User experience is about human nature
What is UX really about? User experience (UX) is all about making it as easy as possible for people to achieve their goals. This is the essence of UX.
But to do this, people often need to interact with various elements like physical objects, digital applications, services, and texts, among others. Therefore, designing these elements to ensure smooth and easy interactions is key to creating a great UX.
What makes a good user experience?
One might think it depends on whether we’re designing: an app, a service, or a physical object. This is true, there are guidelines for achieving good UX depending on what we are designing. But all these elements — no matter what they are — share a common factor:
The human on the other side of these elements.
So, understanding how we function as humans is the foundation for designing intuitive and efficient user experiences, and that’s exactly what we’re going to dive into next.
The Market Problem
Imagine we arrive at a market like this one:
We take a glance, and in seconds, many things happen in our brains:
- We recognise objects in the scene: people, dogs, shops, cars, buildings..
- We recognise the colours, shapes, and textures of each of them.
- We estimate distances: the building in the background is much farther away than the stalls in the market.
- We calculate relative sizes: the trees are taller than the market stalls.
- And many other things.
And we do all of this in seconds.
Even if someone calls us to solve a complex problem, we can still do all of that while solving the problem over the phone.
All this that our brain has done is what allows us to navigate the market successfully and safely to fulfill our objective, whether it’s to stroll or to buy something.
Imagine now we have to cross a street to leave the market.
Simple, right? That seems so.
We do this every day safely without getting hit.
But it isn’t a simple task.
To do this successfully, we have to know our walking speed, estimate the distance to the other side of the street, determine the speed of the oncoming cars, and finally, we need to calculate if our walking speed will allow us to cross that distance before the cars reach the crossing point.
Notice that all the described situations involve solving various problems, but they don’t require much effort for us.
We don’t need prior knowledge.
We don’t need too much concentration.
We do them extremely quickly.
We don’t get tired of doing them.
We don’t even realize we are solving problems!
Now, imagine you have to solve this other problem:
The Triangle Problem
Prove that in a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse c
is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.
This task can be quite challenging, doesn’t it?
It requires prior knowledge of geometry, intense focus on the problem, significant cognitive effort, and dedicated time to solve it.
It’s clear that it’s much easier to solve the market problem than the triangle problem, right?
Why?
Is the market problem simpler? I would say not. It is far more complex than the triangle problem.
However, for humans, it is much simpler.
Why?
To get a better idea of why, let’s check out another scenario.
The Lion Problem
Imagine you are an ancestral Homo sapiens, 100.000 years ago, walking calmly through the savanna when suddenly this appears.
Now imagine if you delay in identifying it is a lion, and what it could do to you. If you are not able to quickly calculate the speed and distance at which the lion is approaching you. If you can’t decide, based on previous information, if you should run away, hide, or submit.
What could happen?
It’s quite easy to envision
But we’re still here, aren’t we? Evolution and natural selection have given us the skills to successfully confront these situations. Our survival depends on it. We have developed adaptive skills to solve the Lion-type problem.
What exactly are these skills?
We excel at recognizing lions (and other things), calculating speeds and distances, and making decisions based on this information, to name a few. And we can do all of this very quickly.
Notice that the skills required for this problem are the same as those needed to solve the Market Problem. Therefore, we excel in solving market problems as well.
Let’s return to the triangle problem.
We know how to solve the triangle problem, don’t we? But it will cost us much more: much effort, much time, and much knowledge.
Why?
Because this is a modern problem.
We did not need to solve triangle problems in ancient times for survival, so our brains didn’t develop special skills for this.
How can we then solve triangle problems if we haven’t developed specific skills for them during our evolution?
The answer is simple: We use the same skills developed for solving lion-type problems.
But, because these skills evolved for something very different, it requires us much more cognitive effort and time to solve triangle-type problems.
Conclusion
User experience, as we said, is all about making it super easy for people to achieve their goals.
To master the field of user experience, it is essential to have a deep understanding of human cognitive abilities, limitations, and the workings of our cognitive processes.
In this article, we have started to understand some of them.
In the next articles, we will dive into human cognitive abilities: identifying those in which we excel, and those in which we do not.
This will help us create applications — or anything humans need to interact with- that leverage our strengths and minimize the need to rely on our weaknesses.
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 (this article)
- The Illusion of thought: Why we’re not as good at thinking as we believe
- Designing for the mind: Using our cognitive power to create Outstanding User Experience
References
“Why Don’t Students Like School?” by Daniel T. Willingham.
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.
References
