Psychology of User Experience

• People Don’t Want to Work: they will do the least amount of work possible to get a task done;
• People Have Limitations: they can only look at so much information or read so much text on a screen without losing interest;
• People Make Mistakes: Assume people will make mistakes. Anticipate what they will be and try to prevent them;
• Human Memory Is Complicated: People reconstruct memories, which means they are always changing;
• People are Social: they will always try to use technology to be social. This has been true for thousands of years;
• Attention: Grabbing and holding onto attention, and not distracting someone when they are paying attention to something, are key concerns;
• People Crave Information: Learning is dopaminergic—we can’t help but want more information;
• Unconscious Processing: Most mental processing occurs unconsciously;
• People Create Mental Models: People always have a mental model in place about a certain object or task (paying my bills, reading a book, using a remote control);
• Using Visual Systems can help people.

Susan Weinschenk

Hierarchy of needs

In his 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” American psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed the idea of a psychological hierarchy of needs in human beings. This hierarchy of need principles specifies that a design must serve the low-level needs (i.e., it must function), before the higher level needs, such as desirability, can begin to be addressed.

• Physiological needs are the requirements for human survival. They include breathing, food, water, shelter, sex, clothing, sleep and comfort.
• Safety needs can be seen as a way to meet tomorrow’s physiological needs. They include personal and financial security, health, order, law and protection from elements.
• Love and belonging needs are about social interactions. We don’t want to go through life alone. Social needs include friendship, love, intimacy, family, community, belonging and relationships.
• Esteem needs include self-esteem as well as recognition from others. Esteem can come in the form of achievement, status, prestige, recognition, mastery, independence and responsibility.
• Self-actualization needs relate to becoming more than what we are, and they can come from peace, knowledge, self-fulfillment, realization of personal potential, personal growth and peak experiences.

Hierearchy of User Experience

• Functionality needs focus on meeting the most basic design requirements. For example, NFC in a customer’s mobile device must provide the capability to make a connection with another NFC object.
• Usability needs have to do with how easy and forgiving a design is to use. For example, configuring your mobile payment preferences to facilitate types of payments and choice of merchants, the interface should be tolerant of errors and mistakes.
• Reliability needs are about establishing stable and consistent performance. For example, if lack of interoperability between mobile payment partners results in a service that behaves erratically or is subject to frequent failure, reliability needs will not be satisfied.
• Confidence needs address security, customer support, contact methods, policies, and giving users control. For example, a mobile payment service must ensure privacy and security of customer’s personal and financial information. A breach in this will result in lack of trust and result in non-adoption.
• Desirability needs focus on personalization, community, flexibility, and customization. For example, if a mobile payment service allows customers to personalize and control their payment experience, and creates a seamless experience across product, services, and channels, desirability needs will be satisfied.

From: Perry Chan and Steven Bradley

Cognitive styles

“Cognitive styles: the stable attitudes, preferences, and habitual strategies that determine how an individual processes information.”

TYLER TATE: COGNITIVE STYLES: GET INSIDE THE USER’S HEAD

Peripheral vision crucial for sense-making

‘Larson and Loschky found that if the central part of the photo was missing, people
could still identify what they were looking at. But when the peripheral part of the image
was missing, then they couldn’t say whether the scene was a living room or a kitchen.
They tried obscuring different amounts of the photo. They concluded that central vision
is the most critical for specific object recognition, but peripheral vision is used for getting
the gist of a scene.’

From ’100 Things Every Designer Should Know About People’ by Susan Weinschenk

Why UX matters for people

Probably one of the best articles explaining why UX matters for people. I added some notes (marked with //). The actual article gives (a bit) more detail about how that translates to UX practice.

1. People Don’t Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To //Reduce the amount/complexity of information to digest/process
2. People Have Limitations //See 1. People are not only lazy (see above), they have natural constraints (time, intellect, capabilities, background etc.). Assume users as human beings, not machines.
3. People Make Mistakes // Provide alternatives/exits/Undos
4. Human Memory Is Complicated // See 2 (cognitive limitations). Don’t let people remember things, memory becomes messy very quickly.
5. People are Social // Not only relevant for social Web. Make use of it!
6. Attention // Yes, attention IS the currency of the Web and there are many ways to let people pay…
7. People Crave Information // Information seeking behaviour is peseudo-natural. Interesting point.
8. Unconscious Processing // Neuroscience and UX is Susan’s actual business (expertise, book, etc) … not really convinced of the value of neuro-scientific UX, but interesting nevertheless.
9. People Create Mental Models // There’s always a pre-conception of things in people’s mind. Deal with it …
10. Visual System // Visual hierarchy and insights from Gestalt psychology. An evergreen and rightly so.

