Design the Ultimate Customer Experience
Understanding psychological processes like memory, information processing, and cognitive biases can help make better UX decisions.
- Design better websites by knowing human abilities and limitations
- Apply human factors, cognitive psychology, and human computer interaction concepts in web design
- Explain user behavior and anticipate the impact of designs with psychology
- Go beyond usability guidelines to understanding their underlying reasoning
- Attention
- Factors affecting attention, how to get people's attention
- Cognitive load: The effects of stress, interruptions, and multitasking
- Multiple sensory inputs for communicating information
- Adaptation to information overload
- Visual perception
- Visual acuity and discerning fine detail on screens
- Typography, legibility, and color and contrast sensitivity
- Contextual effects in perception, how people perceive relationships among groupings
- Eye gaze patterns, where people look
The Human Mind and Usability
- Memory and knowledge
- Memory capacity, fallible memory
- Short-term and long-term memory, information retention
- Working memory to accomplish tasks
- Law of practice and forgetting
- Strategies for information retrieval
- Recognition compared to recall, and why they matter
- Associative priming and information scent affects time on task
- How users select what links to click on
- Mental models for predicting interactions and outcomes
- People form schemas and scripts of concepts and activities
- Considerations for mental models in interaction design
- Perception stronger than fact
- Language
- Factors that influence reading and comprehension
- Online reading patterns
- Word and sentence processing
- Scanning: Where people look and don’t look
Apply psychology principles
Predict and understand how your customers think and act
- Problem solving and decision making
- Choosing between different possibilities
- People's tendencies to choose the path of least resistance (minimize interaction costs)
- How distractions affect cognitive processes
- Emotion-driven behavior
- Aesthetics and first impressions
- Pleasurable and desirable experiences
Behavior is strongly influenced by unconscious thought, but it is often more predictable than you might expect.
Understanding the foundations of human cognition will help explain and anticipate user behavior.
If you’re an executive or team member involved in interface design in your business role and don’t have formal training in psychology or human factors, your work will benefit from understanding the theory that determines which designs work best.