Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
When choosing among several alternatives, people avoid losses and optimize for sure wins because the pain of losing is greater than the satisfaction of an equivalent gain. UX designs should frame decisions accordingly.
The perceived value of a site represents the benefit that users expect to derive from using it. High expectations make users more likely to engage with the site.
Chunking is a concept that originates from the field of cognitive psychology. UX professionals can break their text and multimedia content into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and remember it better.
Exposure to a stimulus influences behavior in subsequent, possibly unrelated tasks. This is called priming; priming effects abound in usability and web design.
Do you ever think your users are lazy, or maybe even a little bit dumb? Device Inertia, momentum behavior, and selective attention are common behaviors that can make users seem slothful. However, interface design, not deficient user effort, is the true cause for these error-prone user paths.
Features meant to increase user efficiency by reducing steps can end up hurting users if they do not conform to existing mental models and expectations based on past experiences.
People often overlook new visual details added to an existing image. This affects the usability of many design elements, from error messages to navigation.
Showing users things they can recognize improves usability over needing to recall items from scratch because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.
Unless faced with life-changing information, most site visitors won't read all of the content provided but settle for a “good-enough” answer. Better sorting and clearer writing satisfy users without exhausting the limited time they’re willing to spend on a website.
Humans tend to return good deeds: use this social psychology law in user interface design to gain users’ trust and motivate engagement with your site or app.
The "halo effect" is when one trait of a person or thing is used to make an overall judgment of that person or thing. It supports rapid decisions, even if biased ones.
The reciprocity principle states that people, when given something upfront, tend to feel a sense of obligation to repay what has been provided. Login walls reverse this sequence and require users to disclose personal info before allowing access to content. People often resent this, and may not be as forthcoming or cooperative as a result.
People have very limited ability to keep information in their working memory while performing tasks, so user interfaces should be designed accordingly: to minimize memory load. One way of doing so is to offload items to external memory by showing them on the screen.
If experienced designers want to learn about psychology and how it applies to user experience, should they get a psychology degree, or is it better to learn on your own?
When people think that something is rare or only available for a limited time, they will tend to act fast to secure that scarce item. This behavioral principle can be used in user experience design, but beware of overuse.
People can remember about 7 (plus/minus 2) items in short-term memory. This memory limitation has implications for UX design, but not the ones you often hear stated.
A common problem during user experience ideation is when design teams are stuck on a traditional way of thinking about aspects of the design. Here are some tips for breaking out of such functional fixedness.
An engaging gameplay experience is good design. But there's a fine line between engagement and addiction, which would be bad UX, especially in the long term.
Too many offerings (e.g., products or services) on a website make it harder for users to make a decision due to analysis paralysis. Alternatively, too many options can also cause users to hastily make a decision and later regret their choice due to buyer's remorse.
Users' answers to survey questions are often biased and not the literal truth. Examples include acquiescence bias, social desirability bias, and recency bias. Knowing about response biases will help you interpret survey data with more validity for any design decisions based on the findings.
The Halo Effect says that any one element in a user's experience with a company will rub off on their interpretation of other elements and their feelings about the company as a whole. Good design in one part of a website will make people like other parts better (and like the company better), but the opposite is also true.
Negative experiences have stronger emotional impact on humans than positive experiences do. Thus, in designing the user experience, we need extra emphasis on avoiding those lows.
It's not just users who are subject to illogical thinking: designers and UX professionals can also make sub-optimal design decisions by falling prey to the same decision biases, such as framing effects when analyzing usability data.
Change blindness is the tendency for people to overlook things that change outside their focus of attention. In user interface design, this explains why screen changes that seem striking to the designer can be completely ignored by users.
Priming is a basic principle of psychology with big impact on user interface design: exposure to something makes a user more likely to think and react in related ways at later steps in the interaction.
Gamification brings the visual design and the mechanics of games to other products. As we examine our ethical responsibilities as UX professionals, social media deserves special consideration. Gamification in social media can make people feel as though their social lives are being scored.
#6 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to design user interfaces to facilitate #memory recognition which is easier than recall because there are more cues available to facilitate the retrieval of information from memory.
Designers should consider the physical and mental abilities of children, as well as utilize existing UX conventions. Here are 3 guidelines to consider when designing UX for children, based on our user research with users aged 3-12 years.
Users’ mental models of concept categories are far less strict than you might expect. Consider keeping small numbers of outlier pages within their larger parent category, rather than creating unnecessary subcategories.
With repeated practice, users develop imprecise memory of objects and content in a UI, but still need additional visual and textual signals to help them find a specific item.
Design elements that appear similar in some way — sharing the same color, shape, or size — are perceived as related, while elements that appear dissimilar are perceived as belonging to separate groups.
When deciding which links to click on the web, users choose those with the highest information scent — which is a mix of cues that they get from the link label, the context in which the link is shown, and their prior experiences.
To decide whether to visit a page, people take into account how much relevant information they are likely to find on that page relative to the effort involved in extracting that info.
To measure learnability, determine your metric, gather your data, and plot the averages on a line curve. Analyze the learning curve by looking at its slope and its plateau.
Even though B2B and B2C ecommerce sites have different kinds of users, both types of sites can use similar strategies to simplify purchase flows and increase consumer trust.
Digital products are competing for users’ limited attention. The modern economy increasingly revolves around the human attention span and how products capture that attention.
Cognitive biases change the way that we recall past events. The peak–end rule focuses our memories around the most intense moments of an experience and the way an experience ends.
Children’s cognitive skills are still developing, so their reasoning abilities are weaker than those of adults. To help them successfully use an interface, designs should display clear, specific instructions, leveraging kids’ mental models and prior knowledge.
Users appreciate personalized content suggestions and are willing to give up some of their privacy for quality recommendations, while accepting some inaccurate recommendations.
