7 Principal Psychological Phenomena in UX Design
When I first saw this meme I found it mildly amusing, then I had a little thought experiment — why would the cats behave like that and what could the owner do to solve this hilarious mess? It does have a simple and clean UI, everyone can understand what it is when they see it. But what about its User Experience?
An easy solution (i) to this is to place two small panels in between two bowls to simulate a cubicle as this will give the cats a sense of space subconsciously. A better solution (ii) is to guide the cats to their designated bowl, this will of course require practices and training. Finally, the most ideal solution (iii) is to figure out the three cats’ preferences and to be sure each preference is unique, then place each cat’s favourite bowl with her favourite food inside.
(i) is interventional design. It purposely sets up walls and barricades to isolate a single user’s experience. We’ve already seen this a hundred times — ATMs, bathroom chambers, phone booths, bedrooms and etc.
(ii) is directional design. It uses orientational marks and highlights to help the users navigate and locate. Things like station signs, city maps and staircases guide the users through complex systems and reach their destinations.
(iii) is proactive design. Instead of shovelling everything you’ve got down the user’s throat, it learns the user’s behavioural pattern and uses that information to serve them. That’s why we start to see Netflix has a brand new “Because you watched…” feature and Google Maps tries to find a cool cafe for you based on your recent activities.
From (i) to (iii), we can see that the solution becomes more and more personal and intellectual. We homo sapiens are social and sentient animals, we cannot separate our emotions from our behaviours. The sense of accomplishment when we succeed and the sense of frustration when we fail, they are the drives we come to develop. Imagine if infrastructure designers and corporate product designers didn’t pay any attention to our behaviours, cognitions and interactions, we will be wreaking havoc in this world, just like those three cats.
UX design has a long-term relationship with psychology — namely, social, behavioural and cognitive psychology. Like I mentioned above, people are motivation-/competition- driven beings. When we want something, we don’t want it to be too easy to obtain, we like a challenge and we also like a reward. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs tells us that right above our basic needs, come the psychological needs. These are what make us desire, make us want to collaborate, compete, create and destroy.
To understand the user’s psychological actions and reactions, we first need to observe. Luck for us, psychologists have long been conducting numerous experiments in various well-controlled environments since the early 19th century. Many of the common psychological phenomena I’m about to explain have already been widely supported, we simply have to understand them and find out how to apply them into UX design thinking.
Probably one of the most important experiments, if not the most important, this psychological term explains a learning procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus is paired with a previously neutral stimulus. Many scientists argue that the concept of neuroplasticity may be responsible for this form of the associative learning process.
In a well-documented design system, all the primary CTA buttons should have the same vibrant colour. A designer would like to place a CTA button when a certain action is required in order to increase its conversion rate, and a designer should always use this button to ask the users to perform a series of actions with the same expectation. The users will eventually get familiar with the colour and shape and would assume that whenever they click a similar button, it would function just like their predecessors. But what if this wasn’t the case?
Then it is a Dark Pattern. This atrocious design manipulates the users’ expectations and tricks them into actions they didn’t intend to do. Funny how our brains could hopelessly fall for something like this, but it happens to the best of us. Be careful with this power, designers, or your product will end up like what cost LinkedIn in 2015.
This psychological term says when giving the patient a substance with no intended therapeutic value, the patient may feel they are receiving clinical benefit and even believe they are getting better. Some studies found no evidence in this placebo effect and this way of treating patients are often regarded as dishonest and misleading. Despite all the controversies, this psychological phenomenon is still very much real in many daily scenarios.
One of the most iconic examples is the Pull-to-Refresh animation. Anyone who owns a smartphone for more than 3 days knows how this works, but do they know there is a Placebo Effect? Because the users expect the refresh to work but they have no control over how long a page would reload. So instead of doing nothing, we designers create this Pull-to-Refresh animation to reassure the users that the loading is now indeed undergoing and the page will show up in no time. From the user’s perspective, “I did this, I made the reload happen, I pulled down the page like a boss, I am in control.” but the reality is, that page will refresh when it’s done no matter how hard the user pulls it, but the animation distracts the users away from the technical limitation of processing massive data flow in the backend. I know, it may sound like deception, but no harm is done. 😉
This psychological term addresses that people subconsciously tend to mirror other’s behaviour or emotion when they are in close proximity. Have you ever picked up a word your friend said and you then said it right back to him?
