Light readings to get into the UX mindset

With the beginning of a new school year in mind, I have curated a list of the top three all-time classic books that should be on the reading list of any new or aspiring UX designer. These are impactful and fundamental readings that come in a fun and pleasant format while covering all the basics of UX, human-computer interaction, and web usability you need to know.

Even though the field of UX is creative and ever-changing, always welcoming fresh ideas, there are some fundamental principles that everybody should understand and consider while designing. These essential points of advice for making easy-to-use products do not change over time, but they remain the same even when the landscape changes because they are about people and how they understand and use things, not about technology. And while technology often changes quickly, people change very slowly.

Jakob Nielsen:

“The human brain’s capacity doesn’t change from one year to the next, so the insights from studying human behavior have a very long shelf life. What was difficult for users twenty years ago continues to be difficult today.”

The book titles that are presented are completed by their main takeaways and a summary of the principles they cover. If you can internalize a handful of these key ideas and understand how to apply them, you’ll have a good foundation to build from.

Don’t make me think

One of the most read books on usability for beginners and experts alike. It is a usability manual that doesn’t look like a textbook as it presents the common patterns that “make sense” when you are designing websites and applications in a nonspecialised language that is accessible for everybody. The book has a common-sense approach to usability and user experience that is not about trends, but about foundational trusts and the way the users use your designs. It tries to cover and explain topics like why users make certain choices, what kind of things we can statistically expect that our users will want to do on a website or mobile application, what the most common usability issues are, and which are the usability principles.

Steve Krug’s gives a very basic definition of usability that sounds like:

“A person of average ability and experience can figure out how to use the thing to accomplish something without it being more troubles than it’s worth.”

A breakdown of attributes and some helping questions that can guide you to determine if your product is usable are the following:

The book takes the reader on a short journey into the world of usability testing and provides an excellent overview of the most important factors to look out for when preparing, doing or evaluating usability tests. However, this reading focuses on one kind of testing: simple, informal, small-sample do-it-yourself usability testing. The topics that are addressed in the book are the following:

The “Do-it-yourself” usability testing is a qualitative method that is an informal research that has the final objective of gaining insights that allow you to improve the product you’re building. This means that this method implies fewer restrictions, allowing to test fewer users, more often, making testing simpler and therefore more likely to get done.

In the book, Steve Krug wants you to start thinking and considering the usability of your work, but if you want to go deeper into the topic of how to perform a usability test, I would recommend you read further the “Rocket Surgery Made Easy”. One example of usability testing that might guide you with your work can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QckIzHC99Xc

The main takeaways from this book are that usability testing works in the majority of cases and you will always learn something from research and testing. Most digital products have usability problems and most of the serious ones are easy to find.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.

Nir Eyal’s creation is a fascinating read that will give you an insight into behavioral design, which is the intersection of technology, business, and psychology. The book aims to explain how to design your products so that they become habitual for the customers that use them. Utilizing contemporary examples such as Gmail, Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest, the author proves/illustrates how by following the same model, using these applications became part of our daily routine.

“Users take their technologies with them to bed. When they wake up, they check for notifications, tweets and updates, sometimes even before saying “Good morning” to their loved ones. Ian Bogost, the famed game creator and professor, calls the wave of habit-forming technologies the “cigarette of this century” and warns of their equally addictive and potentially destructive side-effects. “

The importance of creating a habit-forming product for the business

The author starts by establishing a definition for the term habit as being behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. Habit-forming products have the ability to change user’s behavior and create unprompted user engagement. The final goal is to influence customers to use your product on their own without relying and investing in overt calls-to-action such as ads or promotions.

As the old saying says “Business is worth the sum of its future profits”, fostering consumer habits is an effective way to increase the value of a company. User habits are a competitive advantage. Products that change customer routines are less susceptible to attacks from other companies, have greater flexibility to increase prices and have a higher customer lifetime value. For many products, forming habits is imperative for survival.

“Companies increasingly find that their economic value is a function of the strength of the habits they create. In order to win the loyalty of their users and create a product that’s regularly used, companies must learn not only what compels users to click, but also what makes them tick.”

