Overview of Cognitive Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction
UX is much about how users find and consume content, and understanding the cognitive processes and nuances users go through when finding and consuming content is important to architecting an ideal experience.
In one real estate project I worked on, the website had a list of properties on which our team should design a new favorite system, that is users could bookmark houses they like best. So, we decided to use a heart icon as it could refer to “love” (how romantic!) and things users really enjoy. The heart would be a perfect icon: so beautiful, so cute and very intuitive, right? I did a user test. Result: Almost no user understood how to favor the listings. They simply did not associate the heart with favorites. The most plausible explanation — and…
The Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective levels
Despite all the technological advancements over the years, the workings of the human mind still remain extremely complex and difficult to understand.
Despite all the technological advancements over the years, the workings of the human mind still remain extremely complex and difficult to understand. In the book “Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things”, Donald A. Norman distinguishes between three aspects (or levels) of the emotional system, that is, the sum of the parts responsible for emotion in the human mind, which are as follows: the visceral, behavioral and reflective levels. Each of these levels, while heavily connected and interwoven in the emotional system, influences design in its own specific way (Norman, 2004).
The Visceral Level
I remember it like today, the first…
Introduction to Psychology in UX Design
Most designs are meant to be used by people. Thus, how would designers be able to design good products without understanding them?
My mother has a serious problem with her television. Well, not exactly with the television itself, but with the cable TV control. She always has a hard time switching to the HDMI channel with the TV control, and then switching to the correct channel to watch her favorite soap operas, using the cable TV control. And it’s a daily chore: if she turns on the TV and it’s on a different channel than the soap opera, my mom gets stressed and anguished that she can’t connect to her favorite channel so quickly.
Whenever I visit her, she asks me to…
Introduction to Psychology in UX Design
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…
DesignFromHuman
Psychology for Design in an easy way. Understanding people, improving UX — by Rian Dutra
