Psychology and UX Articles & Videos

  • Reciprocation: Why Login Walls Aren’t Always “Better"

    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.

  • How to Handle Category Outliers in Your IA

    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.

  • Working Memory and External Memory

    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.

  • Social Proof in UX

    Users take cues from other humans: if many others like something or do something, that makes people feel that this thing must be good.

  • Principle of Closure in Visual Design

    People tend to fill in blanks to perceive a complete object.

  • Should Experienced Designers Go Back to College?

    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?

  • The Scarcity Principle in UX: Don't Miss Out!

    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.

  • The Magical Number 7 and UX

    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.

  • Design Ruts and Functional Fixedness

    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.

  • Compensatory vs Noncompensatory: 2 Decision-Making Strategies

    Ease users’ purchase decisions by designing interfaces that support both compensatory and noncompensatory decision-making strategies.

  • Spatial Memory: Why It Matters for UX Design

    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.

  • Similarity Principle in Visual Design

    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.

  • Proximity Principle in Visual Design

    Design elements near each other are perceived as related, while elements spaced apart are perceived as belonging to separate groups.

  • The Principle of Common Region: Containers Create Groupings

    In visual design, elements within the same boundary are perceived as related.

  • Video Game Engagement vs Addiction

    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.

  • Choice Overload Impedes User Decision-Making

    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.

  • Information Scent: How Users Decide Where to Go Next

    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.

  • Survey Response Biases in User Research

    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 in UX Design

    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.

  • Information Foraging: A Theory of How People Navigate on the Web

    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.

  • The Word "Validate" Undermines UX Effectiveness

    Our words define UX research goals for users, stakeholders, and teams. Turning UX research into improved design is already challenging. Why make it more so by setting unsuitable expectations with the words we use to describe research?

  • What Is a Mental Model?

    What users *think* they know about your system will determine how they interact with the design. Understand users' mental models to design something that'll work well in practice.

  • Peak–End Rule: Use to Your Advantage

    Users largely judge their experience with your product or service on two data points: the peak and the end.

  • The Availability Heuristic

    People make decisions based on the information that is most readily available to them. Understanding how the availability heuristic works will help you design for the way people think.

  • The False-Consensus Effect: You Are Not the User

    The false-consensus effect refers to people’s tendency to assume that others share their beliefs and will behave similarly in a given context. This assumption can lead UX professionals to make the wrong design decisions. Acknowledge your vulnerability and establish checks.

  • Design for How People Think (Don Norman)

    Design for how people are, not what you want them to be.

  • Psychology Makes You a Better UX Designer

    Understanding psychological processes like memory, information processing, and cognitive biases can help designers make better decisions.

  • The Design of Everyday Things

    Find out the inspiration behind Don Norman's book, The Design of Everyday Things.

  • How to Handle Category Outliers in Your IA

    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.

  • Principle of Closure in Visual Design

    People tend to fill in blanks to perceive a complete object.

  • Compensatory vs Noncompensatory: 2 Decision-Making Strategies

    Ease users’ purchase decisions by designing interfaces that support both compensatory and noncompensatory decision-making strategies.

  • Spatial Memory: Why It Matters for UX Design

    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.

  • Similarity Principle in Visual Design

    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.

  • Proximity Principle in Visual Design

    Design elements near each other are perceived as related, while elements spaced apart are perceived as belonging to separate groups.

  • The Principle of Common Region: Containers Create Groupings

    In visual design, elements within the same boundary are perceived as related.

  • Information Scent: How Users Decide Where to Go Next

    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.

  • Information Foraging: A Theory of How People Navigate on the Web

    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.

  • How to Measure Learnability of a User Interface

    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.

  • What B2B Designers Can Learn from B2C About Building Trust

    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.

  • The Attention Economy

    Digital products are competing for users’ limited attention. The modern economy increasingly revolves around the human attention span and how products capture that attention.

  • The Peak–End Rule: How Impressions Become Memories

    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.

  • Designing for Kids: Cognitive Considerations

    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.

  • The Anchoring Principle

    People tend to focus on a single, initial piece of information, which influences how they estimate value and make subsequent decisions.

  • Individualized Recommendations: Users’ Expectations & Assumptions

    Users appreciate personalized content suggestions and are willing to give up some of their privacy for quality recommendations, while accepting some inaccurate recommendations.

  • Change Blindness in UX: Definition

    Significant changes in a web page can remain unnoticed when they lack strong cues, due to the limitations of human attention.

  • Prominence-Interpretation Theory

    Prominence-interpretation theory helps determine what shapes users’ perceptions of a site’s credibility.

  • Intelligent Assistants: Creepy, Childish, or a Tool? Users’ Attitudes Toward Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri

    Users assume that assistants have a low level of competence for complex tasks and find them to be socially awkward to interact with.

  • Distracted Driving: UX’s Responsibility to Do No Harm

    I walked away from two distracted-driving accidents in one week. Can we use known UX principles to reduce harm?