UX design psychology #1: making products that hook your user’s brain
Why do drivers lower their radios when searching for an address if all they need is a healthy pair of eyes?
This strategy seems nonsensical at first, but only when not under the light of cognitive psychology: the science investigating how humans process sensory stimuli to respond and generate knowledge out of it.
Understanding cognition is a must for you, UX designer, wanting to design products your users simply won’t be able to get out of – and here’s an easy way to do so:
1] Cognitive Attention in UX Design
Why do you close your eyes when trying to remember stuff?
Attention is about selecting sensory stimuli (visual, sound, smell, etc.) while ignoring other stimuli — just like that apparent nonsense in the image above.
We are talking about our most limited resource; so limited even gold fish has higher attention span than we do, so ux designers should care to deliver just the right amount of information a user needs.
The attentional process is divided into two processes:
Top-down Attention: when you are actively looking for something.
A driver lowering the radio is simply filtering out irrelevant stimuli, such as music, in order to focus on the visual stimulus he needs at the moment.
From this you conclude that users are trying to satisfy specific needs most of the time, so it’s your duty to offer them exactly what they need without exhausting their attentional resources. Here are some examples:
- Using information architecture (hint:MoSCoW Method) so your products will deliver exactly what the user needs.
- Breaking your content into small chunks so users won’t suffer of cognitive overload — like when you are faced with a huge wall of text instead of paragraphs, for instance.
- Getting rid of the clutter, like random animations, loud background music, and anything that sips your users’ cognitive resources.
Pro tip on attention: ask yourself what do your users need and if that feature X helps them achieve it. If not, you should probably cut it.
CLICK HERE → UX Design Collective TO READ THE FULL STORY