It is a science about why a particular design can attract your attention and attract your blood. The human brain is lazy, biased, and prone to shortcuts. The user's experiential research on human cognition may be confused, unscientific, and full of false assumptions-maybe this is the fault of the lazy brain. Cognition is very complex, …
It is a science about why a particular design can attract your attention and attract your blood.
The human brain is lazy, biased, and prone to shortcuts.
The user’s experiential research on human cognition may be confused, unscientific, and full of false assumptions-maybe this is the fault of the lazy brain.
Cognition is very complex, and many factors affect intestinal responses or immediate impressions. When you ask someone, “Why are you doing this?””It is very likely that they will not be able to answer, or you will misunderstand their answer.
Enter neuroscience.
Design Psychology and Neuroscience of UX
Although research methods such as observation and interviews usually require user experience researchers and participants to make guesses, modern technologies such as eye tracking enable researchers to study almost imperceptible reactions and preferences.
For products with a lot of traffic, seemingly tiny details (such as the width of the button or the color contrast of the text) can make a difference of millions of dollars. Therefore, technology giants like Facebook and Google began to adopt neuroscience-based technologies to study how people use their products.
Let’s start by introducing reactive ”quick thinking” and provide designers with some tips to help them use the power of neuroscience to create a great user experience.
Design psychology: think fast, think slowly
It is no secret that many factors that drive human behavior are subconscious. Within a few milliseconds after a person encounters a new application or website, millions of neurons are stimulated and the brain makes hundreds of subconscious decisions.
Am I in the ”right” place? Should I trust this website?
YouTube UX researcher Javier*Vargas-Avila (Javier Vargas-Avila) determined in a 2012 study that people will have an aesthetic response to Web pages within the first 17 to 50 milliseconds after exposure.
To understand this, it takes 300-400 milliseconds to blink. Your product may receive its trial, judgment and judgment in less than the blink of an eye.
These impressions may not appear, but they will affect behavior. For example, if a site loads slowly and the brain reads the first item loaded as ”off topic”, the user can leave immediately without having to wait for the site to load.
Web UX user testing
Companies like Facebook invest a lot of resources to study the loading order of elements. If someone logs in to Facebook but does not see any notification badge, they may leave immediately. If badges load first, they may wait while loading news feeds with a lot of content.
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” divides human thought and decision-making into two systems to help illustrate this difference.
System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotype, subconscious.
The thinking of System 1 is reactive-responsible for complex but instinctive cognition, such as determining the distance between objects or determining emotional responses.The lazy brain usually defaults to system 1 thinking.
System 2: Slow, hard work, logic, calculation, conscious, infrequent.
System 2 thinking is analytical and is suitable for more complex scenarios, such as determining appropriate social behavior or comparing two products with different prices and characteristics.
Thinking fast and slow in design Psychology
Since the brain does not want to reprocess information or make novel decisions every time it encounters a new situation, many human decisions belong to system 1 or ”quick thinking.”
When making decisions quickly, the brain over-relies on patterns or thinking models-familiar patterns of information and interaction.When participating in the thinking of System 1, System 2 will never take effect.People may not know the decision-making shorthand of their brains, but it can seriously affect their behavior and cognition of the product.
Design psychology
Although it only accounts for 2% of the mass of the human brain, the human brain consumes 25% of the body’s oxygen.Brain laziness is a survival mechanism-pattern recognition and shortcuts mean that it takes less energy to consciously deal with this situation.The brain recognizes things, marks them, and then ignores them until they are related again.
The brain’s preference for patterns and lazy decision-making may make survival easier, but it makes UX design more difficult.How do you learn things that your research subject can’t even perceive?
A few neuroscience technologies have recently entered UX research, helping researchers clarify things that stimulate ”quick thinking”.
Attention and perception can be studied with eye-tracking cameras.Emotional response and arousal can be determined by skin sensors or facial analysis.The electrical response in the brain can be measured by EEG.
Brainwave analysis test design psychology
Electroencephalography (EEG) is a test that detects electrical activity in the brain.
For designers, it seems an impossible task to capture someone’s interest and convey important information in less than the blink of an eye.Fortunately, just as neuroscience can help us diagnose problems, it can also reveal general solutions and best practices.
These are some general lessons learned from neuroscience user experience research, and designers can use these lessons when designing digital products.
Design psychology Skill 1: Easy to identify
Everyone will have expectations for their appearance after entering the website or application. Approaching expectations can help designers benefit from instant subconscious decisions.
The person who opened your application or website wants to know a) Is it exactly what I am looking for? b) Is this high quality? Keeping the design simple and keeping the brand, services and products in a leading and central position helps people position themselves.
Putting certain information first and centered means preventing other information from being squeezed out. Organizing the design is as important as rearranging the components.
You will notice that cross-technology companies are gradually moving to simpler and less crowded interfaces. These simple designs are better than more complex designs in terms of task completion, and visual clarity can affect online and offline purchase decisions.
Science has proved that visually concise design works better. The lazy brain can immediately grasp the purpose of the website and understand the measures to be taken.
Minimalist design and noisy ui design, better network user experience design psychology
Noise and calm. Google has optimized its website to attract users to its logo and encourage interaction with the search box. From 65.5% in 2016 to 80.5% in 2017％
Design psychology Skill 2: Point out what is about to happen
Initiating or preparing some upcoming information or interaction for someone can improve the user’s ability to understand and react to new information.You can make someone expect things like UI elements, certain interactions, or timing in the process.
For example, Yelp uses additional screens to warn users that they are leaving Yelp to access third-party sites.The additional context helps users signal that they expect to obtain a new design and information architecture.
Yelp startup example in Design Psychology
Startup is a double-edged sword.The message you are not trying to convey will still affect decision-making.For example, if your photography company only features baby pictures, then a person may mistakenly think that you only serve baby customers.
Design Psychology Tip 3: Organize for lazy Readers
Eye tracking research can follow people’s gaze when products interact with products.They can generate heat maps to show the length of time spent on a part of the screen, or to show how the eyes jump on the page.
We know that in various industries and application types, the brain usually scans information in F mode (or E mode).The person looks at the information at the top, looks to the right, and then scans the page down for relevant information or icons.
Breaking the F mode (for example, placing important information in the lower right corner) will make it more difficult to find.
Research on Eye Tracking in Design Psychology
The eye tracking heat map shows the length of time participants focus on each part of the page. Pay attention to the F mode to attract attention, when the person moves down the page, the attention will decrease.
Tame your words
According to Nielsen Norman’s study of 45,237 page views, people only read 20% of the text on the page. To make matters worse, on websites with more content, people only spend about 4 seconds of extra time for every 100 words they add.