In our personal experiences with products, every interaction is intimate and instant. We are not made of machines, we feel when we use them. With a visual guide, our emotions can change in a result of how the products want us to feel. That’s why since last year, Emotional Design has become such a buzzword in the design community because designers are eager to find the connection between the users and the products through psychological familiarities.
This psychological term states that people with less technical background are more inclined to believe that aesthetically appealing designs are generally more intuitive than the less appealing ones. When those aesthetic designs fail them, however, the users tend to blame themselves instead of the broken functionalities. Maybe an impressive photograph caught your attention, or maybe the product happens to be using a lot of your favourite colour, or maybe those fancy animations really wowed you. Nonetheless, those positive emotional responses further reinforce your interactions with the products, they overcompensated the usability drawbacks and made you more tolerant.
Let’s use this shot as an example. On the left screen, three icons are too translucent to be seen clearly, the accessibility is poor to people with colour blindness and low sense of contrast; there isn’t any indication as to which icon means what; by sacrificing usability in favour of unnecessary negative space is a big no from me. On the right screen, scrollable vertical tab design in mobile is probably one of the worst ideas, not only it’s nearly impossible to implement, but it also reduces the experience of general scrolling on a mobile device (there is a reason why no one has done it in app design, because it doesn’t work).
But you don’t give a f*** about what I just wrote, do you? You thought, well, it looks clean and pleasing. So next time when you see a shot on Dribbble that impresses you so much you forgot all about UX, don’t worry, it’s not your fault, you can’t help it.
This psychological term is also known as the Isolation Effect, it predicts that people are more likely to remember an object that stands out from the rest. Many theories argue that people’s perceptual recall is often linked with substances’ contextual properties.
Notification design is a very good example of this effect. We look at our smartphone’s home screen every day, hardly there is any change going on unless a notification pops up. Whether it’s just a badge or a beep, it draws our attention toward it.
This psychological term demonstrates that people have a tendency to remember the first and last items in a series, while items in the middle often get neglected.
It is considerably better to put the less important items in the middle if you want to design a list. But sometimes it is quite difficult to decide which item is superior to the other, in my case, I usually do some research on the traffics, I always get insights about what the most/least visited contents were and I would know exactly what goes to the middle.
This psychological term shows that people tend to develop a preference for something because they are familiar with them. This social psychology happens to all of us, the more often we see someone in no successive period of time, the more likely we’ll find that person likeable or charming. Unfortunately for the users, that is all the SEO elites need to hear. And that’s why things like web banner ads exist because advertisement agencies believe merely flashing their ads to the users’ faces will leave a memory trace in their brain.
Clever designers have come up with this strategy where they would place the “Next” button on the top right corner of the Onboarding screens, and when the user reaches the actual home screen of the app, there is also a button on the top right corner, it can be the user’s profile icon, setting, notification or just any CTA buttons you want the users to press. This is such a nice little touch (yes, pun intended) but it makes a huge difference in your app’s conversion rate. The users have already experienced this before, it only feels more natural for them to perform it again because of their cognitive fluency.
This article is barely scratching the surface of psychological UX design. Through my UX design researches, I believe that only via observing and understanding my end users’ behaviours and emotions can I truly make a product that is practical. However, we designers also need to be cautious with how we want to influence their emotions. Without appropriate research and careful implementation, the best of our intention could end up with the worst manipulation.
Remember, always be empathic with your users.
I’m Carlos, an IA/UX/UI Designer based in Tokyo. You can also find me on Twitter, Dribbble and my website. Happy design ✍️
7 Principal Psychological Phenomena in UX Design
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