Designing for the Mind: Using Our Cognitive Power to Create Outstanding User Experience

We interact with countless things every day and every time, from physical objects to digital applications.

How are we capable of doing this? What happens in our mind?

Let’s discover and delve into the key cognitive human processes that make this possible, which are fundamental for designing good UX.

The simplest model of our mind

This diagram, explained in detail here, provides a basic representation of how our mind processes work. Here’s a brief review:

When we’re solving a problem, which is almost all the time, the process is as follows:

1. Attention and Perception: These processes take in and interpret information from the environment, which is temporarily stored in working memory.
2. Working Memory: This is where we hold and manipulate information temporarily. It acts as a mental workspace for problem-solving.
3. Long-term Memory: To solve the problem, we generally need prior knowledge, which we retrieve from long-term memory.
4. Thinking and Problem-Solving: With all this information, thinking and problem-solving occur in working memory, combining this information to generate new solutions and insights.
5. Learning: If we learn something new while resolving this problem, it will be stored in our long-term memory for future use.

Let’s take a closer look at the main cognitive abilities involved in this process.

Attention

Attention is like the beam of a flashlight on something specific.
It allows you to concentrate on one part of the environment while ignoring the rest.

How does our mind choose what to focus on, what to pay attention to?

Imagine you are walking through a forest and you come across this:

What is the first thing that catches your attention?

I don’t think anyone said the trunk, the leaves, or even the mushroom.
Why does the vast majority see the snake first?

Because attention has certain preferences on what to focus on.
These preferences vary from person to person and their current circumstances. But… there are three of them on the podium, that are also universal:

Why these three?!

Because they are the things we needed to survive in ancient times, so our brain was wired to pay special attention to any message about them.

In those times, when we saw something, our mind asked these three questions:

Can it eat me?
Can I eat it?
Can I have sex with it?

Evolution ‘designed’ our attention to help us focus on things that have a YES at least in one of these questions. It’s an adaptive skill.

Also, attention tends to focus on more personal matters:

Has it ever happened to you that when you are about to buy a certain brand of car, you start seeing that brand everywhere on the street, whereas you didn’t notice it before?

Or if you’re a woman with children, didn’t it happen to you that when you were pregnant, you started seeing pregnant women everywhere? Were there more pregnant women? Probably not; they were just invisible to you before.

Our attention is selective

Selection is driven by universal interests (danger, food, and sex) or particular ones (car, pregnancy).

Besides this, it’s also important for us to respond quickly to novelty.
We need to rapidly detect changes in the environment that could be potential threats (danger) or opportunities (food and reproduction).

As a result of these adaptations, our attention is easily interrupted by new or unexpected stimuli.

Our attention is fragile

We also needed to stay alert and responsive to our environment at all times. This means that we can only maintain focus on a specific task or object for a limited amount of time. When the novelty wears off, or it no longer contributes to our primary objectives, our attention shifts to something new.

Our attention is short

Summary:

Attention involves our senses to take in information from the environment.
Attention is selective, short and fragile.

Perception

Let’s analyze perception and its characteristics.
Imagine this situation:

This boy is lying in the field, looking at the sky and finding shapes in the clouds: his perception is working.

But to see shapes in the clouds, you first have to pay attention to them.

Perception requires attention first

Attention and perception work together.
Attention comes first, involving our senses to take in information from the environment. Perception follows, interpreting this information.

Imagine now you’re driving down the road with your little child and you see this sign.

When you get home, your child tells the family that you passed by the entrance to a farm. You don’t understand why they said that. You didn’t pass by any farm. Then you remember the sign.

You both perceived completely different things from the same stimulus. The reason is the previous experience each of you had.

Let me share a little personal anecdote here:
I have a pair of bangle bracelets that I’ve had forever and never take off. They’re the kind that make a small noise when they hit a table.

A few days ago, my daughter was given similar bracelets, and while she was typing at a computer, the bangles hit the desk, making the same noise. Instantly, she thought about me.
At first, she didn’t realize why I suddenly came to her mind, but then she understood: This sound has always been around her, and she never noticed it before (neither did I). But her brain unconsciously did.
The noise of her bangles was interpreted as one thing: me.
That’s perception.

When you remember your childhood while smelling something, or taste a dish that instantly transports you to your grandmother’s kitchen, that’s also perception at work.

Note that perception, to interpret this information, connects with memories, emotions, and previous associations stored in our long-term memory.

Perception is influenced by experience

Let’s see another characteristic of perception
See the next image and read only the text that is horizontal.

Now read the text that is vertical.

Probably, you have interpreted the middle character differently each time, haven’t you? This was because an another characteristic of our perception:

Perception is influenced by context.

Take a quick look at this image, no more than 1/2 seconds:

Was there an antique clock in the image? If your answer is “I don’t know…” let me ask you for another exercise:

Look at the image again for 1–2 seconds with this question in mind: Is there a hammer in the image? It’s highly likely that this time you saw it quickly.

