Introduction to Psychology in UX Design
Design for how people think — an introduction to psychology in UX
How to apply Psychology to Design? What principles of Psychology are important for designers to achieve a better user experience?
When my wife and I moved into our new home, we bought an induction cooktop. Although in North America is common, in Brazil it was still a type of recent product. That is, we were not used to using a non-fire stove, as it is fully electric and uses electromagnetism to turn cooking pans into cookers, creating heat energy inside the pan itself, instead of firing it in from outside.
In the first month, we used it for a few days and it was pretty easy, actually. But one day she was cooking something in the kitchen and suddenly yelled me scared and ashamed. She had toasted one of the pans because she turned on the wrong burner and heated up, for a few minutes, the unwanted empty pan which was on the cooktop. I got so pissed off because she ruined a brand-new pan!
After a few days, I was at home alone and decided to cook. I put a pan with oil, turned on the cooktop, touched the display to turn on the burner, heard the boot sound, and left the kitchen to take a bath. As soon as I put my feet in the bathtub, I felt the smell of something burning. I jumped out of the bathtub. That was my turn to burn one of the pans. I made the same mistake of turning on the wrong burner and heating up one of the empty pans on the cooktop.
Why did two people make the same mistake with the same product in such a short period? Was it a design mistake or a lack of attention from users? Lack of error prevention or reckless of the couple? Maybe both. Anyway, based on our conceptual model, when we turn on a cooktop, we expect to see the firelight generated from the burner. Once we no longer have this visual warning (because it’s not a gas cooktop), we are helpless.
Since this cooktop has only a small display on the front part (Figure 1), it only indicates the burners that are on through an indirect mapping, which makes it difficult to identify the burners that are on. Mapping is basically the relationship between the elements of two sets of things (Norman, 1988). When the relationship between those elements is poor, design can provide misunderstandings and errors from users. Even for the most careless and lay user, Design must be able to prevent major errors, especially those that put users’ lives (or business, work, or any other part) at risk.
Psychology in UX Design
No, I’m not here to talk about how designers distressed because they usually work under pressure, or even because some of their bosses have no idea what actually UX Design (User Experience Design) is, and because of that we, designers, need a psychologist. No, I’m here to discuss how can we apply Psychology in our Design decisions.
What is Psychology? How can we apply Psychology to Design? What principles of Psychology are important for us to achieve better user experience in our digital products (or even in physical ones)? What does it look like to design without consideration of users’ psychology?
A good understanding of Psychology can be very important for designers and professionals focused on user experience, using it as a base for the UX Design process. In simple terms, Psychology is the study of the mental processes that lead to human behavior. Good design reflects users’ psychology as a way of meeting their needs.
As designers focused on user experience, we want to understand psychological principles so that we can adapt our products to new technologies without relearning design patterns, whether we want to redesign an existing website to make it more intuitive or to get more leads, or build a fully new digital experience aligned with how users make decisions, for instance.
So, based on the principles of psychology, we can:
- Provide easy-to-use products;
- Change (or even manipulate) user behavior;
- Account for users making quick decisions;
- Present users with a call to action at the right time;
- Shape users’ positive attitudes toward our design;
- Incorporate social elements and interactions to influence users;
- Persuade users to engage deeper with our product;
- Communicate meaningfully with users about our design.
Ultimately, we’ll create happier users when we account for the principles of psychology in our design (Yocco, 2016).
The Gulfs of Execution and Evaluation
There are two parts to an action: executing the action and then evaluating the results: doing and interpreting. Both execution and evaluation require an understanding of how the item works and what results it produces. Both execution and evaluation can affect the emotional state of the user. When we use something, we face two gulfs: The Gulf of Execution, where they try to figure out how the product operates, and the Gulf of Evaluation, where they try to understand what happened. The role of the designer is to help people bridge the two gulfs1.
Back to our cooktop case, it seemed to be very easy to use, because actually, we had already used it in the previous days, despite being a new device in our lives. It had a flat glass top with no detail that could distract us and make mistakes when we cook, and a fairly simple interface that displayed the power value and a cooking timer. So, there were visible elements that helped bridge the Gulf of Execution. I turned on the cooktop, touched the display to turn on one of the burners. I heard a boot sound. It worked. I mean, I thought it worked.
But, when something goes wrong on the user’s perspective, then we have a big gulf: why am I feeling that something is burning? Why didn’t the pan heat up and the other toasted? I did it right, didn’t I? What happened?
The Gulf of Evaluation was easily bridged, at first. That is, the cooktop turned on, I heard the boot sound and the display showed the set power, yet something unexpected happened. When user action causes a different outcome than expected, it signifies a failure to reach the goal.
The Gulf of Evaluation reflects the amount of effort that the person must make to interpret the physical state of the device and to determine how well the expectations and intentions have been met. The gulf is small when the device provides information about its state in a form that is easy to interpret and matches the way the user thinks about the operation. Thus, the major design elements that help bridge the Gulf of Evaluation are feedback and conceptual model.
The gulfs are present for many devices. Interestingly, many people do experience difficulties but explain them away by blaming themselves. In the case of things, they believe they should be capable of using, they simply think they are being stupid. Alternatively, for complicated-looking devices, basically, they give up and decide that they are not capable of using them. Both explanations are wrong because the difficulties reside in the design, not in the people attempting to use them.
How can we, designers, help bridge the two gulfs? A deeper understanding of Psychology can help us to find answers. But, in few words, we bridge the Gulf of Execution through the use of signifiers, constraints, mappings, and a conceptual model, and we bridge the Gulf of Evaluation through the use of feedback and a good conceptual model.
