When your designing muse comes calling, and you start working on your potentially award-winning app, it will come as a surprise that you need more than creativity to get your hot UX design off the board. Indeed, masters in the field cannot overemphasize the importance of psychology and UX design.
User experience designs work best when they present content that a visitor to an e-commerce site can access easily and comfortably. You need to explore the subtle persuasive cues that will convince online visitors not just to come back, but also to buy.
You see how your grocery store puts the candy jars close to the cashier; psychology will show you how to bring out your online candy. However, for that to happen, you must take some courses in psychology. Find out now why leading employers will seek you out if you have psychology on your resume.
Creating Interactive Designs
In evaluating your user experience, you can attest to the indignation it aroused in you to find a requirement that you must verify you aren’t a robot. Am not a robot? Well, the human factor counts. A user interface design should contain intuitive aspects that allow human emotions, especially empathy to flow.
Apart from online business, people use technology for social interaction. They use it to seek guidance and for validation. Such behavior shows that you should encourage your users to give feedback and ratings for the website.
People tend to gravitate towards sites that have high ratings. When we find a site that is popular and attractive to us, mirror neurons get stimulation for this synchronous behavior and provide the satisfaction you get in belonging to a larger group.
Your website gains by having a platform that allows interaction between users in a forum or on social media. Such feedback helps you gauge people’s behavior and responsiveness in your constant updating of your UX design. The more interaction you can have with your audience, the better perceived the site becomes.
Technology with a Human Face
The best websites give the impression that there is a human face on the other side of the screen. Furthermore, as a UX designer, you must have personas in mind who are the users whose needs you seek to address with your design.
Chief among the ideas for your consideration is that your users should accomplish whatever they seek from a website as fast and easily as possible. Steve Krug calls it satisfying. He emphasizes that your web design should exploit the fact that a user seeks the initially available solution to his or her problem.
To confirm the viability of your design on the user persona premise, you should start by creating fictional users. You would then set up your app or website and proceed to create a demographic analysis of the users who visit the site or use the app.
Such qualitative and quantitative data at the usability testing stage will help you understand the level of engagement and adjust your design for optimum conversions. In following through with your design process, you should consider the usability of your design on various devices.
Device Targeted UX Designs
The user interface design you choose depends on the intended device for your design. Think about thumb patterns if it’s for a mobile device. If some elements extend beyond the reach of the user’s thumb for swiping actions or the actions require several button actions, then that works against your design’s effectiveness.
In the same vein, your website or app should easily convert when used in different versions of various mobile devices and desktops. Your choice of graphic design elements should ensure visibility and legibility of content in different conditions.
A Focused-Content Approach to UX
Psychology affords you some tips in utilizing standard user behavior in formulating your user experience strategy. Peter Morville delves into UX with his Three Circles theory to explain the distinction between user-centered design and user experience.
In this conceptual model, he shows the correlation between content, context, and users. He further developed this into a honeycomb diagram to illustrate the facets of user experience. Where cognitive psychology helps you in developing designs that focus on human’s perception, Morville helps you integrate that into your design through his guidance using the honeycomb idea.
In his advocating for an easy to use interface, he lists the following facets of design as cardinal in understanding what matters to users. That it should be:
- Desirable
- Credible
- Usable
- Valuable
- Accessible
- Findable
The facets turn out very handy during a review of a website since you can target a specific target for review. Such happens if you don’t have the resources to effect an overhaul of an entire website. You can prioritize on the facets that appear more important as you continue testing and reviewing your website or app.
Following such guidance, analyze and integrate user feedback and ratings to understand the specific needs of your target population. You should not make guesses on your target user’s needs.
The Hick Law Angle: Why This is so Important
If you provide content that your users don’t need, you create clutter on your design that detracts from the user experience. Hick’s law says that the more options you bring before users the longer the decision making process.
Most psychologists agree that human beings seek the easiest and quickest way to get things done. That translates that to a clutter-free website and a user-friendly interface. If you expose your web visitors to a choice of too many pictures or products, they will take longer to look at them and to make a choice.
They might get confused and fail to buy. Alternatively, they might buy and but later feel dissatisfied out of the belief that maybe other products were better than what they chose. The exasperation or satisfaction gained from viewing numerous items depends on the cognitive load presented to the user.
The cognitive load is the cumulative amount of mental effort or thought used by a person to complete a task. Even with this multiplicity of objects, Hick’s Law and the Von Restorff effect take precedence.