Susan Weinschenk: The Psychologist’s View of UX Design

Knowledge at basic level

“Our knowledge at the basic level is mainly organized around part-whole divisions. The reason is that the way an object is divided into parts determines many things.

1. First, parts are usually correlated with functions, and hence our knowledge about functions is usually associated with knowledge about parts.
2. Second, parts determine shape, and hence the way that an object will be perceived and imaged.
3. Third, we usually interact with things via their parts, and hence part-whole divisions play a major role in determining what motor programs we can use to interact with an object. Thus, a handle is not just long and thin, but it can be grasped by the human hand.”

Lakoff (1987) p.47

Gestalt (‘What is it?’) and affordance (‘What can I do with it?): core processes in screen communication

Basic level categories (Rosch)

Just as Hunn (1975) argued that the basic level for animal categories is the only level at which categorization is determined by overall gestalt perception (without distinctive feature analysis), so Rosch and others (1976) have found that the basic level is:

• The highest level at which category members have similarly perceived overall shapes.
• The highest level at which a single mental image can reflect the entire category.
• The highest level at which a person uses similar motor actions for interacting with category members.
• The level at which subjects are fastest at identifying category members.
• The level with the most commonly used labels for category members.
• The first level named and understood by children.
• The first level to enter the lexicon of a language.
• The level with the shortest primary lexemes.
• The level at which terms are used in neutral contexts. For example, There’s a dog on the porch can be used in a neutral context, whereas special contexts are needed for There’s a mammal on the porch or There’s a wire-haired terrier on the porch. (See Cruse 1977.)
• The level at which most of our knowledge is organized.

Thus basic-level categories are basic in four respects:

• Perception: Overall perceived shape; single mental image; fast identicfication.
• Function: General motor program.
• Communication: Shortest, most commonly used and contextually neutral words, first learned by children and first to enter the lexicon.
• Knowledge Organization: Most attributes of category members are stored at this level.

Lakoff (1987), p.46-7

Visually structured v plain language information

My comment in response to Jeff Johnson’s book/article: Designing with the Mind in Mind

I do agree that visual structure is key to clean and scannable interfaces but this insight is often being challenged in usability test sessions. Presenting information in a purely structurded way implies some level of abstraction that many users (particularly casual ones) cannot follow easily as it makes them ‘think’. And this is what UX designers want to avoid by all means .

People often prefer plain language information, phrased in full sentences. My guess: it’s because a sentence is more explicit and is better suited to mimic a conversation (which successful HCI is all about).

This does not hold true for any site and any type of information and it doesn’t undermine the good principles that you’ve outlined here. But it shows that minds work differently and many people want to be addressed in a more direct (as you call it) prose style.

David Ellis: Behavioural model of information seeking

Six primary behaviour patterns in information seeking:

1. Starting: identifying relevant sources of interest
2. Chaining: following and connecting new leads in an initial source
3. Browsing: scanning content of identified sourcves for subject affinity
4. Differentiating: filtering and assessing sources fior usefulness
5. Monitoring: keeping abreasts of developments in a given subject area
6. Extracting: systematically working through a given source for material of interest

David Ellis, cited in Kalbach (2007, p.26)

Repertory Grid

“The Repertory Grid method has a number of benefits for user experience research and design evaluation. Repertory Grid studies

• quickly generate a large number of attributes, or constructs, that are useful in comparing different examples
• elicit differentiating attributes in the participants’ vocabulary rather than the researcher’s vocabulary
• identify constructs that are important to the participants rather than the researcher
• provide a structured process for eliciting feedback that is easy for participants to understand”

“The Repertory Grid is a data extraction and analysis technique that has as its basis the Personal Construct Theory, which George Kelly developed in the 1950s. The central theme of the Personal Construct Theory is that people organize their experiences with the world into conceptual classifications that we can differentiate and describe using attributes of those classifications called constructs. Often, these constructs manifest themselves as polar opposites on a scale, so we can easily classify the elements of our world. For example, based on our experiences with people, we know that some are shy and others are outgoing. When we meet new people, we may consciously or subconsciously categorize them according to that construct.

An important element of the Personal Construct Theory is that each individual has his or her own unique set of constructs that are important to that person. Taking my example further, whether a new person is shy or outgoing might not be important to you in your categorization scheme, but it might be very important to someone else. George Kelly hypothesized that people are constantly challenging and growing their construct systems, but those systems remain unique to the individual, and the sum of each person’s experiences shapes them. In addition, the differences in people’s construct systems contribute to our different perceptions of the world and our behavior in it.”

From Michael Hawley: The Repertory Grid: Eliciting User Experience Comparisons in the Customer’s Voice