Cognitive Psychology in UX Design

Welcome to this talk. So today's topic would be cognitive psychology and how to leverage it to understand our behaviors both as users and as designers and ultimately use this knowledge in order to improve our approach to UX design. Just a few words about myself my name is Emilia Ciardi. and I am a UX and product manager working currently in IGT, which is an office in Fisbury Square and a studio in Manchester here in London as well. In case you want to reach out, these are just my contacts. To get started with the topic of cognition, let's consider for a moment the terrific amount of work that our brain gets done in every single instant. It is capable of processing a... a dizzying amount of signals and perceptions all in one go. So we are constantly making decisions, even in a way that's almost semi-automatic in reality. For example, in this moment, we are deciding where to look at, if and how to adjust our position. At the same time, we listen to the noises in the environment we are in. We also listen to these words that someone is speaking. So we are hearing them. We are... understanding their meaning, we are waking them. And while also we try to take in the person who's talking, like who's she, her gestures, her attitude. So we are doing a lot just in every single instant and we don't even realize that we are doing it. Maybe in the meantime, we also take a quick look at the smartphone because why not? We can, right? So it's a really complex job that our brain does while we don't even realize that all these things are going on. How does this happen? So, towards the end of the 19th century, this guy with the nice beard, the American psychologist and philosopher William James, well, he provided the first answer to this question. So, he formulated a theory in which our mental processes are based on two kind of separate types of thinking. So, the associate thinking that is based on associative memory of past experiences, which is fast, and then a second type of thinking that is a little bit more, let's say, slower and more considerate when things require a deeper analysis because it's a novel situation, it's a new problem for us. So this new kind of thinking became known as the dual process theory. Later, with the work of Kahneman, psychologist and economist, the theory of the dual process was further developed and he investigating many aspects of human decision-making processes, especially because he was an economist, so it was a really important topic for him to understand, so much so that in 2003 he was awarded with the Nobel Prize for Economics. So his dual process model tells us that there are two separate agents or systems in the mind, each with its own functions, limitations and capabilities. System 1, also called intuition, is fast and it's always at work. It kicks in automatically and unconsciously. It's also hot in the sense that it is affected by emotions and makes use, as we shall see in a moment, of heuristics, which exposes it to the possibility of also making mistakes in the end. On the other hand, System 2, reflection, is slower and only causes the person to think differently. comes into play if you have to make more conscious and deliberate choices with a cool head so to speak. It has an analytical approach to decisions and in this sense it is a little bit more reliable. Precisely because of its extreme speed and efficiency intuition beats reasoning in the most in the vast majority of cases. System 1 routinely proposes conclusions and solutions that System 2 merely approves, intervening more actively only if there's something that's not exactly clear, so there is the need to some form of deeper investigation. This means that System 1 or intuition is actually responsible for a large part of our behaviors. And this is why it is essential to understand how it works. Well, System 1, as I was already saying, uses heuristics to make its decisions. That is, decision-making methods that are kind of shortcuts to make efficiency the real strong suit, in the end. So technically, a heuristic is a resolution method that does not guarantee an optimal solution, but focuses on obtaining an acceptable one sufficient to achieve an immediate purpose. Heuristic methods are also used in software to approach problems that are too onerous to compute. So you might be familiar with this depending on how many designers are here actually. Oh wow, cool! How many front-end developers? Okay, nice. A mix. So I can imagine that you're all familiar with heuristics, but this is... the method that our System 1 uses and it keeps us alive because the speed that only heuristics can guarantee to System 1 are actually what allows us to process the complexity of the world that surrounds us. And just to basically react at the external stimuli at a speed that saves our lives as human beings, let's say, in a wild environment. And we have evolved this system just for that. So, without heuristics we would not be able to survive in the end. But, due to their nature, heuristics have blind spots. And so they introduce some form of systematic error in our decision patterns. It's like they introduce a little bit of irrationality in us that emerges as a side effect of this efficiency that we need to achieve with the heuristic. And these systematic errors are called cognitive biases. From this perspective, I mean, we are all equals, we are all on the same boat, we all are subject to biases and none of us is immune. So this is no good news in the end, right? And there's worse. I mean, the first of the biases we need to be aware of is precisely the blind area bias. So this means that we tend to just ignore that we are victims of our own biases. We only can see them clearly in the others that surround us. So it's very like the biblical quote that we don't see the log in our eyes, but we are very ready to see the specks in others'eyes, let's say. So being aware of this at least can allow us to self-correct a little, right? and mitigate the tendency that we have. Okay, but now that we are aware that we as humans are subject to biases, let's see how this can help us to do a better job as designers by reviewing some heuristics and biases that are particularly interesting for their implications on UX. Of course, even as front-end developers or developers or users, you will also be able to kind of exploit these biases a little bit. So the first heuristic that all of us human beings use is the heuristical fluency. Ideas, objects and products that require less mental effort, less strain, are perceived as of greater value in the context of the aspect we are trying to evaluate. So I know this is a little bit convoluted, let me explain it in a different way. In practice, If something is simple, clear, self-evident, we use this as a proxy to estimate the value of the object from another perspective. For example, the perspective of safety, reliability, effectiveness, credibility. So if an idea or a product is clearly presented, more likely it will be highly valued as safe, reliable and effective. or effective. I mean, depending on what the user is trying to kind of gauge of the product or of the idea, he will use fluency, so the absence of strain, as a proxy for whatever he's trying to look for, regardless of the real characteristics of the object. I mean, if a website is clear, I can imagine that it is more reliable, but that is not true. Not necessarily, maybe it's totally unreliable. But I will have that perception. So this mechanism is so powerful that it can distort or skew our sense of truth, particularly when simple things are repeated until they become familiar. And this is the very effect that makes fake news so effective. It's called also the illusory truth effect. Something is simple, something I hear it over and over again repeated, I think it's true. It's also... behind urban legends and stuff like that, actually. It's the very same bias. So ideas, objects and products that will require low process fluency will be perceived as more valuable and also truer. So what is really interesting for us is to use, to exploit this thing a little bit in order to become better designer, right? So it follows that it is imperative for us to create a user experience that minimizes the cognitive load of our users. Not just so that the product can become user-friendly or just usable, but rather because this will ensure that our product is perceived as higher in value, whatever the characteristic the user is looking for. Why? Because cognitive fluency will be used as a proxy. So how do we do that? Well, the good news is that we are already applying a lot of, you know, good sound, you know, tools. Because when we study design, we are already studying the tools of Gestalt psychology. That was a current in Germany at the start of the 20th century that actually studied the fundamental principles of visual perception. Design principles already incorporate a lot of good stuff that automatically allows us to create very strong visual hierarchies that are very clear and that can help people actually decode very easily what's happening on a page, what's happening on a screen, right? So what are these tools? These tools are simply size, color, contrast, negative space, proximity, repetition, and then the characteristic of texture and styling. We also have to pay very special attention to typography