Perception is influenced by the objective

Summary:

Perception requires attention first.
Perception is influenced by experience, context, and objectives.

Memory

Working and Long-Term Memory

Working memory(WM)

Think of it as the workbench of your mind.
It’s the ‘place’ where you put and manipulate the information -taken from the environment or from the long-term memory- you need right now.

Whether you’re solving a math problem, remembering a shopping list, or trying to understand a story, all that happens in your working memory. It’s like the stage where the action of your thoughts takes place.

For example, if I ask you now How tall is a giraffe?
The image and the concept of a giraffe is now passing into your working memory. Just a millisecond ago, you weren’t consciously about a giraffe, but now you are!

Whatever you are conscious of at any given moment is in your working memory at that time.

Long-term memory (LTM)

Is where all the knowledge you have is stored. It includes information like the fact that a dog has four legs, what your friends’ voices sound like, how to make a latte, and that you like chocolate ice cream.

It contains not only concrete things but also abstract ones. For example, in LTM we have the memory of what our dog looks like, but also the general concept of what a dog looks like to be called a dog, or the concept of a triangle.

We also have procedures in LTM. That means ways of doing things, algorithms. We know how to drive, how to cook certain dishes, techniques for solving a Rubik’s cube. All these procedures are also in our LTM; we don’t have to think and reason them out every time.

Working memory characteritics

Limited Capacity
Short-term memory has limited capacity.

Volatility
WM is highly volatile. New items entering short-term memory often push out old ones. This volatility is due to the temporary nature of WM.

Focus Required
To keep something in working memory, you need to focus on it.

If someone tells you a phone number and then someone else starts talking to you about something else, you’ll likely forget the number unless you have time to memorize them (transfer them to long-term memory).
Focus is essential for maintaining information in working memory.

Cognitive Bottleneck
The limited space in working memory is one of the bottlenecks in our cognitive process.

If a genie from a bottle offers something to improve my thinking, I will ask for more space in my working memory!

Recall vs. Recognition

Imagine someone asks me for the name of a person I know, and I don’t remember it.

But then he says, “Was the person’s name John, Walter, or Cristian?” And then I clearly remember, “Yes, it’s Walter!”

The first question requires me to recall, while the second one prompts me to recognize.
The cognitive processes in both cases are quite different. Recognition is much simpler than recall.

In fact, the graphic below shows what happens with these two types as we age — don’t be alarmed.

Thought

We analyzed thought in more detail in the article The Illusion of Thought: why we’re not as good at thinking, and also compared it with memory.

To avoid repeating myself, here are just a few concepts:

Our brain isn’t very good at thinking: Our brain is not ‘designed’ to think.
The truth is quite the opposite: Our brain is ‘designed’ NOT to think.

In fact, it has strong and important strategies to avoid thinking.
We rely more on memory because it is much more efficient than thought.
The brain’s ability to use memory to solve problems is a strategy to avoid thinking.

Thinking is hard, slow, and unreliable

Just one more thing about thinking.
Thinking is much more costly for us, but we like it!
We solve crosswords, puzzles, and sometimes we enjoy solving problems.

Are we masochists?

Actually, no, we do like thinking, but under certain circumstances represented in this graphic:

To enjoy problem-solving, you need to have a minimum level of skills and knowledge to achieve that. If you don’t have that minimum, you will likely feel overwhelmed by the problem and may abandon it. This can lead to frustration.

On the other hand, if you have significantly more skills and knowledge than needed for the problem, you will probably get bored and lose interest.

To find pleasure in solving problems, you need to be in the “pleasure zone”. This way, you can find the challenge interesting but not unattainable. Outside this zone, you either get frustrated or bored.

Final Thoughts

Understanding the characteristics of cognitive processes helps us design interfaces that leverage the strengths of our attention, perception, and thinking, while also considering the limitations of our working memory and the importance of our long-term memory (LTM).

Our goal should be to minimize unnecessary cognitive load by keeping these characteristics in mind during the design process.

Usability guidelines and heuristics are based on this understanding. Given the extensive literature on usability guidelines and heuristics, I won’t delve deeply into them here.

For further exploration of UX topics, I highly recommend the Nielsen Norman Group website, where you will find comprehensive resources.

References

• Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham
• Designing with the mind in mind — Understanding interface guidelines by Jeff Johnson PhD
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Some images in this article were generated by AI using GPT-4o.

UX Series

This article is part of a series about the fundamentals of User Experience. Here are the other articles and the suggested order to read them:

• User experience is about human nature
• The illusion of thought
• Designing for the mind: Using our cognitive power to create outstanding user experience(this article)

Found this article useful? Follow me (Mayda). I post periodically about App Design, AI, UX, R&D, and Neuroscience, aiming to turn complexity into clarity — first in my mind, and hopefully in yours.