Have you heard that knowing a little about psychology can help with UX? How? Let's get into it.
I'm Ash Montes. I work as a freelance UX researcher and in this video I want to share what concepts from psychology are good to be familiar with if you're working with UX design or UX research. At the end I'll share some resources so you can learn more on your own. So let's say you're on an e-commerce website and you want to search for something. Where do you think you'll find the search bar?
At the top of the website or at the bottom? You may not have read about it. You didn't see any rules that stipulate this is where the search bar should be.
How do you know this? What's the reason for this intuition? People don't want to think more than they have to, so they assume things will work just like the other things they have seen before.
By the way, a number of things I'll mention here in this video. you can go more in-depth by reading a couple of books I've listed down below. There's one I really enjoyed called 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People.
One of the things mentioned in the book is this notion around mental models. Mental models is a term that comes from psychology, and it's frequently used in UX. And it basically relates to what a person believes in when trying to work out how something works.
So if you have expectations on how something works, you have a mental model. It's like a map we create in our heads when we're in a new neighborhood and we're getting familiar with it. When working with UX, a good amount of effort comes in identifying what are the mental models that the general population has when they're using a product.
If the UX team overlooks this part, the team may think. they came up with a beautiful and elegant design, but because they haven't noticed the gap between their mental model and the user's mental model, it's a mismatch between mental models, which can lead to serious design errors and usability issues. This is something that is especially important if the product is new to the market, so people are unfamiliar with these new patterns. As an example, when the iPhone was launched, you had a black iPhone with a very discreet home button.
No outline, no icon, no label. It's something you notice only by feel. And they launched the Touch ID feature.
So right when you were setting up the phone, you get this command. Where do you click? To people who are now familiar with the iPhone, the answer is simple.
Here. But. to lots of people who were getting their first iPhone in 2014, they would naturally assume it was directly on the screen.
Now, the UX team working on the iPhone could argue that the information was in fact mentioned on the screen, but it goes to show it's not enough. We know this because we take research and knowledge about the brain and we extrapolate some design principles from it. One that I've seen up close in different places is a team of designers working on a website page and believing customers will notice an important piece of information, let's say a button. But then obviously no one notices that button. How's that possible?
Again, you might have come across this in psychology. The term is selective attention. There is an experiment you can find on YouTube. known as the gorilla test. And this was an experiment with a group of students passing two basketballs between them.
And the volunteers were invited to count how many passes happened between the students. What happened? Someone wearing a gorilla costume joins a circle, spends 10 seconds on screen, and the volunteers observing the scene miss the gorilla.
It goes to show... That even though you might assume people notice obvious things, depending on how the information is displayed and what is prioritized, people will miss important information. So another key learning from psychology. People crave information, but the problem is people want more information that they can actually process. With this knowledge on psychology, you can anticipate some findings and explain why you're getting certain results when speaking to customers.
In fact, I would say psychology is key not only to designers working on UX, but also to UX researchers like myself. UX research shares some fundamental similarities with experimental psychology. In both disciplines, whoever runs the research knows that what people say and what people think are two different things.
One of the most interesting experiments I've seen recently was devised by a psychologist, Pater Johansson, and he invited volunteers to choose one picture as their favorite from two pictures. So he showed two faces and asked people to choose which one they preferred. And then what he would do is almost like a magic trick. He would put down the two pictures and he would hand over to the volunteer the picture the volunteer did not choose. And the volunteer would then be asked to justify why they picked that picture, what happened.
People had to justify their decision and they would naturally come up with a very convincing reason for why they chose the picture. Again, the picture they didn't actually choose. Even more bizarre, once they had finished with the experiment, the volunteers were asked about it and they didn't have a recollection that they chose the other picture.
They were now convinced that the wrong picture was actually the right one. So this is what it's called choice blindness. It's ongoing research, but it shows how unreliable feedback can be when you run a preference test, as an example. People can choose an option and explain their thinking as if it's the true reason behind the decision, but as you can see, this is just a rationalization. In case you're curious to know more, look for choice blindness, and this is tied to this cognitive phenomenon known as introspection illusion.
Basically, this means that people incorrectly believe that they fully understand the roots of their emotions. The other big aspect that UX researchers pay attention to and is directly related to psychology is bias. And what is cognitive bias? So bias is this tendency to make decisions or take actions influenced by something. This is part of being human.
We're bombarded by information, so we need to manage all of this. And we do this by finding patterns and taking shortcuts. Biases are a result of these shortcuts, basically. And then it can lead to unconscious errors in thinking.
There's a bunch of biases. So in the UX research side, we're always trying to pinpoint moments where there is a bias. In fact, in UX research, you know there is a bias blind spot, which is when we recognize the impact of bias on the judgment of others. but kind of ignoring the bias that affects our own judgment. There are other biases that are quite frequent when working with UX research.
One of them is social desirability bias. This is the tendency to report an answer in a way that feels more socially acceptable than giving a true answer. An example of this is when an interviewer asks someone about their eating habits or exercise activities. People that may not be that active would shy away from admitting this out loud.
So that's social desirability at play. And then you think, well, better to observe behavior instead of asking for feedback. Not so fast.
Behavioral data can also be affected by bias. You want an example? There was some research done at the beginning of the last century.
This was 1924. Hawthorne Works was the company that commissioned a study to see if the workers would become more productive. in higher or lower levels of light. And what they've noticed with the research was that the productivity always improved whenever the research started. And then there was a slump when the study ended.
In reality, it was just because workers knew that they were being observed. They naturally were more productive on the days that they were being observed compared to the days that they weren't. We have to wonder if people are acting a certain way because this is their natural behavior, or are they doing this because it feels like the appropriate way to behave in front of a researcher. As a UX researcher, you can always warn your team not to fall into these traps. I saw something somewhat related to this recently.
In a usability testing, the participant was struggling interacting with the website. The website had issues and the participant might have missed information that was displayed on the screen that wasn't well placed. The problem was with the website, not with the person, but because the person was struggling so much they felt bad about it.
What happened next? When the researcher conducting the study asked for feedback, the participant only had praise to give. So it's very common behavior that we see.
We have to first make the participant comfortable and in some cases give them permission to criticize something. And the second thing is we have to call this out to whoever's watching because people in the team might take the participant's compliment at face value and conclude that the website is working well. A good rule of thumb is if actions and words don't match, stick with the behavior.
All of this is to say learning more about psychology or having an interest in the subject can definitely work in your favor. I highly recommend that you keep looking for some of these experiments, case studies, and reports. That's part of what we do on the UX research side anyway.
I read and really enjoyed bottlenecks aligning UX design and user psychology. by David Evans, talking about the industry practices, but also catering for students. But if you prefer learning in small doses, there's Sketchplanations by Jonathan Hay. He has a weekly newsletter with a sketch that covers one concept, and you can check a bunch of cognitive biases.
And also Dr. Maria Panagiotity with her newsletter on UX psychology, Top Notch. and another source of inspiration for this video. And there's this giant codex produced by Buster Benson.
You can spend some time with the map and on all biases on Wikipedia. And in case you haven't seen these videos before, check these out and feel free to subscribe because the next one will be a good one. UX research theme of one.
Now see you around.