Psychology in Design: Habituation and Relatability.
What is it that really drives UX?
Getting used to something is very easy for the human mind.
We all use multiple, complex tools each day. At first, they seem overwhelming. As you keep using it over the week, it becomes easier. Before you know it, using the tool/device has become more muscle memory than anything else.
This is what we commonly call a habit.
A designer’s job is to see what people are used to and be able to actively include it in their design. UX in design comes more from the customer being habituated to performing a certain task as opposed to liking it as much.
Let’s look at craigslist as an example. One of the biggest classified advertising players since 1995.
In today’s modern UX and UI philosophy, this is a nightmare. But why is craigslist still successful despite the advent of many other competitors?
It’s because it’s relatable. People have been habituated to using this website for over 20 years. This is what drives their UX.
Habit and Relatability: A Designer’s toolkit or enemy?
Now that we’ve defined 2 of the many factors that affect UX decisions, we can start to talk about their contribution to the entire process of design.
If we consider it to be an absolute, habits would be purely beneficial to a UX designer and make his decisions infinitely easier. But..
Habits are prone to CHANGE.
Habits don’t change over short periods of time, unless someone wants to actively start/stop a habit. In which case, power to you.
What this really means is that if I try to map out user preferences and usage patterns for an app in 2017, they won’t change drastically over the next 2 years. But when we consider a longer period of time such as 5 years, these will change a lot. Consider the period from 2012–2017. We’ve seen the number of smartphone users almost triple over time. This marks a very significant change in what users have come to expect of an app/responsive web design tremendously. What was a habit in app usage to us 5 years ago may not be so anymore.
This works quite differently for relatability.
An action, an interaction or a website only becomes relatable once we’ve used it multiple times over several years. This too, looks and sounds like a habit. The difference between the two is resistance to change as opposed to gradual change. This speaks very closely with Weber’s law of Just Noticeable Difference (JND).
Let’s take these two cubes for example.
Two identical cubes, just that the one on the right is 2px heavier than the one on the right. This would make minimal to no change to the UX on a micro level. This represents JND decently well.
The two cubes above now show a noticeable difference. Even on a micro level, this would disrupt the UX. But seriously, who moved my cube?
As a user, I’ve come get used to these cubes next to each other sitting identically. If after using said product for (let’s say) 2 years, this would annoy me to a certain extent. This is where I start to find the product, in a a larger sense, unrelatable. This is also one of the main reasons you don’t see big companies such as Facebook make drastic changes to their design. Little bit here, little bit there. Never any cube-altering changes. Mainly because even though the overall UX might improve by having a squeaky-clean design re-work, your customer just won’t be able to connect with the product they’ve come to use for so many years (which is obviously bad for business)
Now having said these things, this is the first part in a series of such Psychology break-downs to come from us. Give us a follow if you liked this, and we’d love to get your feedback on this!
For anyone who wants to get a head-start on some of the topics we might cover in the future, here are some great reads:
5 Psychology Rules every UX Designer should know