hierarchy so that the structure of the page and the content is really really clear just at a glance. So in the end by carefully using these tools we can have a strong visual hierarchy that is clearly understandable just by scanning the page or screen at a glance. This will reduce the cognitive load and will help our product to you know have that aura right? Another important tool to place the important elements in our visual hierarchy are the page scan patterns, the typical way that our eye traverses web pages for example. Different studies including the ones by Nielsen Norman Group have revealed that there are several popular scanning patterns among which the F and the Z shaped patterns are the most common. The Z pattern is especially relevant for pages which have low density of content. Imagine a home page or a landing page, something like that. So the pattern follows a Z shape. We first look at the top left and then we scan through the right, then our eye moves diagonally down and then we proceed to the right. The F pattern on the other hand is used when the content is very dense. So for example, imagine a Google search or maybe a listing of products in an e-commerce. So the pattern of the eye that in that case we use is we look at the top left and then we start scanning vertically and when we find something, a clue that something interests us, we proceed to the right. So if we know how the eye moves through the pages, then we are also able to understand which kind of layout is more appropriate to what we are trying to achieve. And we can also place the important elements in those spots where we know that the eye will go. Another fundamental guideline for minimizing cognitive load is the adoption of solutions that are familiar. for our users. So design patterns that are already established, of course. As design patterns evolve over time, we need to keep learning and become keen observers of the evolution of modern interaction patterns to make sure that our design is always relevant and fresh. Sites like the one I'm showing here with the URL actually can be useful to keep up to date, especially because mobile patterns are particularly dynamic and evolving. We also have to pay attention to the coherence and consistency of our user interfaces in order to maximize usability and clarity. And adopting a design system can certainly help to guarantee the coherent development of our user experiences, especially when we are working on complex and possibly multi-channel products, maybe an ecosystem of multiple products. So if we want to keep consistent everything, adopting a design system is a very good idea. And finally, let's try to internalize the concept of less is more, right? Because we should avoid the longer copy in our UX, possibly, and also avoid unnecessary elements and choices. Anything that is not functional to help the user to accomplish the task that he's actually trying to do. with the help of our product is not simply an extra thing, like something extra, okay, it's more, it's good. No, because the accumulation of these extra things, okay, adding stuff that it's not really super important, not super relevant, actually accumulates and create that strain. So it keeps us from reducing the cognitive load because the user, even if he's not interested in those elements, still will have to spend some... brain power in order to understand what they are and why they are placed there. So it's adding to the cognitive load. So in the end, instead, we should consider adding some form of personalization and anticipatory design, because everything that we can do to minimize the strain and help the user to reach faster his goal, everything in that direction is really, really important. And in fact, here I'm showing Netflix because you know that There is the paradox of choice. When you have so much choices, you have a high strain. And that sometimes basically paralyzes us and prevents us from doing any choice. So how big, big companies like Netflix or Amazon are solving this problem? Because they certainly have a lot of choices and options to offer us, right? Their catalogs are huge. So they are using anticipatory design and personalization. They try to provide us categories and to put things in front of us, anticipating our desires because they can study our behaviors. So they already know what we like in a way. They can check our history. They can use machine learning and such techniques in order to anticipate our needs. And this is exactly what we should look for in order to provide that complexity without overwhelming the user. So let's now see another bias that affects our hard-working system one. So the usability aesthetic effect that is a beautiful, elegant design is automatically perceived as more usable. So this is something subtle and different from what we were looking at before. If something is beautiful, it's perceived as usable. So this perception distorts also all subsequent user interactions with the product and it's typically resistant to change. It's resistant to change, that's crazy, right? In other words, the first impression influences the long-term perception of quality and usability. This effect is well documented both for products, brands and for human beings. So it really looks like the first impression is key. Furthermore, a positive reaction to aesthetic values of a design evokes feelings of affection and loyalty. iPhone users, anyone? Of course. So, and the converse is also true. So if something is aesthetically poor, we have a very low tolerance towards any defect. Okay. and this is also very very important to keep in mind, in extreme cases it can lead to just rejection of the product for no good reason because maybe the product is perfect from any other point of view but it's just that we don't like it aesthetically and we reject it. This was the case that we can have here like side by side the great success of the Fiat 500 A car whose design has become iconic, even though it was small and really not really practical, but I mean in the original version, compared to the market failure of the Fiat Duna, I can easily bet you have never heard of it. Yes, even in Italy we even have seen it on the roads and you can easily see why, come on. So we talk about a halo effect, For the positive case, that is when beauty generates a magical aura around the product and horn effects for the opposite. Unfortunately, this is also the same bias, the same bias that leads us to think that the ugly guy is the bad guy. Yeah. So what does all this tell us? It seems trivial to say that we must take care of the aesthetic side of our products, right? In order to be able to leverage positive acceptance and create that halo effect, that emotional bond with our users. On the other hand, we must also be aware that an aesthetically winning design makes users more tolerant to minor usability defects. For example, the tolerance to minor usability defects of, let's say, iPhone users is pretty high. In fact, on the iPhone, the cut and paste functionality arrived late, let's say, compared to the Android phones, for example. But this did not affect the loyalty of iPhone users. They were not bothered. So, me included, of course. So if we want to conduct the tests with users on our products and our focus is on usability, maybe it's counterintuitive, but we should consider tuning down the aesthetics value of what we are using to test because people can get just too enamored of the aesthetic qualities of what we show. and just be more tolerant to the defects so we won't be able to spot them while we are doing the testing. So this is like good to know, right? In order to to prepare for your user experience research activities. So let's talk a little bit about priming. This is an effect that also has profound impact on UX and design. We can describe it by saying that the exposure to a stimulus influences the behavior of users. in subsequent interactions, even if the activities have no relation whatsoever to the original stimulus. And this is the tricky part, right? Here the example is the red interrogation room. What does that to do with the interrogation? Apparently nothing. But the interviewee in the room feels so overwhelmed by the aggressive caller that his mind is kind of predisposed to yield. to surrender. So the stimulus doesn't have anything to do with the matter at hand, but still it has this influence that's very subtle. And actually priming shapes our behaviors and reactions to the environment and is often an effective shortcut that allows us to take quick decisions. If we feel a bad vibe in the room, something primed us. And maybe we will go away, we will find an excuse and go away. This saved our lives, I mean the lives of our ancestors a lot of times. It is a surviving mechanism again, this heuristic, but it is a little bit dangerous if we are not aware of it in modern times and in fact it is an efficient persuasion tool, priming, when used in a certain way and is employed extensively in marketing and advertising. to no surprise. So priming is the reason why colors are so important in the design. Whether we use them knowingly or not, they have a profound impact on users. Each color has a range of suggestions which, if used correctly, are very powerful to establish an emotional relationship with users and to communicate them the values of our product and of our brand. So