The Habit Zone

A company can begin to determine its product’s habit-forming potential by plotting two factors: frequency — how often the behavior occurs — and perceived utility — how useful and rewarding the behavior is in the user’s mind over alternative solutions.

A behavior that occurs with enough frequency and perceived utility enters the “Habit Zone”, helping to make it a default behavior. Habits cannot form outside the “Habit Zone” where the behavior occurs without enough frequency and perceived utility.

The Hook Model

All of the most addictive products use the “Hook Model” to associate user’s emotions and routines to a product, prompting them to return to it time after time, without having to resort to expensive advertising. The underlying model of all habit-forming products, Eyal says, has four steps — trigger, action, variable reward, and investment.

1.Triggers

New habits need a foundation upon which to build. Triggers provide the basis for sustained behavior change and they are the ones that move us to take action. They come in two forms:

• External triggers tell the user what to do next by placing information within the user’s environment.
• Internal triggers manifest automatically in your mind. When a product becomes tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a pre-existing routine, it leverages an internal trigger.

2.Action

To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking. The more effort required to perform the desired action, the less likely it is to occur.

According to the Behaviour Model developed by Dr. B.J. Fogg of Stanford University, the user’s behavior (or action) depends on three prerequisites

B = MAT

Motivation — the energy for action. Humans are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek hope and avoid fear, and finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection.

Ability — making it easy for the user to accomplish the desired action. Designing with an eye toward simplifying the overall user experience reduces friction, removes obstacles, and helps push the user across Fogg’s action line. Ability is influenced by the six factors of time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, and non-routineness. Ability is dependent on users and their context at that moment.

Trigger — a trigger must be present to activate the behavior. Users of your product have a pain point. You should design your triggers such that they cue a potential solution to the pain point

Therefore, for a clear trigger to be effective, the user should be motivated enough and should be able to perform the action with minimal effect.

3. Variable reward

To form a habit, users must come to depend on the product as a reliable solution to their problem. Variable rewards should satisfy one or more user needs and also keep them interested in engaging again with the product. To hold our attention, products must have an ongoing degree of novelty. Variable rewards, and not just any rewards, make users come back to a product again and again by reinforcing the motivation — they fuel our drive to check email, browse the web, or bargain-shop. Products utilizing infinite variability stand a better chance of holding onto users’ attention, while those with finite variability must constantly reinvent themselves just to keep pace.

Variable rewards come in three types: Tribe, Hunt, and Self.

Rewards of the tribe — the search for social rewards fuelled by connectedness with other people (gratification from others)

Rewards of the hunt — the search for material resources and information (things, money or information)

Rewards of the self — the search for intrinsic rewards of mastery, competence, and completion (mastery, completion, competency or consistency)

4. Investment

Investments in a product create preference because of our tendency to overvalue our work, be consistent with past behaviors and avoid cognitive dissonance. The three tendencies on which this step relies on are:

• We irrationally value our efforts — The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it. In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest that our labor leads to love.
• We seek to be consistent with our past behaviors — studies reveal that our past is an excellent predictor of our future.
• We avoid cognitive dissonance — to avoid the cognitive dissonance of not liking something in which others seem to take so much pleasure, we slowly change our perception of the thing we once did not enjoy.

Investments increase the likelihood of users returning by improving the service the more it is used. They enable the accrual of stored value in the form of content, data, followers, reputation or skill. Investments increase the likelihood of users passing through the hook again by loading the next trigger to start the cycle all over again.

The “Hook Model” is designed to connect the user’s problem with the designer’s solution frequently enough to form a habit. It is a framework for building products that solve user needs through long-term engagement.

The design of everyday things

Another one that is a must-read for every designer and is aimed at anyone involved in the design process, regardless of which field they work in. This book challenges all previous assumptions about design and provokes readers to open their minds to a much broader, more inclusive idea of design. Design is discovering, understanding, and evaluating. Design is the door to your office, the car that you drive, the oven in your kitchen. Design is everything. Design can comfort, inspire, provoke and warn. Good design can save lives, poor ones can cost lives.

“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.”