The Seven Stages of Human Action
When people do a frequent act, one for which they are quite experienced and skilled, most of the stages, that happen during that task, are subconscious. When someone is still learning how to do something, determining the plan, specifying the sequence, and interpreting the result is quite conscious.
When I was a kid, my parents had bought a Panasonic VHS camera recorder (Figure 2) and it was one of the things I most enjoyed playing with. But camcorders were not as common for me as they are for today’s children. The first few times I used it, I had to go through a learning curve. It was necessary to open the large cover on its body, take the VHS tape on the correct position and fit it inside the camera. Open the battery slot on the back of the camera, and put the huge battery in the correct position. Also, if the VHS tape was not brand new, I had to push a few buttons to set the tape in the right position, otherwise I could overwrite other recordings that I’ve done previously on the tape. After that, I needed to uncap the lens.
Then I should turn on the camera, pull out the viewfinder, close my left eye and view with the right one on that small display, check if the display is on and also check if everything else is set correctly. Finally, I could shoot something to be recorded by pressing the recorder button, which was next to several others that I can’t remember anymore.
Although it was an easy-to-use device at the time, especially because I was a child, it took extra effort in my motor coordination — as it was quite heavy and relied on just one eye on a small black-and-white display while I should handle some buttons. Besides that, I needed my Procedural Memory — it’s our memory for the things that require a step-by-step process — to remember what my dad taught me about shooting with that camera, and my Working Memory — which basically is what processes information, the information that is temporarily stored in our short term memory and more permanently in our long-term memory — which helped me accomplish the task of shooting.
From the first few times, I certainly had difficulty using the camera. Fortunately, however, after a certain time of use, we start automating functions pretty quickly and can then allocate a bigger chunk of our attention to things, avoiding mistakes and errors, like when we are learning to drive or to use a new microwave. Thus, after a couple of days since the first use, I could shoot my own horror movies with my brother and cousins without worrying about the camera operation.
Therefore, when that seemingly difficult task becomes easy and automatic to do, we enter Flow State, which is basically the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter, and the experience itself is so enjoyable that they will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it (Czikszentmihalyi, 1990). In simple terms, that happens when the user has mastered the interface and is concerned only with the purpose and challenges of the task.
The specific actions bridge the gap between what we would like to have done (our goals) and all possible physical actions to achieve those goals. After we specify what actions to make, we must actually do them — the stages of execution. There are three stages of execution that follow from the goal: plan, specify, and perform. Evaluating what happened has three stages: first, perceiving what happened in the world; second, interpreting it; and, then, comparing what happened with what was desired. Thus, the seven stages of action are composed of:
- Goal (form the goal)
- Plan (the action)
- Specify (an action sequence)
- Perform (the action sequence)
- Perceive (the state of the world)
- Interpret (the perception)
- Compare (the outcome with the goal)
The seven-stage action provides a useful framework for understanding human action and for guiding design. Not all of the activity in the stages is conscious. We can do many actions, repeatedly cycling through the stages while being blissfully unaware that we are doing so. It is only when we come across something new or reach some impasse, some problem that disrupts the normal flow of activity, that conscious attention is required.
It was an ordinary day and, like most days, I woke up before sunrise. I went into the dimly lit room, sat on the couch, and turned on the television. Like all television I know, it has preserved the volume of the day before, which, unfortunately for my eardrums, was very loud — why don’t TVs understand that in early hours our ears are sensitive and need a lower volume than last night? So, I quickly grabbed the controller, positioned it normally, and pushed the button to turn the sound down. But I hit the wrong button. The quality tactile of that controller was not good. I mean not only in terms of the touch sensation itself, but mainly because of its lack of differentiation in its orientation, that is, if I put the control in my hands without seeing it, I can’t tell whether it is upside down or not, at least in the first few seconds. It has a simple rectangular shape, without a button shape or arrangement that makes it easy to identify its orientation. I have to finger more carefully to identify some key buttons and then figure out if I am pointing at the TV or at me — maybe my wife would even like it if I could mute my voice sometimes.
This is a case of event-driven behavior, that is, the sequence starts with the world, causing evaluation of the state and the formulation of a goal. The trigger was related to the product design: the lack of device orientation, which made using difficult. This led to a violation of the goal of turning down the volume, so it led to a subgoal — turn on the light so I could see the controller or waste some time trying to figure out why I hit the wrong button. But turning down the volume was not the high-level goal. For each goal, we have to ask “Why is that the goal?” Why was I turning down the TV’s volume? I was trying to watch TV in a silent place because I just had woken up and someone else was sleeping. Turning down the volume was thus a subgoal. But watching TV was itself a subgoal. I was regulating the sound in order to watch without anyone waking up, which had the goal of satisfying my curiosity to watch an episode of Lost. So, the hierarchy of goals is rough: satisfy the desire to watch the episode; turn down the volume; find the correct volume button; get more light or find key buttons (to figure out the device orientation); turn on the TV. In this flow we’ll have to add other steps such as find the correct channel, the desired episode, etc. but let’s keep it simple. This is called a root cause analysis: asking “Why?” until the ultimate, fundamental cause of the activity is reached1.
The seven stages provide a guideline for developing new products or services. The gulfs are obvious places to start, for either gulf, whether of execution or evaluation, is an opportunity for design improvement. The trick is to develop observational skills to detect them. Most innovation is done as an incremental enhancement of existing products. But, when we face radical ideas, the ones that introduce new product categories to the marketplace, we have to reconsider the goals, and always asking what the real goal is, that is, what is called the root cause analysis.
So, when you need to design some cooktop, think about how you can prevent the user from setting the house on fire by heating up the wrong pan simply because they didn’t notice that they turned on the wrong burner. And remember, humans are flawed, especially those who turn on the cooktop with a pan full of oil and go take a shower.