the images we use also have a very strong priming value. Used in the right way, again, they act as symbols capable of evoking concepts and memories beyond what they represent, let's say, literally. For example, if on a travel site I use the image of a beautiful shell, it's just a shell, but I will be evoking all the memories of the people about their journeys to... a beautiful beach or maybe the dream travel that they want to do to the Bahamas or something like that. So it is evoking something else. Here we can see an interesting example in which the image has been built as a metaphor for a message to basically communicate to potential customers that this guy, this digital agency, he's able to build products as elegant and agile as a colibri. What a beautiful metaphor, very effective. Fonts also transfer to observe a range of associations and emotions, and we need to become versed at using them in our design to establish the correct priming. The suggestions they communicate are particularly important in logo design for brands and products. In general, we are starting to understand that due to the priming effects, all the visual elements of our design image, fonts, colors, everything, even sounds actually, although they are not really the subject, but even sounds, implicitly contribute to making the user form a mental image of our brand or of our product. Which brings us to another essential point. It is important that this mental image that we are building with priming is consistent with the product and with the expectations around it. If this mental image is dissonant with users'expectations, they will feel very frustrated and may come to perceive the product as not credible. How would you react, for example, to a wedding planner website that uses acid green in its color palette? Can you imagine that? I mean, it's just not what I am expecting. And I will go away because it's crazy. Come on, is it green? So, crazy idea. We speak of prototypicality. Yes, it's a difficult word for me. To indicate this adherence to what we could call a category model. And this is why it's very important to do competitor analysis and market research. So if we are trying to build any type of website for a specific business, We should first study the market and the competitors to understand what is the expected visual imagery, all those clues about color, about language, about visual imagery, that will put our design on the right track, to use the right priming. And another important element is to avoid accidental priming that works against our product. In this example of a sign-up form, The word spam, we won't spam you, even if it is inserted in a positive way, I mean, they are just trying to reassure users, but actually, the fact that they are mentioning spam brings to the attention of the user that bad priming, it's a bad thing, spam, I mean. I wasn't even thinking about it, but now that you may... Now I'm not sure I want to register, really. And in fact, inserting that has a bad effect on conversions in the end. So don't use bad priming. So Piken rule, this is something that was studied by Kahneman as well, and it's super interesting. This effect has to do with how we humans store our memories. We don't record our memories like, you know, a recorder would do something very, you know, reliable. Unfortunately, that's not the case. We rather reconstruct our memories. And what we really tend to remember are the peak moments and the end of the experience. So whatever peak moment we create in our user experience, that will likely stick with the users as well as the end. So here, this effect is providing us with a very, very good strategy, in a way, to create memorable user journeys. How? So, to take advantage of this knowledge, our design should create positive peak moments, of course. So we can disseminate them, so to speak, in the typical journeys of our users. In order to do this, we can analyze the flows of our product and identify... the right opportunities to create these moments. So, for example, micro interactions or the conclusions of small tasks are generally excellent candidates. In general, we shouldn't be afraid to make our users smile because everyone will remember a good laugh. I mean, even just a smile, a little smile. And sometimes even a chance encounter with a funny animation can leave a memorable. A memorable memory. Here we see how Asana, a popular collaboration tool, rewards users who have completed the tasks of the day. And this is even random, if I can remember correctly. So it doesn't happen always, it just happens at random days when you complete all tasks. So it still has that kick of, oh, okay, today I triggered the unicorn. I feel good. And so you remember that. Then we must certainly reduce the impact of negative moments because those negative peaks will be remembered as well. So, of course, we should focus on eliminate or mitigate them in all cases where that is possible. So conducting proper usability studies and quality assurance. However, there are errors that just cannot be avoided, like disconnections and other... malfunctions. So we must still handle them in a nice way in order to sweeten that moment if we can so that it's not remembered in a way that's so bad, possibly. So in these cases, we should strive to offer clear messages and instructions so that the user can understand what's happening and maybe recover from the situation. And here too, a touch of humor, like in this case, can lighten the soul and make the error situation more tolerable, if nothing else. Finally, we have the final moments of the main user journeys, and now we know that last impressions are lasting impressions. So if we can identify the natural conclusion, for example, of a user journey, say for example that the user is completing a survey or is filing his taxes, as in this case, it's a very good thing to celebrate the moment and then the user experience on a positive and satisfying note. Okay, let's come to loss aversion. It is a bias that has a lot of hold. on us in practice. We are much more sensitive to the pain of losing something compared to the pleasure of acquiring it. In the image shown we see the classic last donut in the office. How good do you feel when you have it? How bad do you feel when someone else is having it? Something to think about. The concept of loss aversion was first published in 1984 in a paper entitled Choices, Values and Frames by Kahneman as well and his colleague Tversky. And they carried out a series of very enlightening experiments that showed that people tend to fear a loss twice as much as they are likely to welcome an equivalent gain. Okay. It is for this reason that successful services such as Netflix, but also Amazon Prime, Dropbox for Business, pretty much everyone that has like some form of subscription going on, are offering the free trial. Once your product is in a customer's home, an emotional bond is developed through use and the feeling of ownership is a powerful psychological tool Forgetting people to keep paying for the service even when the trial basically finishes. The trial period typically of one month creates that emotional bond and that loss of aversion, basically aversion loss, which afterwards costs a lot to break psychologically for the user. This is also known as endowment effect, so I feel endowed and so I don't want to break it. But there's also other formulas for creating loss aversion. For example, consider roadtrippers.com. It is a travel planning application which allows you to, even as a visitor, start creating your own trip. So describe your destination and each step of your trip. So without creating an account. But once users have invested an effort and their own time learning, you know, the tool. and basically putting in some effort to create their road on the platform, they will quickly gain a sense of ownership and so they will be motivated to create an account to avoid losing their work. And this again is loss aversion in action. FOMO, or fear of missing out, is another variant of loss aversion, like a strange child of loss aversion. It is the fear of missing out on something. It is used extensively, creating a sense of scarcity around the service, product or experience that is being sold. Booking.com does a great job using loss aversion to nudge sales. When customers are browsing hotel deals, they see a message like the one above. So only six rooms left on our site. So people that might be on the fence to buy. They will buy because they already feel that fear of missing out. And Amazon also does that. We are really used to see phrases on a product page like, only two of these items left in stock. Something like that. That's also FOMO by scarcity. And there's also the opportunity to create FOMO with a countdown clock. So instead of using scarcity, you are using the urgency, right? And sticking with Amazon, how do you feel when you see phrases on a product page like only one hour left to order for the next day delivery? So that also creates that urgency. Right. Okay. Up until now, we have seen a small selection of cognitive biases, and I can assure you it's a small selection. There are many, many, many, many more that helped us to better understand the basics of design and ground it in cognitive psychology. However, even we as designers or as front-end developers or as developers, well, we are human