According to the Von Restorff effect, when faced with many similar objects, the unique one in the group remains in memory long after the experience. Following that principle, you should endeavor to make important aspects such as call-to-action buttons look different from other aspects of your application or site.
Building on that fact, designers also exploit the Serial Position Effect. That effect says that people remember the last and the first items in a list that they view. Therefore, most UX professional designers list the series of their actions to the left or the right of their site. A clear illustration of the serial position effect is the placing of the profile and home items to the extreme left or right of iOS applications.
Attention Grabbing
You cannot possibly pay attention to everything in your environment. You use some discrimination to decide what requires what amount of attention from you. If you are a designer, you must create riveting content to ensure productive human-computer interaction between your online visitor and your website.
Since online surfers take seconds to scan your site content, you should focus on his unintentional blindness to direct him to valuable information. By focusing on something specific either by being told it’s there or because it is what you were looking for in an e-commerce site, you blot out all other elements of the interface as you focus on your object of interest.
The sure ways of getting attention include addressing the primary need that brings the visitor to your site and by optimizing on the ease of scanning of your web pages. The colors, fonts, and sounds you choose can be distracting or attention grabbing.
Although change makes things stand out, some people get change blindness which makes them oblivious to changes in stimuli. As you receive reviews that show you the user perspective on various aspects of your website, consider that you need those psychology principles to train or persuade your audience to pay attention to the target content. With such, you will build an engaging and relevant UI for your clients.
Credibility of Your Website
With soaring ratings, user forums, social media platforms integration and chat options, your users get a feeling of authenticity of your website and merchandise. Most online business deals move faster when driven by referrals from satisfied clients.
Even without return clients, first-time users confirm the validity of your business from such reviews and ratings. The social psychology perspective defines your study of how the implied, imagined or actual presence of others influences people’s feelings, thoughts and behaviors.
The best idea is to concentrate on building one emotional experience. That emotional experience should form relationships between users and should build a relationship between users and your brand or products. Use of color, beeps, and choice of words helps in building and sustaining the desired emotions and connection.
Design bases on communication and psychology help you understand human behavior and motivations. Knowing that you can have effective communication with your users through your designs. Therefore, design goes beyond artistic aptitude and succeeds when you consider the intended human responses.
Psychology on Text in User Experience Design
Website visitors need information. They also need to find it quickly, and that requires you to set your content out in an organized, clear and attractive layout. A visual system helps you to generate legible fonts and to employ the appropriate grouping.
In use of color, red and blue come across as a most undesirable pair to view together. Therefore, you should avoid using blue text on a red background and vice versa. Nevertheless, you can use color to enhance your grouping cues.
The findings are an outcome of Aristotle psychology on perception to support this view by proposing that perception happens because an organ is affected. The change the organ undergoes is an alteration, which occurs due to the effects of the qualities of the object, and the experience is what Aristotle sums up as perception.
In the choice of color to enhance the design, you should employ the optimum use of white space for an aesthetically attractive visual design. The drawback on color selection and use manifest when you consider that some of your visitors could be colorblind. For such, you must find alternative ways of grouping. Such steps ensure you communicate to the user even in the face of eye tracking.
Eye tracking studies confirm that users follow an F-shaped pattern when reading web pages. The F means fast, meaning that users take seconds to peruse text on your website. The F also summarizes the pattern that reading behavior follows-two horizontal movements and one vertical movement.
The initial component, the first horizontal movement, shows the user reads text across the upper part of the content. After that, he scans another horizontal movement down that page. Finally, he reads in a vertical movement where he peruses content on the left side of the web page.
This pattern, however, varies with some readers giving attention to only one horizontal area, there creating an L, while some read an extra horizontal section thereby creating an E model. As a designer, you should follow those findings to section your crucial content in the mentioned areas of the web page.
When applying that concept, entice the user to read more of your content by starting paragraphs with relevant keywords, using bullets and placing crucial information in the first two paragraphs. Combining that with expert use of whitespace will get your website added to author collection status for constant reference on your niche or product.
Why UX Designers Need to Understand Psychology
Evidently, the impact of psychology in UX design is far-reaching. Some designers argue that you don’t need to delve into the formal study of psychology to succeed in user experience design. They feel that you only need to know how to apply some principles of psychology to your work.
Nevertheless, getting adequate qualifications gained through accredited institutions like HFI enhances your worth and performance in the lucrative yet competitive world of UX design.