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Human Mind and Usability

9 min readJun 17, 2020

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Hi, I’m Melda. I am a member of the club named ITUX we founded as Istanbul Technical University (ITU) Industrial Design students. I prepared a presentation on ‘Human Mind and Usability’ for our UX/UI training series, Jumpstart, and I wrote a summary of the researches that I did.

Hope you enjoy :)

Click here for Turkish version.

What is Usability?

It is part of the user experience and can be called the ease of access to the intended use of the product or the ease of use of the product.

User experience (UX) designers design usability throughout the design process.

Features of a usable product:

It should be easy to get used to
The user should reach the desired goal easily.
It should be learned and unforgettable the first time.

Human Abilities and Limitations

It is necessary to pay attention to what people can and cannot do to design a usable product. In other words, our product should not be designed as we want people to behave, but in accordance with their general behavior.

Attention

Users always look for what they want to find, their interests are shaped in that direction. For example, when we enter a site to find a restaurant’s phone number, our eyes only pay attention to their phone numbers.

Factors that affect attention

The human mind struggles to keep its attention when it needs to exert extra effort when thinking about doing a task.

You can see this situation yourself with the Stroop Effect study. In the image above, try saying the color in which the words in the first line are written. You probably did this easily. In the second line, try saying the color in which it is written instead of reading what is written. Didn’t you have a hard time?

Multiple tasks. When the human mind tries to perform many tasks at the same time, it is difficult to focus again while passing from one to the other.
When the same designs are used repeatedly, people will not see this. The reason for not seeing / ignoring the advertisements on the websites called banner blindness is due to this. In the image below, we can see that a person does not pay attention to advertisements while browsing the website.

https://enigma.swiss/en/blog/banner-blindness/

Information communication

When designs that appeal to more than one senses are made, the attention of the user will be more.

Overloading information

The human mind has a hard time analyzing more information and choosing from among them. Designs that do one job well can be preferred instead of designs that can do multiple jobs.

Things to do when designing for attention

Finding missions
Directing the user
Not to repeat in design
Addressing multiple senses

Noise

Simplicity in design will provide convenience to the user. Unnecessary frames and excessive use of colors, which we call noise, create difficulties for the reader to focus on. When editing, the use of white space should be preferred.

Visual Perception

Typography

We call typography the art of arranging a text to be more readable, its letters more understandable and appealing to eye taste. More positive results can be achieved by preparing a text in the product in accordance with the art of typography. Providing the contrast between the background and the text will increase the readability of the text and will not force the user.

Colors

Colors are the tool that gives the easiest and most accurate message to be given in the design. Of course, when appropriate color choices are made for our purpose

Blue: It evokes the sense of trust and calmness. We can see that it is used frequently in institutions such as banks and hospitals.
Red: It evokes danger and ambition. It may be preferred to stand out, but it is better to be careful when using it.
Orange: It is an energetic color and evokes creativity adventurousness. It reflects youth and modernity.
Yellow: Recalls optimism and happiness.
Green: It evokes nature, stability and existence.
Black: It evokes luxury, power, classicism and formality.
White: It evokes purity, cleanness and simplicity.

Gestalt Principles

Good Figure: The human mind perceives the shapes grouped together as a single shape.
Proximity: Our minds perceive objects closer to each other as a group.
Similarity: Our minds perceive similar objects as a group.

Grouping can be provided with colors too. In such a case, objects should be colored by considering color blindness.

Closure: Although our mind does not see an entire object, it has the ability to complete it.
Continuity: Our mind perceives objects continuously instead of perceiving them as separate parts.
Shape-Ground Relationship: Multiple things can be displayed in one shape by making use of the gaps.
Symmetry: Objects formed around a center are perceived symmetrically.

Eye Tracking:

It is seen how people read the page when they enter a website with eye tracking method. With the resulting patterns, designers can edit the content they want to highlight and articles they want users to read. Since most people will read very little of a text, the reader can be helped by dividing the text, listing, putting meaningful subtitles and revealing keywords.

F-Pattern:

In texts without subtitles, people tend to focus on the top of the page and the beginning of the lines. Since this reading pattern is similar to the letter F, it got this name.