beings. So, as such… we unconsciously are conditioned by biases that affect our work. So, in fact, there is a wide range of biases that are particularly common and dangerous for the work of a designer. Let's see them. Enter designer biases. Let's start with the Maslow's hammer. So, it indicates an over-reliance on a familiar tool or method, ignoring or undervaluing alternative approaches. In other words, if you have an ember, everything looks like a nail. This happens to everyone in every line of work. As designers, this can make us lazy and basically rely too much on a restricted set of design patterns, for example, that we know. Then there is the confirmation bias. It is the tendency to only retain and focus on information that confirms our own ideas and preconceptions. This is very dangerous for a designer especially because we should understand and solve the problem of our users, of our commissioners anyway, so we need to be always open-minded and receptive. Unlike the guy here that certainly is not a not a good listener. A closely related bias is the false consensus effect. We tend to overestimate how many people share our choices, our values, our judgments, our perspective in general. And also, and that's the most dangerous thing, we perceive alternate responses as rare, deviant, and more revealing of the respondents. Like, oh, you don't see this thing like I do. What's wrong with you? So... Much in the same way, we designers, developers, UX researchers can assume that people who will use our interfaces are like us, which is just not true. It's wrong. So, being aware that we are subject to this bias can help us keeping this tendency in check. We need to observe and talk to the user, to the real users that are the targets of our products. Congruence Bias is the tendency to only test hypotheses through direct testing, without ever testing possible alternatives or trying to falsify our hypotheses. So the classic example of congruence bias was discovered by Peter Wiesen in the 60s, and he gave subjects the number sequence 2, 4, 6, telling them that this sequence followed a particular rule and asking them to find out what the rule was. So participants could provide their own numbers, their own sequence, and test if it did check the rule. Okay? So the problem was that most subjects responded to the task by quickly deciding that the underlying rule was numbers ascending by two, and And all the tests, the sequence that they provided as tests, were all congruent with the rule that they had already decided was in action. So in the end, they never discovered that the real rule was just simply to list ascending numbers. So if they had ever tested with 2, 3, and 4, that would have passed the test. So, as designers, what does this tell us? As designers, it is that we should always try to create and test different solutions and try to falsify our assumptions. So if we get like too kind of stuck with our own design, with our initial idea, and we never try to disprove it or to find an alternative, then we might really, you know, basically, you know, work with a very restricted mind, right? Then there is the experimenter's bias, which is... The bias that occurs when experimenter expectancies end up influencing the research outcome. How can this happen? So the experimenter may introduce cognitive bias into a study in several ways. For example, he may subtly communicate his own expectations for the outcome to the participants, causing them to alter their behavior to conform. to those expectations because everyone likes to please other people. It's just human. So the classic example of the experimental bias is that of Clever Hans. It was a very clever horse, in fact, and his owner claimed that the horse was able to do arithmetic and other tasks with the 89 success rate. So, wow. In reality, Hans was an extraordinary perceptive animal. And so while the guy was basically using that little wand to point to the possible answers, the horse was just reacting to micro expressions in the face of his owner, just detecting what was wrong and what was right from that. The owner was totally unconscious that this was happening. It was not like he was not trying to scam anyone, but this is what was happening. The horse was influenced by those subtle unconscious facial expressions of the owner. So while we are doing UX research, we should avoid, you know, making strange faces and use priming or framing when we just interact with our subjects, with our participants, because that can transfer our expectations or our perspective without us. even realizing, and so it can alter the results of the study. So what's a foldable human being to do? And how about a foldable designer or software developer who's just trying to implement a front-end UI? So the answer is simple. We have to acknowledge that we are biased and keep learning, and then trying to counteract and do something to overcome them. Luckily, when it comes to user experience and user interfaces, the answer is simpler than in other avenues of life, because it can assure you that biases actually have a very deep impact in our lives. And in lives, it's much more difficult to contrast them compared to simple tasks of designing stuff, luckily. So the thing is, we should test. We should really, really try to test with real users and also to experiment with different alternative solutions, so not get stuck with our own assumptions. Do research, do research always and yes, conduct it in a proper way, avoiding to prime users with our own expectations, as we have seen. We should strive for objectivity in the end. And ultimately we can say that the best defense is to attack with the weapons of user experience research. Applying in a structured way user research methodology and techniques can really help a lot to balance the conditioning that's coming from our own biases and anchor our design in reality actually. So I hope this introductory talk was interesting for you and that it left you curious to further explore these topics because cognitive UX is actually something that's growing and it's becoming more and more complicated, especially because currently you have to read a lot of psychology books in order to find something that's interesting to apply on UX. So thank you for your attention. Thank you. There are six minutes left. We could use the time for a few questions if there are any. So he read that book and he was wow about the content. And so I read that book as well. And I'm talking about 10 years ago, something like that. And the book is amazing. It's just a book that I slow and fast and slow thinking. I can't remember the title. I'm the worst for remembering stuff. So much so for Pican, Ruel. But yes, the book is extraordinary. If you have the chance, just read it. Because It's not about UX and it's not about cognitive UX, of course. It's just a book about the biases that affect our decision-making processes. So it's about economics, it's about psychology, and it's super interesting, just as human beings we should read it, to understand how our mind really works and that we can counteract a lot of... you know, subtle tendencies that we have that actually have an impact on our lives. So, yeah, this was the start of my research. Thank you. Yeah, it's a very complex thing, I mean, to condense in a few words, because it is a whole different kind of field of study. But basically, user experience research have a lot of different methodologies that apply to different stages of design process and of product lifecycle, for example. There are focus groups where you can try and understand from users what are their needs, their expectations. There are... observational activities where you actually kind of observe the behavior of people either using a product or going on through their life you doing what they do so that you can understand better how to design products that can help them in performing their activities their daily activities and then there are usability studies which are conducted exposing the the participants you to a product and asking them to perform specific tasks. So then you can observe how they go through those tasks and what are the points where the user actually doesn't understand clearly what's happening on the screen and basically gets stuck in the process. So you can kind of pinpoint the real problems of your design and then kind of take that as the starting point for an improvement. And then you reiterate, you reiterate the test, you go iteratively, like with agile methodologies in the end, because basically there's also the big, big topic of lean UX, right? So doing a very simple first design and then test with users and then use the learning that you get from users to feedback on your design and start over again in an infinite cycle of improvement, let's say. Continuous improvement, continuous UX, it's called. So it's a big, big, big topic. Let's say that design as well as, you know, development is always evolving and is trying to adapt to basically the needs of a very complex business and evolving world as software and digital products right now are, you know. kind of the stuff of our our life really understanding how to do design in an efficient way is key so all these practices are evolving really really really at the same speed i would say that development practices are also evolving thanks for your question thank you

