Fundamentals for Design Psychology
In my previous article on ‘UX Laws for simplifying designs’, I had promised to provide more information on the concept of psychology used to understand users and accordingly design a product to be absolutely meaningful.
In our first post, we understood all about the necessary laws of user experience design and how these rules are implemented with examples and how to utilise these laws when designing apps and websites.
In this part, we reveal why we say that people’s experience is what all matters throughout the life cycle of the product.
“User experience (UX) is a person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service”
- Wikipedia
As a designer we want to defend our decision confidently. And we can do this if we know why we made those decisions & how our designs make sense to a user. There are many different definitions for UX that are different but have one thing in common, each definition of user experience mentions the human element of it.
Let us have a look at the fundamentals of user experience design psychology.
People need visual cues
It becomes easy to recognise something by a user when some visual hint is present in the design while taking any necessary action. Visual cues help you as a designer to design a product in a smart and attractive way.
- The content & design should be more relatable if the designer wants the user to perform action accordingly.
- If something is actionable, make sure this is highlighted in a consistent way that also follows conventions.
- Use visual affordances when you want a user to click something. Use clear icons when there is a control you want them to use.
Gestalt Principles
The Gestalt principle, also known as Law of Proximity or Law of Similarity, is an important one to understand. This principle means that users identifies designs easily and utilise them which are visually similar or are closely grouped together.
- The law of proximity states that human perceive objects that are close to each other by grouping them are recognised easily as part of the same group
- Humans are programmed to make connections with things that are visually similar or are closely grouped together.
- Think logically about sectioning off different pieces of information.
People have limited short term memory
Users require our help in many different ways in order to function smoothly while using our product, sometimes users are themselves not clear what they actually need. At such times what they want is a quick clue about what action they can take to solve a problem.
- As per Jackob Nielson’s usability heuristics, states “Recognition rather than recall”
- Eliminate the need for people to remember information if possible by making relevant information visible or readily available.
- Current usage, progress state are few examples.
People have limited scope of awareness
While using your product it might be possible that a user feels lost and exhausted. Too many things collated on the same page or screen can make it difficult to focus correctly on performing some action. So it becomes necessary to group important things into necessary categories or pieces.
- Awareness tests are useful to show us that we are only able to focus on a particular thing at a particular time.
- Average attention span of a human is only about 10 min long.
- Dont assume that while everything is visible, the user can see everything. Very often, they are focusing on something else.
People learn from examples
Remember the times when you yourself wanted to accomplish a task and got stuck with few fields and didn’t know what next should be done, at such times what you seek is a quick clue on what is needed… Similarly other users also want a solution to such a scenario. As a designer we can suggest important information which will help users take action in no time.
- Placeholders helps users to understand about what he needs to do as action
- Give the user a hint about what to perform as a particular action.
People are motivated by other people’s choices
Sometimes the user wants to purchase something good but they are not aware about all the options available but we make their exploring journey smooth by suggesting them what else they can seek and explore within the product for their decision to be precise and clear.
- Users can be encouraged to do something knowing the others have also followed this path
- If you are working with an e-commerce app or site, it can be a powerful thing to have a ‘favourite’ or ’top items’ section, or ‘Customer also bought’ to help users select their preferences.
People are motivated by what remains to be done
Clear indication always helps! It saves time & focus as well. It really eases the user journey and experience to perform something really important. When provided some quick clues about what is already done and what is left in the process it helps user to feel motivated about doing things which are left in a queue
- As per research, people are more likely to be motivated to finish a task if they see what remains to be done, rather than what they have done.
- It’s possible to use this concept in something like a checkout or an onboarding process.
- “Almost done, just verify your email” (to make the task feel like they are almost complete)
- For a checkout, using a step by step process to show how many steps are left will motivate them to finish the checkout.
People are overwhelmed by too many choices
So many choices, Oh god save me! We can feel exhausted when asked so much. It makes us almost dislike any product’s features. So make sure you are not overloading your user with too many choices, questions or filtration when you have the power to design a product.
- Users are more likely to feel overwhelmed when they have too much choice in front of them. Users will be more satisfied with their decision if they have less options.
- Too many options in a single page, the customer does not want this. Instead, reducing to a measured & managed number of possible options would infinitely improve the customer journey.
People are overwhelmed by too much information
Simplified elements & balanced hierarchy in designs help the user to feel relaxed while they take action on something important. The elements on the screen should have a coherence & balance about them.
- Overwhelming a user with a lot of large text & too many buttons is chaos for their cognitive load.
- Organise your content into a visual hierarchy to make things easy to scan for the user.
- Use the law of proximity to group like with like & have a coherent structure of headings, images & buttons to guide the user through the process naturally.
Variable awards are addictive
If you want your product to be used everyday, here is the trick you can implement in your designs,
- Using a random award is what really makes things addictive.
- The power of variable awards has also been used in gaming. If you’ve ever played any game, coming back each day to see what daily reward you win is the reason to check in.
- If you would like people to use your product everyday, you could give the user a chance to win a different prize everyday.
Now that you understand the importance of psychology in design, you have gained the tools to put this into action. All this knowledge empowers the designer to tap into the visual psychology behind the design. In the end we can say that understanding the psychology component in UX design is what makes or breaks successful designers.
“If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.”
— Alan Cooper, Software Designer and Programmer
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