How User Experience (UX) Impacts the Design Mindset for Human Behavior

Designers focusing on User Experience must consider multiple factors before finalizing a product’s design. In User Experience and User Interface (UX/UI), the design components go deeper than just the external appearance and its utility. It is about how the users might feel, how they will respond to it, what feeling, such as happiness or sadness, it will invoke, will its touch and feel provide them adequate satisfaction to use it more and recommend it to others, etc.

All of these factors, and many more, are considered heavily before designing a product. Designing for human behavior is one of the most introspective, deep-diving design experiences. It is unlike any other.

User Experience aims to understand the cognitive factors that influence how users interact with products. Reviewing products from previous experiences is a great way of designing (or redesigning) any product with greater precision. The end goal, of course, is to create a product or a service that users will love and naturally find it easy to use.

Perception, attention, memory, and language comprehension are some of the primary cognitive factors that influence a user’s experiences. Some other factors would be the ability to solve a problem, the ability to make a decision, and cognitive load.

Attention span is an important factor that significantly impacts User Experience. Most online journalism places an incredible amount of importance on the attention span of a reader. ‘How long does a reader stay in an article? What are the elements in that article (font style, size, etc) besides the content that’s holding the reader’s attention span? What colors are more soothing to the eyes?

Is the information packed too closely together or spread apart?’ are some of the questions that the line editors are asking themselves before providing the designers with feedback. If designers can increase the attention span of users on a product, they are also ensuring higher productivity and better sales of that product.

Just like attention span, memory limitations also play a vital role in designing for user experience. Human behavior is often influenced by what we can remember and what we tend to forget easily. Making products or their services memorable is a solid way of ensuring the product is well-valued by customers. Take any quirky design, something color-coded that otherwise comes with a bland exterior.

These are design attempts to make a product memorable. Not always does it work, but sometimes the simplicity in a product sticks out and serves for a long time for the brand.

A large part of studying the psychology of User Experience design involves anticipating how users will perceive and interact with it. If a design feature is added, will it enhance or mar the user experience? How will it help the user and ease their lives? How will the combination of the colors, design elements, etc., together create a first impression on the users? – All of these questions are constantly brainstormed in the design room of a product.

A key factor in the human psychology of UX design is ‘Consistency.’ What consistency does is that it breeds familiarity among users. Once a product is consistent throughout all its iterations, users are most likely to stick to it for a very long time. Given that the users have to like a product for the very first time, but to stick to it ever since will require a lot of trust-building. To build that trust, UX designers must focus on making products consistent throughout.

Besides ‘Consistency,’ ‘Simplicity’ is another factor that UX designers must sincerely ponder upon. There is a law called Hick’s Law or Hick Hyman Law, which suggests that the more choices available to a person, the longer it will take them to make a decision. One of the best examples to justify this law is the advent of OTT platforms such as Netflix and Amazon and the replacement of cable-based television channels.

Previously, TV channels would show or broadcast a pre-decided event on each channel. We still had a choice to choose the channel, but now we have a choice of plenty. While this was meant to be a more luxurious thing, it has often created more doubt and confusion among users as to what they should watch.

This does not affect the overall OTT platform, such as Netflix or Amazon, since their business model includes profiting from any of the myriad entertainment options they are providing.

However, it is negatively affecting the experience of using such platforms for many users. The problem of plenty is something designers must keep in mind while designing the products. While they should not be extremely rigid so as not to provide users with any choice, they should also be careful about designing it with so many options that users don’t know what to choose and what’s best for them. Choices should always be simple.

Categorizing user choices logically also reduces cognitive load. It helps users make decisions more efficiently and quickly. Take the E-Commerce websites, for example. They could easily create a long drop-down of all their products, but that would look jarring and only confuse the users. Instead, they create each category for similar kinds of products. They list them in one place. This way, users can easily identify what they want and not be irritated or jarred by it.

Other elements, such as font style, font size, font shape, design colors, etc., all play a very important part in impacting our psychology. Notification tones, the display format of messages, sound made by apps, etc., all register some or other form of impact on our brain. Studying them and pre-planning what will work with users has, therefore, become a core part of a UX designer’s job profile. This is why studying and understanding user psychology is so important for designing human behavior.