and I am a UX and product manager working currently in IGT, which is an office in Fisbury Square and a studio in Manchester here in London as well. In case you want to reach out, these are just my contacts. To get started with the topic of cognition, let's consider for a moment the terrific amount of work that our brain gets done in every single instant. It is capable of processing a...

a dizzying amount of signals and perceptions all in one go. So we are constantly making decisions, even in a way that's almost semi-automatic in reality. For example, in this moment, we are deciding where to look at, if and how to adjust our position. At the same time, we listen to the noises in the environment we are in. We also listen to these words that someone is speaking.

So we are hearing them. We are... understanding their meaning, we are waking them.

And while also we try to take in the person who's talking, like who's she, her gestures, her attitude. So we are doing a lot just in every single instant and we don't even realize that we are doing it. Maybe in the meantime, we also take a quick look at the smartphone because why not? We can, right?

So it's a really complex job that our brain does while we don't even realize that all these things are going on. How does this happen? So, towards the end of the 19th century, this guy with the nice beard, the American psychologist and philosopher William James, well, he provided the first answer to this question. So, he formulated a theory in which our mental processes are based on two kind of separate types of thinking.

So, the associate thinking that is based on associative memory of past experiences, which is fast, and then a second type of thinking that is a little bit more, let's say, slower and more considerate when things require a deeper analysis because it's a novel situation, it's a new problem for us. So this new kind of thinking became known as the dual process theory. Later, with the work of Kahneman, psychologist and economist, the theory of the dual process was further developed and he investigating many aspects of human decision-making processes, especially because he was an economist, so it was a really important topic for him to understand, so much so that in 2003 he was awarded with the Nobel Prize for Economics.

So his dual process model tells us that there are two separate agents or systems in the mind, each with its own functions, limitations and capabilities. System 1, also called intuition, is fast and it's always at work. It kicks in automatically and unconsciously.

It's also hot in the sense that it is affected by emotions and makes use, as we shall see in a moment, of heuristics, which exposes it to the possibility of also making mistakes in the end. On the other hand, System 2, reflection, is slower and only causes the person to think differently. comes into play if you have to make more conscious and deliberate choices with a cool head so to speak. It has an analytical approach to decisions and in this sense it is a little bit more reliable.

Precisely because of its extreme speed and efficiency intuition beats reasoning in the most in the vast majority of cases. System 1 routinely proposes conclusions and solutions that System 2 merely approves, intervening more actively only if there's something that's not exactly clear, so there is the need to some form of deeper investigation. This means that System 1 or intuition is actually responsible for a large part of our behaviors.

And this is why it is essential to understand how it works. Well, System 1, as I was already saying, uses heuristics to make its decisions. That is, decision-making methods that are kind of shortcuts to make efficiency the real strong suit, in the end. So technically, a heuristic is a resolution method that does not guarantee an optimal solution, but focuses on obtaining an acceptable one sufficient to achieve an immediate purpose.

Heuristic methods are also used in software to approach problems that are too onerous to compute. So you might be familiar with this depending on how many designers are here actually. Oh wow, cool! How many front-end developers?

Okay, nice. A mix. So I can imagine that you're all familiar with heuristics, but this is...

the method that our System 1 uses and it keeps us alive because the speed that only heuristics can guarantee to System 1 are actually what allows us to process the complexity of the world that surrounds us. And just to basically react at the external stimuli at a speed that saves our lives as human beings, let's say, in a wild environment. And we have evolved this system just for that.

So, without heuristics we would not be able to survive in the end. But, due to their nature, heuristics have blind spots. And so they introduce some form of systematic error in our decision patterns.

It's like they introduce a little bit of irrationality in us that emerges as a side effect of this efficiency that we need to achieve with the heuristic. And these systematic errors are called cognitive biases. From this perspective, I mean, we are all equals, we are all on the same boat, we all are subject to biases and none of us is immune. So this is no good news in the end, right? And there's worse.

I mean, the first of the biases we need to be aware of is precisely the blind area bias. So this means that we tend to just ignore that we are victims of our own biases. We only can see them clearly in the others that surround us.

So it's very like the biblical quote that we don't see the log in our eyes, but we are very ready to see the specks in others'eyes, let's say. So being aware of this at least can allow us to self-correct a little, right? and mitigate the tendency that we have.

Okay, but now that we are aware that we as humans are subject to biases, let's see how this can help us to do a better job as designers by reviewing some heuristics and biases that are particularly interesting for their implications on UX. Of course, even as front-end developers or developers or users, you will also be able to kind of exploit these biases a little bit. So the first heuristic that all of us human beings use is the heuristical fluency. Ideas, objects and products that require less mental effort, less strain, are perceived as of greater value in the context of the aspect we are trying to evaluate. So I know this is a little bit convoluted, let me explain it in a different way.

In practice, If something is simple, clear, self-evident, we use this as a proxy to estimate the value of the object from another perspective. For example, the perspective of safety, reliability, effectiveness, credibility. So if an idea or a product is clearly presented, more likely it will be highly valued as safe, reliable and effective. or effective. I mean, depending on what the user is trying to kind of gauge of the product or of the idea, he will use fluency, so the absence of strain, as a proxy for whatever he's trying to look for, regardless of the real characteristics of the object.

I mean, if a website is clear, I can imagine that it is more reliable, but that is not true. Not necessarily, maybe it's totally unreliable. But I will have that perception. So this mechanism is so powerful that it can distort or skew our sense of truth, particularly when simple things are repeated until they become familiar.

And this is the very effect that makes fake news so effective. It's called also the illusory truth effect. Something is simple, something I hear it over and over again repeated, I think it's true. It's also... behind urban legends and stuff like that, actually.

It's the very same bias. So ideas, objects and products that will require low process fluency will be perceived as more valuable and also truer. So what is really interesting for us is to use, to exploit this thing a little bit in order to become better designer, right?

So it follows that it is imperative for us to create a user experience that minimizes the cognitive load of our users. Not just so that the product can become user-friendly or just usable, but rather because this will ensure that our product is perceived as higher in value, whatever the characteristic the user is looking for. Why? Because cognitive fluency will be used as a proxy. So how do we do that?

Well, the good news is that we are already applying a lot of, you know, good sound, you know, tools. Because when we study design, we are already studying the tools of Gestalt psychology. That was a current in Germany at the start of the 20th century that actually studied the fundamental principles of visual perception. Design principles already incorporate a lot of good stuff that automatically allows us to create very strong visual hierarchies that are very clear and that can help people actually decode very easily what's happening on a page, what's happening on a screen, right? So what are these tools?

These tools are simply size, color, contrast, negative space, proximity, repetition, and then the characteristic of texture and styling. We also have to pay very special attention to typography hierarchy so that the structure of the page and the content is really really clear just at a glance. So in the end by carefully using these tools we can have a strong visual hierarchy that is clearly understandable just by scanning the page or screen at a glance.