A big part of what makes The Design of Everyday Things so enjoyable are the descriptions of flawed designs that Norman peppers throughout the book. These case studies serve to illustrate both how difficult it is to design something well and how essential good design is to our lives. The most common example is the so-called Norman doors and a really good illustration of that example can be seen in the video below:

Norman’s background is in cognitive science and in the book, he explores the psychology of everyday objects, making a persuasive argument for the importance of a user-centered approach to design. He presents the human-centered design (HCD), an approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then designs to accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of behaving as the solution to bad design. Good design starts with an understanding of psychology and technology. Good design requires good communication, especially from machine to person, indicating what actions are possible, what is happening and what is about to happen.

“It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people.”

By exploring the fundamental design principles through human interactions with everyday things it covers the six-principle fundamental psychological concepts: affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, feedback and, perhaps the most important of all: the conceptual model of the system. It is the conceptual model that provides true understanding.

Affordance

The term refers to the relationship between a physical object and a person. An affordance is a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used. The physical objects convey important information about how people could interact with them, a property he named “affordance”.

Affordances exist even if they are not visible. For designers, their visibility is critical: visible affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Perceived affordances help people figure out what actions are possible without the need for labels or instructions. I call the signaling component of affordances signifiers.

Signifiers

Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. People need some way of understanding the product or service they wish to use, some sign of what it is for, what is happening and what the alternative actions are. People search for clues, for any sign that might help them cope and understand. It is the sign that is important, anything that might signify meaningful information. Designers need to provide these clues.

Good design requires, among other things, good communication of the purpose, structure, and operation of the device to the people who use it. That is the role of the signifier.

Signifiers can be deliberate and intentional, such as the sign push on a door, but they may also be accidental and unintentional, such as our use of the visible trail made by previous people walking through a field or over a snow-covered terrain to determine the best path.

In design, signifiers are more important than affordances, because they communicate how to use the design. A signifier can be words, a graphical illustration or just a device whose perceived affordances are unambiguous.

Constraints

They are about limiting the range of interaction possibilities for the user to simplify the interface and guide the user to the appropriate next action. This is a case where constraints are clarifying since they make it clear what can be done. Limitless possibilities often leave the user confused.

Mapping

This is about having a clear relationship between controls and the effect they have on the world. You want this mapping to feel as natural as possible.

Feedback

The principle of making it clear to the user what action has been taken and what has been accomplished. Many forms of feedback exist in interaction design, including visual, tactile, audio and more. The key is to design the experience to never leave the user guessing about what action they have taken and the consequence of doing so. Feedback must be informative and immediate: even a delay of a tenth of a second can be disconcerting.

Feedback must also be prioritized, so that unimportant information is presented in an unobtrusive fashion, but important signals are presented in a way that does capture attention. Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking. Too much feedback can be even more annoying than too little. Not only is it distracting to be subjected to continual flashing lights, text announcements, spoken voices or beeps, but it can be dangerous. Too many announcements cause people to ignore all of them or wherever possible, disable all of them, which means that critical and important ones are apt to be missed. Feedback is essential, but not when it gets in the way of other things.

Conceptual Model

A conceptual model is an explanation, usually highly simplified, of how something works. Conceptual models are valuable in providing understanding, in predicting how things will behave and in figuring out what to do when things do not go as planned.

“A good conceptual model allows us to predict the effects of our actions. Without a good model, we operate by rote, blindly; we do operations as we were told to do them; we can’t fully appreciate why, what effects to expect, or what to do if things go wrong.”

People create mental models of themselves, others, the environment and the things with which they interact. These are conceptual models formed through experience, training, and instruction. These models serve as guides to help achieve our goals and in understanding the world. Different people may hold different mental models of the same item.

Technology offers the potential to make life easier and more enjoyable; each new technology provides increased benefits. At the same time, added complexities increase our difficulty and frustration with technology. The design problem posed by technological advances is enormous. The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology and the challenge for the designer. That is why the designers should keep in mind their principles as they will remain valid also in the distant feature as they are about people not about technology or machines:

“The fundamental principles stay the same. Human beings have always been social beings. Social interaction and the ability to keep in touch with people across the world, across time, will stay with us. The design principles of this book will not change, for the principles of discoverability, of feedback, and of the power of affordances and signifiers, mapping, and conceptual models will always hold. Even fully autonomous, automatic machines will follow these principles for their interactions. Our technologies may change, but the fundamental principles of interaction are permanent.”