The Psychology Behind Creating A User Centered Design
Contrary to a popular belief, a successful product doesn’t only mean having a great UI and plenty of features. Every aspect of it revolves around its Usability.
A perfect way to enhance Usability is by improving the User Experience which is all about understanding and adjusting according to the psychology of the user.
User Experience initiates and strengthens the bond between a product and its users. By understanding how our designs are perceived, we can make adjustments so that the products we create are more effective in achieving the goals of the user and that’s where User-Centered Design comes into play.
How do you approach Human Centered Design ?
Understanding the psychology of a user plays a big part in delivering a smooth experience. It helps you build a user journey and all the necessary processes around it. The totality of your audience’s experience is profoundly impacted by what you know or don’t know about them.
Think of it like planning a birthday party for your best friend. You know her likings and stuff she doesn’t like so you plan accordingly and when your friend finds out about the surprise then that’s when the real joy comes.
In a similar fashion by understanding how our designs are perceived, we can make adjustments so that the applications or websites we create are more intuitive and user friendly. (Thus making users happy)
There are some basics of psychology that you should know before you start designing user flows.
- What you see isn’t what your brain gets
- People scan screens based on the past expectations and experiences
- People see cues that help them do what they want
What you see isn’t what your brain gets
Vision trumps all the senses. Half of the brain’s resources are dedicated to transform our visuals into something that we recognize. What our eyes physically perceive is only one part of the story. The visuals coming into our brains are worked upon and interpreted. It’s really our brains that are “seeing.”
Your brain creates shortcuts in order to quickly make sense out of the world around you. It uses Rules of Thumb or Past Experiences to make guesses about what you see. Most of the time that works, but sometimes it causes errors. You can influence what people see, or think they see, by the use of shapes and colors.
Take this image for instance
Notice how it draws attention to two different messages, with the words being the same. Do you realize how we can control what the user sees and what he interprets out of it. Now imagine we use this power to make the user perform actions that we want him to do. Magicians take this power to a whole another level to create Illusions. That’s a story for another Blog.
So if on a web page out of all the buttons one looks prominent and filled. The user will click it because in the past, a similar button took the user to the next step.
People scan screens based on the past experience and expectations
What you think people are going to see on your website may not be what they interpret. Where do people look first on a computer screen? Where do they look next? It depends on their background, knowledge, familiarity with what they are looking at and expectations.
People are smart
With an average internet user visiting at most 10 websites in a day, people know where to look for information and what to do.
If they read in a language that moves from left to right, then they tend to look at the screen from left to right. If they read from right to left, it is the opposite.
Observing a general trend, now people don’t start in the topmost corner because they have gotten used to the idea that some things on their computer screens that are less relevant to the task at hand, such as logos, blank space and navigation bars are there. They tend to look at the center of the screen, where the crux of the webpage is, and avoid the edges.
After having a first glance at a screen, people move in their culture’s normal reading pattern (left to right, right to left, top to bottom). If something grabs their attention, for example, a large photo (especially one with someone’s face) or movement (an animated banner or video) somewhere else on the screen, their attention is diverted there. This is where you can reel them in to convey important information.
Organize your website strategically to hook the user
It’s best practice and even logical to put the most important information that you want to convey to the user in the top third of the screen or in the middle. Avoid putting anything important at the edges, because people tend not to look there.
Design web pages so that people can move in their normal reading pattern. Avoid a pattern where people have to bounce back and forth to many parts of the screen to accomplish a task.
People see cues that tell them what to do with an object
You’ve probably had the experience of encountering a door handle that doesn’t work the way it should: the handle looks like you should pull, but in fact you need to push.
Objects can talk
In the real world, objects communicate to you about how you can, and should, interact with them.
For example, by their size and shape, doorknobs invite you to grab and turn them. The handle on a coffee mug tells you to curl a few fingers through it and lift it up. A pair of scissors invites you to put fingers through the circles and move your thumb up and down to open and close. If the item, like the door handle, gives you cues that don’t work, you get annoyed and frustrated. These cues are called affordances.
Word from the wise
Don Norman in his book The Design of Everyday Things referred to the idea of perceived a affordances: if you want people to take action on an object, whether in real life or on a computer screen, you need to make sure that they can easily perceive, figure out, and interpret what the object is and what they can and should do with it.
We all need help
When you try to accomplish a task, such as opening a door to a room or ordering a book on a Web site, you automatically and largely unconsciously, look around you to find objects and tools to help you. If you are the one designing the environment for the task, make sure that the objects in the environment are easy to see, easy to find, and have clear affordances.
Think about affordance cues when you design. By giving people cues about what they can do with a particular object, you make it more likely that they will take that action.
Use shadows to show when an object is chosen or active. Avoid providing incorrect affordance cues.
Rethink hover cues if you’re designing for a device that uses touch rather than a pointing device.
Conclusion
I think no element in your design should add to the complexity of the design which seems impossible but if you start reasoning the complexity of each element that you add to your design. The design will become a lot less complicated.
Yet No Design is perfect. As humans evolves, their psychology advances. We need to keep our designs updated according to the latest usability trends. Good Luck with that ;)
Thank you! ❤️