This will reduce the cognitive load and will help our product to you know have that aura right? Another important tool to place the important elements in our visual hierarchy are the page scan patterns, the typical way that our eye traverses web pages for example. Different studies including the ones by Nielsen Norman Group have revealed that there are several popular scanning patterns among which the F and the Z shaped patterns are the most common.

The Z pattern is especially relevant for pages which have low density of content. Imagine a home page or a landing page, something like that. So the pattern follows a Z shape. We first look at the top left and then we scan through the right, then our eye moves diagonally down and then we proceed to the right. The F pattern on the other hand is used when the content is very dense.

So for example, imagine a Google search or maybe a listing of products in an e-commerce. So the pattern of the eye that in that case we use is we look at the top left and then we start scanning vertically and when we find something, a clue that something interests us, we proceed to the right. So if we know how the eye moves through the pages, then we are also able to understand which kind of layout is more appropriate to what we are trying to achieve.

And we can also place the important elements in those spots where we know that the eye will go. Another fundamental guideline for minimizing cognitive load is the adoption of solutions that are familiar. for our users.

So design patterns that are already established, of course. As design patterns evolve over time, we need to keep learning and become keen observers of the evolution of modern interaction patterns to make sure that our design is always relevant and fresh. Sites like the one I'm showing here with the URL actually can be useful to keep up to date, especially because mobile patterns are particularly dynamic and evolving.

We also have to pay attention to the coherence and consistency of our user interfaces in order to maximize usability and clarity. And adopting a design system can certainly help to guarantee the coherent development of our user experiences, especially when we are working on complex and possibly multi-channel products, maybe an ecosystem of multiple products. So if we want to keep consistent everything, adopting a design system is a very good idea.

And finally, let's try to internalize the concept of less is more, right? Because we should avoid the longer copy in our UX, possibly, and also avoid unnecessary elements and choices. Anything that is not functional to help the user to accomplish the task that he's actually trying to do.

with the help of our product is not simply an extra thing, like something extra, okay, it's more, it's good. No, because the accumulation of these extra things, okay, adding stuff that it's not really super important, not super relevant, actually accumulates and create that strain. So it keeps us from reducing the cognitive load because the user, even if he's not interested in those elements, still will have to spend some...

brain power in order to understand what they are and why they are placed there. So it's adding to the cognitive load. So in the end, instead, we should consider adding some form of personalization and anticipatory design, because everything that we can do to minimize the strain and help the user to reach faster his goal, everything in that direction is really, really important.

And in fact, here I'm showing Netflix because you know that There is the paradox of choice. When you have so much choices, you have a high strain. And that sometimes basically paralyzes us and prevents us from doing any choice.

So how big, big companies like Netflix or Amazon are solving this problem? Because they certainly have a lot of choices and options to offer us, right? Their catalogs are huge. So they are using anticipatory design and personalization. They try to provide us categories and to put things in front of us, anticipating our desires because they can study our behaviors.

So they already know what we like in a way. They can check our history. They can use machine learning and such techniques in order to anticipate our needs.

And this is exactly what we should look for in order to provide that complexity without overwhelming the user. So let's now see another bias that affects our hard-working system one. So the usability aesthetic effect that is a beautiful, elegant design is automatically perceived as more usable. So this is something subtle and different from what we were looking at before. If something is beautiful, it's perceived as usable.

So this perception distorts also all subsequent user interactions with the product and it's typically resistant to change. It's resistant to change, that's crazy, right? In other words, the first impression influences the long-term perception of quality and usability.

This effect is well documented both for products, brands and for human beings. So it really looks like the first impression is key. Furthermore, a positive reaction to aesthetic values of a design evokes feelings of affection and loyalty. iPhone users, anyone? Of course.

So, and the converse is also true. So if something is aesthetically poor, we have a very low tolerance towards any defect. Okay. and this is also very very important to keep in mind, in extreme cases it can lead to just rejection of the product for no good reason because maybe the product is perfect from any other point of view but it's just that we don't like it aesthetically and we reject it. This was the case that we can have here like side by side the great success of the Fiat 500 A car whose design has become iconic, even though it was small and really not really practical, but I mean in the original version, compared to the market failure of the Fiat Duna, I can easily bet you have never heard of it.

Yes, even in Italy we even have seen it on the roads and you can easily see why, come on. So we talk about a halo effect, For the positive case, that is when beauty generates a magical aura around the product and horn effects for the opposite. Unfortunately, this is also the same bias, the same bias that leads us to think that the ugly guy is the bad guy.

Yeah. So what does all this tell us? It seems trivial to say that we must take care of the aesthetic side of our products, right? In order to be able to leverage positive acceptance and create that halo effect, that emotional bond with our users.

On the other hand, we must also be aware that an aesthetically winning design makes users more tolerant to minor usability defects. For example, the tolerance to minor usability defects of, let's say, iPhone users is pretty high. In fact, on the iPhone, the cut and paste functionality arrived late, let's say, compared to the Android phones, for example.

But this did not affect the loyalty of iPhone users. They were not bothered. So, me included, of course.

So if we want to conduct the tests with users on our products and our focus is on usability, maybe it's counterintuitive, but we should consider tuning down the aesthetics value of what we are using to test because people can get just too enamored of the aesthetic qualities of what we show. and just be more tolerant to the defects so we won't be able to spot them while we are doing the testing. So this is like good to know, right?

In order to to prepare for your user experience research activities. So let's talk a little bit about priming. This is an effect that also has profound impact on UX and design.

We can describe it by saying that the exposure to a stimulus influences the behavior of users. in subsequent interactions, even if the activities have no relation whatsoever to the original stimulus. And this is the tricky part, right?

Here the example is the red interrogation room. What does that to do with the interrogation? Apparently nothing.

But the interviewee in the room feels so overwhelmed by the aggressive caller that his mind is kind of predisposed to yield. to surrender. So the stimulus doesn't have anything to do with the matter at hand, but still it has this influence that's very subtle. And actually priming shapes our behaviors and reactions to the environment and is often an effective shortcut that allows us to take quick decisions.

If we feel a bad vibe in the room, something primed us. And maybe we will go away, we will find an excuse and go away. This saved our lives, I mean the lives of our ancestors a lot of times. It is a surviving mechanism again, this heuristic, but it is a little bit dangerous if we are not aware of it in modern times and in fact it is an efficient persuasion tool, priming, when used in a certain way and is employed extensively in marketing and advertising. to no surprise.

So priming is the reason why colors are so important in the design. Whether we use them knowingly or not, they have a profound impact on users. Each color has a range of suggestions which, if used correctly, are very powerful to establish an emotional relationship with users and to communicate them the values of our product and of our brand. So the images we use also have a very strong priming value.

