Pavlov’s dogs and UX

What does Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning have to do with user experience design?

Even though he wasn’t a psychologist or a user experience designer, Pavlov’s work explains much of why our web designs work today, one-hundred and twenty-three years after he hatched classical conditioning (also known as Pavlovian or respondent conditioning).

Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, during a physiological study on digestion, discovered a concept so profound that according to John Watson, a researcher that studied Pavlov’s work, can explain all aspects of human psychology.

Let’s summarize: a physician, while studying digestion over a hundred years ago, identified the most critical concept explaining what makes us tick.

And if that’s not astonishing enough, the digestion study’s subjects were dogs — not humans.

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/frotzed/279854096

So, what does all this have to do with user experience design? Not a lot, unless you are tasked to design a highly sticky platform.

By the time you are done reading this article, you’ll be thinking to yourself, “Self, I feel like I inherently knew all this, but at…