Psychology Concepts
Cognitive and psychological concepts relevant to UX design
Analysis Paralysis
The state of overthinking a decision to the point that no action is taken, often due to too many options or too much information. ### Too many options hurts users’ decision-making ability How they feel about the experience as a whole can besignificantly impacted as a result. ### Optimizing for choice Avoid analysis paralysis by keeping the decision-making process in mind. Avoid overwhelming users by only showing one thing at a time (e.g. featured product), or by providing tools for narrowing down choices up front (e.g. search and filtering). ### Optimizing for comparison When comparison is necessary, we can avoid analysis paralysis by enabling side-by-side comparison of related items and options that require a decision (e.g. pricing tiers).
Chunking
Chunking is a process by which individual pieces of an information set are broken down and then grouped together in a meaningful whole. ### Chunking Chunking helps users to easily scan and identify information that aligns with their goals and process that information to complete their task more quickly. ### Grouping Structuring content into visually distinct groups with a clear hierarchy enables designers to align information with how people evaluate and process content. ### Content relationships Chunking can be used to help users understand underlying relationships by grouping content into distinctive modules, applying rules to separate content, and providing hierarchy.
Cognitive Bias
Systematic errors of thinking or rationality in judgement that influence our perception of the world and our decision-making ability. ### Cognitive biases increase our efficiency Rather than thinking through every situation, we conserve mental energy by developing rules of thumb to make decisions based on past experience. These mental shortcuts enable us to make quick decisions without needing to analyze every detail. But they can also influence our decision-making processes and judgement without our awareness. ### Example: confirmation bias We have a tendency to seek out, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms our preconceived notions and ideas. This is known as confirmation bias, and it can make having a logical discussion about a polarizing hot-button issue with someone incredibly difficult. ### Building awareness Understanding our own biases may not eliminate them from our decision making – but it can help us identify them. Being aware can safeguard us against fallacious reasoning, unintentional discrimination or costly decisions.
Cognitive Dissonance
When a user is confronted with an interface or affordance that appears to be intuitive but delivers unexpected results. ### Cognitive dissonance can negatively affect user experience This can cause frustration and lead to the user abandoning a task, or leaving the experience altogether. ### Seek out frustrating and confusing steps Prevent cognitive friction by conducting user interviews to understand a user’s mental model. Create task flows to ensure coherent steps, and design easy-to-use information architectures with Card Sorting. ### Evaluate and test to create a smooth journey Expert evaluations and usability testing can also highlight problems in a design and uncover solutions. When a great user experience feels easy, it’s because no steps in the journey were confusing or difficult. ### Origin Cognitive dissonance was established by Leon Festinger in When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (1956) and A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957). In these works, Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency to function mentally in the real world. People who experience internal inconsistency tend to become psychologically uncomfortable and motivated to reduce cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive Load
The amount of mental resources needed to understand and interact with an interface. ### Our brains have a limited amount of processing power When the amount of information coming in exceeds the space we have available in our brain, we struggle to keep up — tasks become more difficult, details are missed, and we begin to feel overwhelmed. ### Intrinsic cognitive load Refers to the effort required by users to carry around information relevant to their goal, absorb new information and keep track of their goals. For example, we can only hold three or four items in our working memory at once. ### Extraneous cognitive load Refers to the mental processing that takes up resources but doesn't help users understand the content of an interface (e.g. distracting or unnecessary design elements).
Contextual Inquiry
A field study that involves in-depth observation and interviews of a small sample of users to gain a robust understanding of work practices and behaviors. ## How It Works ### Introduction Begin by introducing yourself, stating the goals of the inquiry, and communicating what the participant can expect. Be sure to let participants know their feedback is confidential! ### Inform Next up is the transition to the interview. Inform the participant that you will watch while they perform their work, and to expect questions whenever you see something interesting to discuss. ### Explore During the interview, be sure to watch and learn while stopping the participant to discuss observations that you’d like to explore further or clarify. Ask open-ended questions that let the participant give you details about why they took a certain action. ### Clarify End by asking any outstanding questions and summarizing your interpretation of the observed processes in order to get final clarifications and correct your understanding. ## Synthesize Synthesize the data collected during contextual inquiries by identifying important patterns and themes (e.g. affinity mapping).
Flow
The mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment of process of the activity. ### Flow results from immersive and engaging user experiences A flow state occurs when there is a balance between the difficulty of a task and the level of skill required to complete it. It’s characterized by intense and focussed concentration on the present, combined with a sense of total control. ### Designing for flow We can build flow into our designs by providing feedback so that the user knows what action has been taken and what has been accomplished. Optimizing for task efficiency is key for avoiding disengagement with the interface. This is achieved by building a responsive system, removing friction, and making content and features available for intuitive discovery. ### Finding balance A task that’s too difficult leads to heightened frustration, while a task that’s too easy can lead to boredom. Finding the right balance requires matching the challenge with the user’s skill level.
Mental Model
An explanation of someone’s thought process about how something works in the real world. ## Match designs to the users’ existing mental models This enables them to easily transfer their knowledge from one product or experience to another, without the need to first take the time to understand how the new system works. ## Meet users’ expectations. Subvert them at your peril. Take ecommerce websites, which use consistent patterns and conventions such product cards, virtual carts and checkout flows in order to conform to users’ expectations. Radically redesigning these elements or removing these concepts altogether for the sake of novelty runs the risk of alienating users. ## Understand how your users think Shrinking the gap between our own mental models and those of the users is one of the biggest challenges as a UX designer. To achieve this goal we use a variety of user research methods such as user interviews, personas, journey maps and empathy maps.
Selective Attention
The process of focusing our attention only to a subset of the stimuli in the environment — usually those related to our goals. ### People filter out information that isn’t relevant To maintain focus on the task at hand we must guide users’ attention. Prevent them from being overwhelmed or distracted by helping them find the information or action they need at the right moment. ### Banner blindness Website visitors ignore banner content that resembles ads, or appears in locations traditionally dedicated to ads. By not styling or placing content to look like ads, you have a higher chance of attention being paid to it. ### Change blindness A perceptual phenomenon occurs when significant changes in an interface go unnoticed due to limitations of our attention and the lack of strong cues. Avoid this by analyzing your design for any competing changes that may happen at the same time and that may divert attention from each other.
Short-term Memory
The capacity to store a small amount of information in mind and keep it readily available for a short period of time. ### Short-term memory is limited in capacity and duration We are limited to being able to hold ~7 chunks of information in our short-term memory at any given moment with each chunk fading after 20–30 seconds. We use it to keep track of information in order to achieve tasks, but we often have trouble remembering what information we’ve already seen. Designers must be mindful of this limit when displaying information to users and ensure it’s both necessary and relevant. ### Prioritize recognition over recall Our brains are good at recognizing something we’ve seen before, but not at keeping new information ready to be used. We can support this by making it clear what information has already been viewed (e.g. visually differentiating visited links and providing breadcrumbs links). ### Place burden of memory on the system, not the user We can lessen the burden of memorizing critical information by carrying it over from screen to screen when necessary (e.g. comparison tables that make comparing multiple items easy). ##Origin Memory is believed to be divided into short-term and long- term storage as early as the 19th century. The classical model of memory, developed in the 1960s, assumed that memories move from short-term to long-term storage over time. This model is referred to as the ‘modal model’ and has been most famously detailed by Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968.