Used in the right way, again, they act as symbols capable of evoking concepts and memories beyond what they represent, let's say, literally. For example, if on a travel site I use the image of a beautiful shell, it's just a shell, but I will be evoking all the memories of the people about their journeys to... a beautiful beach or maybe the dream travel that they want to do to the Bahamas or something like that. So it is evoking something else.

Here we can see an interesting example in which the image has been built as a metaphor for a message to basically communicate to potential customers that this guy, this digital agency, he's able to build products as elegant and agile as a colibri. What a beautiful metaphor, very effective. Fonts also transfer to observe a range of associations and emotions, and we need to become versed at using them in our design to establish the correct priming.

The suggestions they communicate are particularly important in logo design for brands and products. In general, we are starting to understand that due to the priming effects, all the visual elements of our design image, fonts, colors, everything, even sounds actually, although they are not really the subject, but even sounds, implicitly contribute to making the user form a mental image of our brand or of our product. Which brings us to another essential point.

It is important that this mental image that we are building with priming is consistent with the product and with the expectations around it. If this mental image is dissonant with users'expectations, they will feel very frustrated and may come to perceive the product as not credible. How would you react, for example, to a wedding planner website that uses acid green in its color palette?

Can you imagine that? I mean, it's just not what I am expecting. And I will go away because it's crazy.

Come on, is it green? So, crazy idea. We speak of prototypicality. Yes, it's a difficult word for me. To indicate this adherence to what we could call a category model.

And this is why it's very important to do competitor analysis and market research. So if we are trying to build any type of website for a specific business, We should first study the market and the competitors to understand what is the expected visual imagery, all those clues about color, about language, about visual imagery, that will put our design on the right track, to use the right priming. And another important element is to avoid accidental priming that works against our product.

In this example of a sign-up form, The word spam, we won't spam you, even if it is inserted in a positive way, I mean, they are just trying to reassure users, but actually, the fact that they are mentioning spam brings to the attention of the user that bad priming, it's a bad thing, spam, I mean. I wasn't even thinking about it, but now that you may... Now I'm not sure I want to register, really. And in fact, inserting that has a bad effect on conversions in the end.

So don't use bad priming. So Piken rule, this is something that was studied by Kahneman as well, and it's super interesting. This effect has to do with how we humans store our memories.

We don't record our memories like, you know, a recorder would do something very, you know, reliable. Unfortunately, that's not the case. We rather reconstruct our memories. And what we really tend to remember are the peak moments and the end of the experience. So whatever peak moment we create in our user experience, that will likely stick with the users as well as the end.

So here, this effect is providing us with a very, very good strategy, in a way, to create memorable user journeys. How? So, to take advantage of this knowledge, our design should create positive peak moments, of course. So we can disseminate them, so to speak, in the typical journeys of our users. In order to do this, we can analyze the flows of our product and identify...

the right opportunities to create these moments. So, for example, micro interactions or the conclusions of small tasks are generally excellent candidates. In general, we shouldn't be afraid to make our users smile because everyone will remember a good laugh. I mean, even just a smile, a little smile.

And sometimes even a chance encounter with a funny animation can leave a memorable. A memorable memory. Here we see how Asana, a popular collaboration tool, rewards users who have completed the tasks of the day. And this is even random, if I can remember correctly.

So it doesn't happen always, it just happens at random days when you complete all tasks. So it still has that kick of, oh, okay, today I triggered the unicorn. I feel good. And so you remember that.

Then we must certainly reduce the impact of negative moments because those negative peaks will be remembered as well. So, of course, we should focus on eliminate or mitigate them in all cases where that is possible. So conducting proper usability studies and quality assurance. However, there are errors that just cannot be avoided, like disconnections and other...

malfunctions. So we must still handle them in a nice way in order to sweeten that moment if we can so that it's not remembered in a way that's so bad, possibly. So in these cases, we should strive to offer clear messages and instructions so that the user can understand what's happening and maybe recover from the situation. And here too, a touch of humor, like in this case, can lighten the soul and make the error situation more tolerable, if nothing else. Finally, we have the final moments of the main user journeys, and now we know that last impressions are lasting impressions.

So if we can identify the natural conclusion, for example, of a user journey, say for example that the user is completing a survey or is filing his taxes, as in this case, it's a very good thing to celebrate the moment and then the user experience on a positive and satisfying note. Okay, let's come to loss aversion. It is a bias that has a lot of hold. on us in practice. We are much more sensitive to the pain of losing something compared to the pleasure of acquiring it.

In the image shown we see the classic last donut in the office. How good do you feel when you have it? How bad do you feel when someone else is having it?

Something to think about. The concept of loss aversion was first published in 1984 in a paper entitled Choices, Values and Frames by Kahneman as well and his colleague Tversky. And they carried out a series of very enlightening experiments that showed that people tend to fear a loss twice as much as they are likely to welcome an equivalent gain. Okay. It is for this reason that successful services such as Netflix, but also Amazon Prime, Dropbox for Business, pretty much everyone that has like some form of subscription going on, are offering the free trial.

Once your product is in a customer's home, an emotional bond is developed through use and the feeling of ownership is a powerful psychological tool Forgetting people to keep paying for the service even when the trial basically finishes. The trial period typically of one month creates that emotional bond and that loss of aversion, basically aversion loss, which afterwards costs a lot to break psychologically for the user. This is also known as endowment effect, so I feel endowed and so I don't want to break it.

But there's also other formulas for creating loss aversion. For example, consider roadtrippers.com. It is a travel planning application which allows you to, even as a visitor, start creating your own trip.

So describe your destination and each step of your trip. So without creating an account. But once users have invested an effort and their own time learning, you know, the tool. and basically putting in some effort to create their road on the platform, they will quickly gain a sense of ownership and so they will be motivated to create an account to avoid losing their work.

And this again is loss aversion in action. FOMO, or fear of missing out, is another variant of loss aversion, like a strange child of loss aversion. It is the fear of missing out on something.

It is used extensively, creating a sense of scarcity around the service, product or experience that is being sold. Booking.com does a great job using loss aversion to nudge sales. When customers are browsing hotel deals, they see a message like the one above. So only six rooms left on our site.

So people that might be on the fence to buy. They will buy because they already feel that fear of missing out. And Amazon also does that.

We are really used to see phrases on a product page like, only two of these items left in stock. Something like that. That's also FOMO by scarcity.

And there's also the opportunity to create FOMO with a countdown clock. So instead of using scarcity, you are using the urgency, right? And sticking with Amazon, how do you feel when you see phrases on a product page like only one hour left to order for the next day delivery? So that also creates that urgency.

Right. Okay. Up until now, we have seen a small selection of cognitive biases, and I can assure you it's a small selection. There are many, many, many, many more that helped us to better understand the basics of design and ground it in cognitive psychology.

However, even we as designers or as front-end developers or as developers, well, we are human beings. So, as such… we unconsciously are conditioned by biases that affect our work. So, in fact, there is a wide range of biases that are particularly common and dangerous for the work of a designer.

