The psychology laws of UX - Part 1
Before starting to talk about the laws, I will summarize what UX is and its importance, in order to show what it has to do with psychology.
First, UX means User Experience, which means, the experience of the person using something. Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity produced by these conscious processes, that is, experience is any knowledge obtained through the senses. Therefore, UX is everything that involves the way any user interacts with the world around them.
UX matters because it puts the user's perspective at the heart of any flow of experience. The better the experience - and we also include the emotions of these moments here - the greater the customer satisfaction should be and the more likely their loyalty will be, in other words, user experience encompasses all user interactions with a brand or product. But to deliver a good experience, you need to understand the user to understand their needs. And that's where psychology comes in!
Psychology is, according to the dictionary, the science that deals with mental states and processes, human behavior, and interactions with a physical and social environment. With this, we can already see that the subjects addressed by psychology are closely related to UX concepts.
Thus, there are several laws and theories that have been developed, here in this article I brought only 5:
1- Miller's Law
A normal person can only keep 7 +/- items in his temporary memory.
This can be considered the most important law, but also the one that is most forgotten.
In 1956, George Miller claimed that the period of immediate memory and absolute judgment were both limited to about 7 pieces of information. The more pieces of information you add to an “interface”, the harder it becomes to “work” using the available information. This is especially critical for novice users because they haven't had the necessary “practice” to code the interface in long-term memory or for the behavior to become habitual. She also highlights the importance of foresight and proper planning in the design process, because as more features are added to a product, the interface must be able to accommodate these new features without breaking the built visual base. Rebuilding a foundation takes a lot of time and resources.
Another perceptual phenomenon observed in relation to Miller's Law is known as the primacy and recency effect. These terms are used respectively to describe how we remember perceived items at the beginning and end of an experience, rather than those in the middle (which kicks off another law: the serial position effect).
In other words, people can't keep a lot of information in their short-term memory, approximately 7 blocks of information, and these disappear from their brain in about 20 seconds.
A simple example is formatting large numbers like phone or zip codes. With all the numbers together, the reading becomes confusing. Already if we separate into blocks, our experience will be better.
It can be applied at any time, as long as it involves a task. By reducing the number of elements by grouping them, the brain will be able to remember and perform more easily. This way, you guarantee that the user will spend his cognitive capacity, memory, and attention on the really important elements of your interface. Therefore, in your interface, avoid:
2- Fitts Law
It is faster to click on larger targets that are closer to you than small targets farther away from you.
In 1954, psychologist Paul Fitts showed that the time needed for us to move towards a target depends on the distance we are from it, it is also inversely related to its size. By this law, fast movements and small targets result in a high error rate, due to the speed-accuracy trade-off. While there are multiple variants of Fitts' Law, they all encompass this approach.
Fitts' law, in its simplest form, is almost intuitive. The larger an object and the closest to us, the easier it will be to move it. It is related to the time the user takes to understand the interface and act.
Therefore, to better utilize the concept of this UX Law, consider:
Adapting your interface to Fitts' Law is important to not leave the user with the impression that your product is complicated to use.
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3- Hick's Law
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number of decisions that need to be made and their complexities.
Hick's Law (or Hick-Hyman's Law) comes from a team of psychologists, William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman. In 1952, they set out to examine the relationship between the number of stimuli and an individual's reaction time to any given stimulus. Basically, it describes the time it takes a person to make a decision based on the number of possible options to be chosen. That is, the greater the number of alternatives, the greater the time for the person to make a decision.
Users bombarded with choices need time to interpret and decide, giving them work they don't want. This is linked to the capacity for cognitive information in choice reaction experiments and the limited ability to process information.
Hick's law is sometimes cited to justify decisions regarding decision architecture. So, by removing the non-essential option, we reduce the number of unnecessary decisions that need to be made. This speeds up user interactions, reducing the time it takes to get those conversions. This reduces the chance that users will get frustrated, give up and leave.
4 - Law of Jacob
Users spend most of their time on other sites and this means they prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
Jakob's law was coined by Jakob Nielsen, a User Advocate, who championed the 'usability reduction engineering' movement for quick and inexpensive improvements to user interfaces and invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation.
Under its law, Nielsen declares that: the user spends more time on other websites than on yours. In this sense, the user has an expectation and is used to interacting with interfaces similar to his own. Therefore, your product must meet this expectation, as the user creates a common sense expectation that needs to be met otherwise, he will have a bad experience.
A good example is the convention of the colors red, yellow, and green, used in traffic lights. We have it in our heads that red is stop or something negative. And green is followed or something positive. If you switch these meanings around, you could end up creating an accident.
We often fall into the tendency of wanting to do something different and innovative, to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. Although it is interesting to differentiate yourself, it is important not to be too disruptive to the point of causing confusion for the user.
Therefore, when developing an interface, it should be taken into account that the user is used to interacting with several similar interfaces. Therefore, it is important to maintain certain standards so as not to confuse the user.
Furthermore, it is possible to innovate and create better experiences by leveraging existing mental models, in which the user can focus on their task instead of learning new models.
5 - Postel's Law or Law of Robustness
The user must be free to enter data in the way that is most convenient for him. Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send.
Postel's Law, also known as the Principle of Robustness, was formulated by Jon Postel, one of the pioneers of the Internet. The Act is a software design guideline, specifically with regard to TCP and networking.
The concept behind this law is: "Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive", that is, "accept, from the user, any form of input. But be precise when sending him feedback”. Be empathetic, flexible, and tolerant of any number of actions the user might take. This means accepting variable input from users, translating the input to meet requirements, setting thresholds for the input, and providing clear feedback to the user.
In practice, if there is an error filling out the form, it is important for the UX to say where the error is, instead of simply sending a message saying that there is an error in filling it out, it is essential to indicate which fields need to be changed and how correct. The application of Postel's Law is directly linked to the good or bad user experience with its interface.
Some people think that design is purely an artistic job where the designer creates beautiful, elegant designs. However, the ability to design an aesthetically pleasing interface is not going to guarantee its success. What makes or breaks the design is how the user thinks and perceives it through each step of the experience. A successful designer can not only create aesthetically pleasing designs, but they also understand the psychology behind the user that makes or breaks the user experience.
Understanding the psychology behind the users allows the designer to create an intuitive, streamlined experience where the user finds heightened usability, efficiency, and pleasure when interacting with a product. If the designer focuses solely on making things “pretty” and neglects the psychology portion, more than likely, their product will fail. Luckily for designers, there are numerous design psychology principles available to help guide our decisions. Once we understand the psychology of design, we are empowered to create beautiful experiences that adhere to the psychology behind the user’s experience.
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