Why I Call Myself a Design Psychologist
How do we communicate with each other? Through facial expressions, hand gestures, speech and body language. From a person’s body posture we can see if one is happy, feeling disorientated, sad or confused. With hand gestures and facial expressions we can understand each other without even speaking the same language.
When designing a website or an app, we use communication in a very similar way. We turn body language into icons and illustrations, moods and feelings into colors and shapes and speech into text and copy.
Learning more about psychology can help designers understand how people make decisions, form habits and understand content. Armed with this knowledge, we at Tictail are creating a product that is simply more human.
Lets get started by introducing the fundamental steps required to master the psychology behind design.
Make it human
“Make it human” should always be your mantra during the design process. It’s now that you have the chance to fulfil your childhood dream of becoming the next award winning actor. Throw yourself into different personas. See the design through different eyes. Empathise with your users. Create things people want. Step back and evaluate every website or app you use. Do you feel like the design fulfils your needs? Is it personal? Is it easy to use? Does it feel human?
Connect with users’ emotions
Your design should create a relationship between the user and your product. Focus on the emotion your product should convey. Avoid getting tangled in creating multiple emotional experiences.
There are so many ways of creating an emotional connection between your product and the user.
For example, color is one of the most powerful assets in your designer toolkit. Each color has the power to conjure specific emotions and moods within a user. Use the cheat sheet below during your next design session and try to pick your color scheme based on how you’d like your users to feel
- Red gets the blood pumping with excitement. (Passionate, aggressive, important)
- Orange is energetic and warm and brings feelings of excitement. (Playful, energetic, cheap)
- Green is the color of nature. It brings calmness to people. (Natural, stable, prosperous)
- Purple expresses a sense of luxury. (Luxurious, mysterious, romantic)
- Yellow reminds users of summer and cheerfulness. (Happy, friendly, warning)
- Blue is the color of calm and serenity, it inspires a feeling of safety. (Serene, trustworthy, inviting)
The Lucky Seven
A wise person once said, “The design is in the details”. Simplicity always enhances the details. We at Tictail live by this mantra. Our platform was created with the simple idea of creating a space for independent brands to showcase their goods, and while this idea has grown in complexity over the years, simplicity has and always will be be the goal.
With simplicity in mind, we have seven rules we always follow when thinking about design at Tictail. We call them the Lucky Seven.
- Typography: The first rule in the art of typography is that it must be readable and legible.
- Color: Stick to one or two main colors that are high in contrast.
- Space: More space makes a design feel open and inviting. Cramped letters or elements that are too close together leads to a chaotic feeling.
- Reduce mental fatigue: Keep it simple by reducing the amount of choices in your design.
- Natural interactions: The best design interactions are always the ones who feel so natural that you don’t even think about them.
- Keep it linear: When interacting with apps or websites, users have a particular goal. A linear design experience with a specific beginning, middle and end allows the user to complete one action with each step.
- User testing is never a bad idea: Getting honest feedback from people who in the end will actually use this product is the best way of understanding what works and what doesn’t.
If you keep these basic rules in mind when designing, you will instantly get a product that will make people enjoy using it. Creating an easy way of communication between a platform and its users makes people’s everyday lives much simpler. There will always be new and innovative ways of interlacing design with psychology, but by keeping your eyes and ears open and by sitting down with your user, you can call yourself a true design psychologist.
