User Psychology, Human Memory plays a big part in almost everything we do

Memory

Going through the whole process of reading the article “User Psychology” and presenting it to class was an eye opener to me

When I read the blog I was engrossed with what the author had to say about a particular article “MEMORY”.

I had little idea about the role psychology plays in UX, but never thought it plays such a vital part in creating experience to user.

I liked the part where the author speaks about Human Memory, I was not aware of the fact that Human memory are not strong and not always right “Beware of False Memory, some things we remember are completely false”

So after getting to know about this fact, I dug more about one of the Heuristic principles form Nielsen Norman “Recognition rather than Recall”

Recognition Memory is the ability to remember things from past varying from people to object.

Recall is something related to retrieving information from the past which is already encoded in the brain.

Try an experiment: name the colors of the words you are given in. Do not read the words, but say the color the word is printed in. For example, upon seeing the word “yellow” in red print, you should say “red,” not “yellow.” This experiment is fun, but it’s not as easy as it seems.

While I was doing some research on Recognition memory I came across an article that grabbed my attention, here are key point from the article

1. People Don’t Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To
2. People Have Limitations
3. People Make Mistakes
4. Human Memory is Complicated
5. People are Social
6. People are Easily Distracted
7. People Crave Information
8. Most Mental Processing is Unconscious
9. People Create Mental Models
10. People Understand Visual Systems

(reference from http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=126)

1. People Don’t Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To

It’s about how the information people are looking for should be made easily available and keep it simple

2. People Have Limitations

Its more about limiting the number of things that people can do on the website, remember people can’t process too many things at once, it’s always good not to complicate tasks for the users else..

You know what users feel

3. People Make Mistakes

While designing a website, as designers we should make sure that the users can easily navigate through the whole website and in case if they click something that they didn’t intend to, there should be an easier way for them to navigate back to where they want to.

4. Human Memory is Complicated

We should try to understand more about Human memory, the more we get to know about human memory, better the experience will be for the user. As designers we should keep things consistent across the website, that way it will help users to access the information easily within the website.

5. People are Social

In a design we have to try and manage a place for people to be social, it makes people more connected towards what they are trying to achieve.

6. People are Easily Distracted

People tend to get easily distracted, but as a UX designer we have to make sure when user completes his goal even our goal is completed. At the same time user shouldn’t feel he’s being controlled by you. Make sure the product is designed in such a way that, it makes the user feel that he’s in total control of what he’s trying to do. The design should be such a way that user is not distracted from what he’s intended to do.

7. People Crave Information

The website should be designed in such a way that, when people come looking for information on your website, it should be made easily available to them to find and should be very clear.

8. Most Mental Processing is Unconscious

The best way to make people explore the site is to grab their attention by making movements, videos and also visuals, so that way we can make the users learn about new things without them being aware of it.

9. People Create Mental Models

It’s always good to create metal models about your product in the user’s mind by designing new models and try to teach them through visuals or videos.

10. People Understand Visual Systems

Presenting content thorough Visuals is one of the best way to make sure it stays in the mind of users, majority of the information transmitted to the brain is through visual, and visual content is processed much faster than text. Visual content grabs user’s attention much faster. Visual content is easier for human brain to process.

From all these articles and research, I feel that as UX designers we are not creating a design for the end users but we are creating an experience for them through which the user achieves his goals and as a product owner he achieves his goals without making the user feel that he’s controlled.

I could relate few experiences of my own to these articles where all the while I was thinking I am Doing what I wanted to do but I was doing what the design wanted me to do.

Lastly, a samll erxeicse ot konw how our Bairn opeartes:)