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.
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.