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Psychology is your superpower to design user-centred interfaces

Jerome Kalumbu
UX Collective
Published in
7 min readNov 7, 2021

An antique typewriter with a sheet of paper displaying the word Psychology.
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Understanding how people think and act is fundamental to designing effective user interfaces. Sadly, most designers ignore that cognitive psychology is the essence of how people interact, feel and process the information on a website.

In his article “What is Cognitive Psychology?” Bryn Farnsworth, Researcher in Neuroscience, gives the following definition for cognitive psychology:

“Cognitive psychology is the science of how we think. It’s concerned with our inner mental processes such as attention, perception, memory, action planning, and language. Each of these components are pivotal in forming who we are and how we behave.”–Bryn Farnsworth

Physical book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The human brain uses two systems to process information.

In his book, “Think fast and slow”, Daniel Kahneman explains that people use two ways of thinking to process information: System 1 (Subconscious) and System 2 (Conscious).

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Written by Jerome Kalumbu

UX / Web designer — Get the free two chapters of DON'T START WITH VISUALS here: www.dontstartwithvisuals.com

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great article Jerome. Coming from a traditional design background, we're taught that all of what system 1 is looking for is what we should strive to achieve. But, it was never explained like this. Now that UX is my career, it's a simple crossover…