likable or charming. This effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle.
By understanding what the mere-exposure effect is and how it works, you will possess a significant advantage in your conversion optimization efforts. More exposure leads to familiarity, which leads to comfortability, which leads to remarkable improvements in conversion optimization as a whole.
Psychology Of Colors
Colors also act as a major factor in the choice and behavior of people. We often find children's toys in bright colors and girls' items in pink. The main idea of the study is that the colors have a great impact on the user's perception.
So, we designers should choose the colors that convey meaning and the right message is delivered along.
Red. Associates with passionate, strong, or aggressive feelings. It is a symbol of both good and bad feelings including love, confidence, passion, and anger.
Orange. An energetic and warm color brings feelings of excitement.
Yellow. This is the color of happiness. It symbolizes the sunlight, joy, and warmth.
Green. The color of nature. It brings calming and renewing feelings. Also, may signify inexperience.
Blue. It often represents some corporate images. It usually shows calm feelings but as a cool color, it is also associated with distance and sadness.
Purple. Long associated with royalty and wealth since many kings wore purple clothes. It’s also a color of mystery and magic.
Black. The color has a great number of meanings. It associates with tragedy and death. It signifies a mystery. It can be traditional and modern. Everything depends on how you employ it and which colors go with it.
White. It means purity and innocence, as well as wholeness and clarity.
Visceral Reactions
The kind of reaction we generally get from the part of our head which is responsible for our instincts and it reacts much faster than our consciousness does. This would lead us to fall in love with the product after its first couple of usage. These reactions are rooted in our DNA, so easily that they can be predicted. UX designers are architects.
We designers aim to create a visually awesome aesthetic impression with the design. It’s not that difficult to guess what looks nice to people and why are our target audience and their needs.
User experience design has its conceptual roots in cognitive and behavioral psychology and it is a blueprint of a human being’s interaction with a machine. The article still does not cover all the design psychology principles. However, as a designer, we also need to observe and understand the end-users and empathize with users more. Their interaction, behavior, and emotions can add much more worth value to understanding them in the product building process.
Reference reading:
Psychology And UX Design: 5 Principles You Need To Know (careerfoundry.com)
*Note: I personally do not own the credits and copyrights of all images used. The ownership goes to the respective mentioned sources.