Let's see them. Enter designer biases. Let's start with the Maslow's hammer. So, it indicates an over-reliance on a familiar tool or method, ignoring or undervaluing alternative approaches. In other words, if you have an ember, everything looks like a nail.

This happens to everyone in every line of work. As designers, this can make us lazy and basically rely too much on a restricted set of design patterns, for example, that we know. Then there is the confirmation bias.

It is the tendency to only retain and focus on information that confirms our own ideas and preconceptions. This is very dangerous for a designer especially because we should understand and solve the problem of our users, of our commissioners anyway, so we need to be always open-minded and receptive. Unlike the guy here that certainly is not a not a good listener.

A closely related bias is the false consensus effect. We tend to overestimate how many people share our choices, our values, our judgments, our perspective in general. And also, and that's the most dangerous thing, we perceive alternate responses as rare, deviant, and more revealing of the respondents. Like, oh, you don't see this thing like I do.

What's wrong with you? So... Much in the same way, we designers, developers, UX researchers can assume that people who will use our interfaces are like us, which is just not true. It's wrong. So, being aware that we are subject to this bias can help us keeping this tendency in check.

We need to observe and talk to the user, to the real users that are the targets of our products. Congruence Bias is the tendency to only test hypotheses through direct testing, without ever testing possible alternatives or trying to falsify our hypotheses. So the classic example of congruence bias was discovered by Peter Wiesen in the 60s, and he gave subjects the number sequence 2, 4, 6, telling them that this sequence followed a particular rule and asking them to find out what the rule was.

So participants could provide their own numbers, their own sequence, and test if it did check the rule. Okay? So the problem was that most subjects responded to the task by quickly deciding that the underlying rule was numbers ascending by two, and And all the tests, the sequence that they provided as tests, were all congruent with the rule that they had already decided was in action. So in the end, they never discovered that the real rule was just simply to list ascending numbers. So if they had ever tested with 2, 3, and 4, that would have passed the test.

So, as designers, what does this tell us? As designers, it is that we should always try to create and test different solutions and try to falsify our assumptions. So if we get like too kind of stuck with our own design, with our initial idea, and we never try to disprove it or to find an alternative, then we might really, you know, basically, you know, work with a very restricted mind, right? Then there is the experimenter's bias, which is... The bias that occurs when experimenter expectancies end up influencing the research outcome.

How can this happen? So the experimenter may introduce cognitive bias into a study in several ways. For example, he may subtly communicate his own expectations for the outcome to the participants, causing them to alter their behavior to conform. to those expectations because everyone likes to please other people. It's just human.

So the classic example of the experimental bias is that of Clever Hans. It was a very clever horse, in fact, and his owner claimed that the horse was able to do arithmetic and other tasks with the 89 success rate. So, wow.

In reality, Hans was an extraordinary perceptive animal. And so while the guy was basically using that little wand to point to the possible answers, the horse was just reacting to micro expressions in the face of his owner, just detecting what was wrong and what was right from that. The owner was totally unconscious that this was happening.

It was not like he was not trying to scam anyone, but this is what was happening. The horse was influenced by those subtle unconscious facial expressions of the owner. So while we are doing UX research, we should avoid, you know, making strange faces and use priming or framing when we just interact with our subjects, with our participants, because that can transfer our expectations or our perspective without us.

even realizing, and so it can alter the results of the study. So what's a foldable human being to do? And how about a foldable designer or software developer who's just trying to implement a front-end UI?

So the answer is simple. We have to acknowledge that we are biased and keep learning, and then trying to counteract and do something to overcome them. Luckily, when it comes to user experience and user interfaces, the answer is simpler than in other avenues of life, because it can assure you that biases actually have a very deep impact in our lives. And in lives, it's much more difficult to contrast them compared to simple tasks of designing stuff, luckily. So the thing is, we should test.

We should really, really try to test with real users and also to experiment with different alternative solutions, so not get stuck with our own assumptions. Do research, do research always and yes, conduct it in a proper way, avoiding to prime users with our own expectations, as we have seen. We should strive for objectivity in the end. And ultimately we can say that the best defense is to attack with the weapons of user experience research. Applying in a structured way user research methodology and techniques can really help a lot to balance the conditioning that's coming from our own biases and anchor our design in reality actually.

So I hope this introductory talk was interesting for you and that it left you curious to further explore these topics because cognitive UX is actually something that's growing and it's becoming more and more complicated, especially because currently you have to read a lot of psychology books in order to find something that's interesting to apply on UX. So thank you for your attention. Thank you.

There are six minutes left. We could use the time for a few questions if there are any. So he read that book and he was wow about the content.

And so I read that book as well. And I'm talking about 10 years ago, something like that. And the book is amazing.

It's just a book that I slow and fast and slow thinking. I can't remember the title. I'm the worst for remembering stuff.

So much so for Pican, Ruel. But yes, the book is extraordinary. If you have the chance, just read it.

Because It's not about UX and it's not about cognitive UX, of course. It's just a book about the biases that affect our decision-making processes. So it's about economics, it's about psychology, and it's super interesting, just as human beings we should read it, to understand how our mind really works and that we can counteract a lot of... you know, subtle tendencies that we have that actually have an impact on our lives. So, yeah, this was the start of my research.

Thank you. Yeah, it's a very complex thing, I mean, to condense in a few words, because it is a whole different kind of field of study. But basically, user experience research have a lot of different methodologies that apply to different stages of design process and of product lifecycle, for example.

There are focus groups where you can try and understand from users what are their needs, their expectations. There are... observational activities where you actually kind of observe the behavior of people either using a product or going on through their life you doing what they do so that you can understand better how to design products that can help them in performing their activities their daily activities and then there are usability studies which are conducted exposing the the participants you to a product and asking them to perform specific tasks. So then you can observe how they go through those tasks and what are the points where the user actually doesn't understand clearly what's happening on the screen and basically gets stuck in the process. So you can kind of pinpoint the real problems of your design and then kind of take that as the starting point for an improvement.

And then you reiterate, you reiterate the test, you go iteratively, like with agile methodologies in the end, because basically there's also the big, big topic of lean UX, right? So doing a very simple first design and then test with users and then use the learning that you get from users to feedback on your design and start over again in an infinite cycle of improvement, let's say. Continuous improvement, continuous UX, it's called. So it's a big, big, big topic.

Let's say that design as well as, you know, development is always evolving and is trying to adapt to basically the needs of a very complex business and evolving world as software and digital products right now are, you know. kind of the stuff of our our life really understanding how to do design in an efficient way is key so all these practices are evolving really really really at the same speed i would say that development practices are also evolving thanks for your question thank you

Transcript for:Cognitive Psychology in UX Design

Transcript for:
Cognitive Psychology in UX Design