7 Concepts of Psychology Which Inform Good UX Design
Understanding UX design is part science and part psychology. The approach to UX design is broad and usually depends on the education or job history of the person involved in it. Someone in product management will approach UX design differently than a interaction designer, and so forth. But no matter how diverse someone’s background is, there are a few basic rules that apply when trying to understand user experience.
People Don’t Want to Work too Hard
People usually spend 40+ hours a week at their jobs. The last thing they want to do in their free time is work. User experience designers should be aiming to provide a path with little to no difficulty when completing a task. Make navigating easy by showing examples rather than just explaining them alone.
Short Attention Spans
We’re in an age of information overload and you can hardly go five minutes without being presented with new facts. With so many things competing for people’s time, focus and energy, attention spans are getting shorter. Make sure the information you provide is easy to scan. Use headers, subtitles and titles to break text content to make your content easy to skim so that users can find what they are looking for–quickly. This will give the consumer the ability to take what they need without getting overwhelmed or frustrated by your information.
Mistakes Happen
People make mistakes all the time. Make their mistakes easy to “undo.” Try to find ways to prevent errors from occurring. If a particular task is prone to creating errors you need to take time to redesign and create safeguards to prevent confusion, errors, and frustration. If your product is not easy to use your users will find one that is.
Unconscious Thinking
Much of our mental processing actually takes places unconsciously. If you can convince people to take smaller actions like, signup for an email or a free membership, they’ll be much more likely to complete a bigger action in the future as they build a relationship with your company and user interface.
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