How to use psychology.
There are a number of additional skills designers learn. From coding and writing, to understanding the fundamentals of business. These skills are invaluable but perhaps not essential. But the one additional skill every designer must invest in understanding the fundamentals of psychology. All too often I find designers trying to force their audience to adapt to their product or experience design. Using a few key principles from psychology, designs can become more intuitive, accessible and delightful. But knowing where to begin can be a daunting challenge! There are endless principles but, which principles are genuinely useful?
Let’s start with the principles that are successfully used by products and experiences you probably enjoy every day. To be clear we are talking about human-centred design and not user user-centred design, these terms are often mistakenly interchanged. And whilst similar, they’re not the same as user-centred design is focused a specific audience and human-centred design takes a wider human perspective to that incorporates psychology. Great designers are able to incorporate both, to focus on the needs of users and to use psychological principles at a human level to make intuitive products and experiences.
In the book Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman describes two thought modes. The first is fast, instinctive, and emotionally led called System 1. And System 2 is slower, more deliberate, and more logical. Human-centred design is fundamentally System 1 as it looks at the universal behaviour common to humans. As designers, we use have to understand System 1 - to understand why we do things we don’t fully acknowledge. Understanding System 1 is incredibly powerful as it surfaces insight that even the user doesn’t know about themselves.
Ironically in understanding System 1, designer tend to rely overly on System 2 processes and fall in a trap. Blindly pursing the needs and wants of users, they overlook the psychological principles that create intuitive, human-centered products. Let’s take a look at the more ubiquitous psychological principles used in design and how to leverage them.
Hicks Law RT = a + b log2 (n).
Hick’s Law predicts that the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices available. Formulated by psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman after they examined the relationship between the number of stimuli presented and an individual’s reaction time to any given stimulus.
Hicks Law implies that complex designs with oodles of choices result in longer processing times for users. It’s why we as designers look to clarify and simplifying by synthesising lots of information into only what is necessary. Fundamentally designers strive for clarity not just because it looks and communicates better, but because it lessens the cognitive load on the audience.
Cognitive load
In short the mental processing power used by our working memories. The human brain like a computer processor has limited processing power: and if we exceed the processor, cognitive load is incurred. Performance suffers, tasks are more difficult, details get missed and frustration can occurs. So simply put don’t make your audiences brain work harder than it should by providing too many choices.
Everyday example
Hick’s Law can been seen in action everywhere however the most common example is the remote for a television. The features available on modern televisions have increased dramatically over time, and the yet the remotes have become simpler, therefore reducing cognitive load. By shifting complexity from the remote to the television, information is progressively disclosed within menus.
Millers Law
Miller’s Law predicts that the average person can only keep 7 (± 2) items in their working memory. And originates from a paper published 1956 on the limits of short-term memory and memory span. It goes some way to explain why having too many options makes people feel uneasy.
In design we revere the number 7 because the human brain retains ~7 bits of information when completing a task. However the nuance of the magic number 7 is an article in itself. The critical thing to take from Miller’s is the concept of chunking information and the human brains ability to memorise information accordingly.
Chunking is the act of grouping related information into smaller more distinct units of information. In design terms chunking makes it easier to process and understand information. Allowing the audience to scan and identify what they’re interested in or need, which aligns to how we generally consume digital content.
Everyday example
One of the examples of chunking you probably have used today is the way in which phone numbers are formatted. Without chunking, a phone number is a 10 digit string of numbers, which is difficult to process and remember. However if you chunk a phone number it becomes so much easier to scan and recall (pun intended).
2034589967
VS
203-458-9967
Jakobs Law
Jakobs Law of Internet User Experiences, states that users spend most of their time on other sites, and they prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Published in 2000 Jakob Nielson how peoples cumulative experiences over time creates an expectation in design patterns. And encourages designers to follow common design patterns in order to avoid confusion.
This does not mean all designs should follow set patterns, that would be boring. It does however mean there is value in making things familiar! Which leads us to the psychological concept of the mental model.
Mental models
Have you used website and felt lost because none of the interactions and content were recognisable or organised in the way you expected? It happens a lot don’t worry! In design we use mental models to understand how users make sense of how something works based on past experiences or previous knowledge, and to help designers approach and solve problems by shaping actions and behaviours. Mental models are really intriguing when you think about an audience’s first interaction with a product. If they can't figure out how it works right away, it may well be their last. But if you really want see just how important the mental model is, we first need to understand what the conceptual model is.
Conceptual model
The conceptual model is what we present to the audience through the interface of a product or experience. And a designer created the conceptual model to fit the mental model of the audience through research, iterations, validation and testing, etc. At this point you might be asking why you should care about the mental and conceptual model? However here is the rub: everything we do in the field of design is about the matching or mismatching the audience’s mental models and our solution’s conceptual model.
Everyday example
Have you ever wondered why things look the way they do? It’s simply because humans designed them to a mental model of what these things should look like. Consider the distinctive teapot from the cover of Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, the handle instead of being opposite to the spout is aligned with it. Our mental model immediately kicks and says this might not work well.
Gestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology is a theory that looks at human perception. Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka are pioneered Gestalt psychology in the early 20th century a counter to the principles of structuralist psychology. The word gestalt means the unified whole the theory that explores humans visual perception of elements in relation to each other by either starting with the whole and then working our way to the parts, or by attempting to break a confusing whole into component parts.
Remember when I said 7 was a magic number? Well there are seven Gestalt design principles:
Principle of proximity
Principle of closure
Principle of similarity
Principle of continuity
Principles of perception
Principle of organisation
Principle of symmetry
Proximity
Proximity is rather simple to understand, when things are close together, they should ne more related than things that are farther apart. Our brains perceive objects that are close together as related, while far apart … aren’t. You will of encountered proximity logic whilst filling out a form. Text that close to an input field indicates what information you need to add.
Closure
Closure is a principle based on the human brains tendency to see closed shapes. As humans we are hardwired to try to bring meaning and order to meaningless chaos and our brains do that via reification: the filling in of missing data to make sense of something we see. It’s a powerful design technique and allows audiences to extrapolate missing information and unify and connect elements themselves.
Similarity
Similarity is when we perceive elements to share characteristics and are thus related. Similar elements are usually defined by their shape, colour, size, texture or value. As designer we can use any of these to highlight a relationship (similar) or that they are not related (different).
Continuity
Continuity is when we see elements that are in line or follow a curve as more related. According to continuity, whenever our eyes begin to follow something, it continues to travel in that direction until it encounters another object. This is valuable tool design when guiding a viewer in a particular direction. Amazon is a master of this principle and guides your eyes to related product listings.
Perception
Perception is how humans perceive objects as either the figure (the focal point) or the ground (background) and instinctively create spatial relationships between them. This means that even simple objects that arrangement together can create a sense of relationship. However sometimes you need things to stand out and get noticed one of the ways we do that is by juxtaposing size. Humans automatically judge a smaller object as the figure, and a larger the ground – we always see the smaller object first. This is a useful tool for dealing with request to make something bigger, and the reason that a copy plus button laid on top of a full-bleed image can draws attention.
Organisation
There are five principles that fall under the umbrella of organisation: uniform connectedness, common regions, common fate (synchrony), parallelism, and focal points. What’s they all mean for design? They means that you can create complex arrangements from simple shapes, as long as they come together to form an easily understood and harmoniousness whole.
Symmetry
Symmetry is how humans perceive symmetrical elements as part of a group. It will come as no surprise we tend to look for order in objects and symmetry is a powerful enabler. This is why symmetry is so satisfying to humans: it’s creates harmony by conveying a sense of order and correctness in things. And why symmetry is so popular in governmental and banking design. Studies have also shown that the human standard for beauty depends largely on symmetrical faces.
Colour psychology
Colour is powerful tool it can impact aesthetics and accessibility and evoke emotions and feelings. We all are surrounded it and every colour we see can create different emotions, behaviours and reactions. It can raise our blood pressure or help to calm us and is a complex and nuanced science. As a designer we use to excite, create elegance, warmth or tranquillity. But all colours are not created equally, colour perception can be influenced by age and gender. Studies by Joe Hallock suggest men dislike the colour purple, whilst women feel the opposite. Blue is the safest of all colour across all age, especially those over 70 (however may be due to most people seeing the colour blue more clearly). Colour however is a difficult subject. There are colours that are more objective such as gold and green that are universally understood in nature. And more objective colours such as white which can be perceived as purity and peace or in some cultures is synonymous with death.
As always, it’s imperative to test before making any assumption and colour is not different. Do not get trapped by what you believe is the right colour, as your audience will and probably does see something different.
Dark patterns
We have the power to use psychology to create better and more intuitive products and experiences. And we also have the power to deceive. Dark Patterns are use design psychology to mislead, trick or addict an audiences. At simple-level, I think of dark patterns like the tricks of dodgy car salesperson. The trouble is their tricks are even easier to pull off digitally –you simply can’t look under a website and see a puddle of oil to know something isn’t right.
Bait-and-switch, disguised ads, faraway billing, friend spamming and sneaking items into your checkout carts. We have all fallen prey to dark patterns from time to time. But perhaps most worrisome practices of designing for audience addiction. Yes we use dark patterns to create addictions.
In Addiction by Design MIT Professor Natasha Schüll synthesises 15 years research and how the gaming industry optimises for maximum time on device. Slot machines are one of the most profitable entertainment industries in the USA according to Tristan Harris former design ethicist for Google. Harris went onto to say that harsh truth is several billion people now have a little slot machine their pocket. Or to put it bluntly, every time refresh our email, swipe right, scroll a feed, we’re playing a slot machine.
As designers, our responsibility is to create products and experiences that support and align with the goals and well-being of users and deliver value. In other words, we design to augment the human experience, not replace it. The first step in making ethical design decisions is to acknowledge how the human mind can be exploited and question what we should and shouldn’t create. Or as Uncle Ben said With great power comes great responsibility.
Get reading
Cognitive UXD
The Design of Everyday Things
Designing for Emotion
Hooked