In the languages written from left to right, it was found that the left and the top of the articles’ were read more the right bottom of them. For languages written from right to left, the pattern seems to be mirrored on the y axis. It was observed that more attention was paid to the right upper side of the page.

https://www.templatemonster.com/blog/f-pattern-website-layout/

Z-Pattern:

This reading pattern is usually created by readers looking at large graphics or other interesting content.

https://uxplanet.org/z-shaped-pattern-for-reading-web-content-ce1135f92f1c

Gutenberg Diagram:

It is seen in single page content. People start to look from the top left corner, then they look at the top right corner, then the bottom left corner, and then the bottom right corner. This is the way readers do to find answers to questions like “Who are you?”, “Why are you important?” The difference from the Z-pattern is that it ends at the 4th point.

Stopped Pattern:

This pattern appears when readers focus on certain words or phrases in the text.

One reason for this reading may be that the focused words may be written in a more remarkable way in the text, and another reason is that the reader is looking for words that evoke the task to complete the task.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/eyetracking-setup/

Layer-Cake Scanning Pattern:

In this pattern, it is seen that people mostly focus on headings and subheadings. The person scans the page in this way until he/she finds the part that he/she is interested in.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/layer-cake-pattern-scanning/

Commitment Pattern:

This pattern is seen when normal reading is done, not scanning. The person focuses on almost every word in the text. It usually occurs when people are very interested or motivated.

Memory and Knowledge

Memory capacity and fallible memory:

The capacity of human memory is limited and can be misleading in some cases. Sometimes people may remember events differently than they did, and may even think they remember things that never happened.

Sensory memory:

Sense organs keeps the stimulants such as light and sound for a short time.

Short-term memory:

It is the memory that temporarily holds and processes information. it contains the information currently being thought. The capacity of short-term memory is quite low, and even with a small distraction, information can be forgotten.

Long-term memory:

It is the memory that the information is kept for a long time or permanently. Learned information and skills are found in this memory.

Working memory:

It is a memory component on which the transactions are temporarily kept in memory and changes are made.

Practice and forgetting:

When we receive information we never knew before, we can easily learn 50% of the information received. By practicing, it can be ensured that all the information is permanent.

In the UX design, after the user uses a product and stops using it for a while, when he/she starts to use it again, it will be a better experience to easily remember how the product is used and it will be a factor to love the product and want to continue using it.

Strategies for finding information in memory:

Is it better to recognize or to recall?

Recognition is when we are familiar with an information or event. Recall is called finding information or details about the event from memory.

There are more signs in recognition to find information from memory than remember. For this reason, it is an easier action to do.

Recall in the user interface:

An example of this is logging into a site. When logging in, we need to remember both our username and password.

Recognition in the user interface:

An example of this is the menu system of an application. When we want to search, we can perform the search by clicking on the magnifying glass sign used for searching in many interfaces.

Mental Models

It is based on the beliefs of the users, not their knowledge. So users act according to what they think an interface will do more than what it does.

Each user has their own mental models. Different users can configure different mental models from the same interface.

Designing according to mental models:

If people are looking in the wrong place to get information, put the information where they are looking for.
Develop people’s mental models. You can do this by better explaining how the interface is used and using more understandable labels.

Decision Making

As choices increase, it becomes difficult for people to choose. Sometimes they even avoid choosing.

Having more options means being less satisfied with the decision. When a choice is made among many options, it is possible that people will regret their choices. Often users want to act without thinking about what to do.

As UX / UI designers, we must go to simplify the design to help users avoid fatigue and frustration when using the interface, but at the same time, we should make them feel that they are in control by giving them enough options.

Emotion-Driven Behaviour

When users are in between two choices of products, one of which is more beautiful and the other one is more functional, they tend to choose the beautiful one. So it would be good to try to appeal to the general tastes and to have a minimal attitude while designing.

As UX designers, we can consider we developed a good product if the users enjoy using the product and do not lose their desire to use it.

I briefly described the human mind and usability in design. Thank you for reading.

Here are the resources I used while preparing this article: