Psychology Behind UIUX Design
good morning everyone
today i’m going to be talking about
psychology in ux design
ux stands for user experience
now why is it important for us
to involve psychology when we’re talking
about user experience design
that’s because humans are
complicated well no surprise there
we all are very complicated we all are
very different from one another
different in so many so many ways so how
will tech company
make us choose to use their application
and that’s actually pretty easy that’s
by influencing the one thing
that is common among all of us
well actually that’s five things and
that’s our senses
touch hearing eyesight smell
and taste these are our five senses
these are
these are the sensors that app
developers will use
to influence you to make decisions so
touch hearing and eyesight are the
sensors that are available to app
developers to influence you
smell and taste no you can’t really
influence that through an app
well you can’t smell anything through
your phone and i know
when your friend sends you a snap of the
food that they’re eating
it would be amazing if you could lick
your phone
and taste the food but you can’t really
do that
but to think about it that’s a scary
level of technology to be honest
and would you really want that all right
so by a show of hands from a visual
perspective
do you think that the food on the right
is more expensive
all right do you think that the food on
your left
is more expensive
okay so what can we infer from this
the food on the right clearly has lesser
food
but since it’s presented to you in a
beautiful manner
and since it has vibrant colors it’s
clear to say
that user interface and the way it’s
presented to you
is very very important so that leads us
to
beautiful interface now how can we
design
beautiful interface that’s by that’s by
following two important points how much
information you’re trying to provide and
how are you trying to provide that
information
let’s take a look at an example shall we
let’s look at this menu
there’s so much information in the menu
it’s so hard for your brain to process
all that information on one at
at one go so that provides a certain
that kind of elicits a certain level of
stress on your brain
and that is called cognitive overload
but that doesn’t look right cognitive
overload is the amount of stress that
you put on your brain
when you’re trying to learn new content
so as you saw from the menu
there was just way too much information
that was given to you at one go
so it’s pretty hard for you to process
all that information
as you saw from the previous slide the
colors were just
way too bright and was just off and
process and colors can also be pretty
taxing
on your mind and thus making a good
choice in the amount of information
that you’re trying to provide and how
you’re trying to provide that
information
is very very important and that brings
us
to processing and perception fluency
what is this this is the ease with which
we can process information
and let me tell you i’m going to give
you two examples of how
information is being presented to you so
these are websites of two tech
giants and there’s nothing wrong with uh
with the design
but it’s just two different approaches
both of these tech companies
offer similar functionalities but it’s
just the way that they choose to
portray it or provide the information to
you
i’m pretty sure you’ve all been on this
website
i hope everyone has so let’s look at
this right
there is a search bar right in the
middle there are two buttons
search and uh i’m feeling lucky well
honestly i’ve been on this website a
billion times i’ve not pressed
that button at all
so it’s pretty clear from the layout
that
it’s search search engine is the primary
feature but they also do offer
mail news and so many other products
which is conveniently located to the top
right
hand side corner and by by clicking the
drop down box
and you’re free to access it but let’s
take a look at this website
they offer a lot of the same features as
well
but they are presenting the information
to you like this
so the news is right there the search
bar is right there
and all of the information is right
there there’s nothing wrong with either
of the approaches but it’s just the way
it is presented to you that is different
now i’m going to ask you guys to please
close your eyes for a bit
and try to feel the emotion try to feel
what comes to your mind when i say it
what do you think
uh when i say the color blue
what do you think when i say the color
green
now what do you think when i say the
color red
now please open your eyes let me tell
you what i think
all right when i hear the color blue
i think of the sky i think of the sea
it’s coming when i think about green i
think about leaves i think about open
fields i think about
grass and that’s pretty calming as well
but when i think about
red well where do we see red
on a daily basis we see red in stop
signs we see red
in traffic lights what does it tell us
it tells us to be alert
it tells us to pay attention it tells us
to to be alert and to notice something
and that’s why when notifications are
provided to us on our phone it is
red in color so every time you have a
notification from a particular app it’s
going to have a badge beside it
that indicates that you have a
notification and since it’s
red it’s going to grab your attention
and that’s why red is being used
now how do you feel when these popular
icons are gray skilled think about it
now how do you feel about them now
don’t you feel just a bit more excited
and a bit more happy to
look at them in their associated colors
i do uh let me tell you how important
colors are
to a company uh over the past decade i’m
pretty sure you’ve heard about t-mobile
the
famous telecom company they have sued
many
companies because they have used similar
shades of magenta and
this is how important uh companies take
the colors that they are associated with
now sound sound is another way
for apps to grab our attention and to
elicit
involuntary behavior and let me tell you
what i mean by that all right
so there’s this experiment that was
conducted in 1890
by a russian physiologist by the name of
ivan pavlov
so what he discovered was was that
whenever he fed his
dog he used to ring a bell and for
over the course of a few weeks he
continued doing that
and it came a point where when he
removed the stimulus
of food and he rang his belt the dog
would start to salivate
now what does this tell you it tells you
that
the the involuntary behavior of the dog
of salivating
is now paired with the ringing of a bell
and this is how an involuntary behavior
is associated with
a neutral stimulus let me give you an
example
now in our phones when our phone rings
we involuntary flinch flinch to our
phone
we reach out for it and that is why it’s
important
to give a good notification sound
let’s take a look at a few popular
ringtones shall we
[Music]
now let’s try to analyze what’s common
among these stones
they’re all they do they all have
high frequency high pitch basically
and that’s how it creates us to be
alert that makes us alert and that
elicits involuntary behavior of reaching
out to our phone
and just by hearing that notification
tones you know whether you got a message
from facebook messenger
or message or ringtone from discord and
that is the uniqueness of the apps
now let’s talk about responsiveness
humans as humans we are habituated to
responsive environments and we want the
applications to be more interactive
with us and that’s why positive
reinforcement
are built into applications let’s take a
look
at how it is done for example on
instagram or any other social media
platform
when you like a picture it’s usually
accompanied by
a vibration or a sound and this is
positive reinforcement this
makes you interact with
the app more want to interact with the
app more actually
and that’s a good thing but also if you
dislike someone’s photo or some some
content
you’re not going to be greeted with a
sound or a vibration because they do not
want to associate that with something
that you’d want to do
that’s how positive reinforcement is
done now let’s talk about positive
intermittent reinforcement now what is
this
there have been many times where i’ve
opened my
app my favorite social media app i’ve
just swiped down
to refresh the app to get new content
and new
new news feed maybe but not every time
do you get
new content this situation
is paralleled with the slot machine
up in casinos so what do you do in a
slot machine you put in a token
you pull the lever and the number starts
spinning
seven seven not seven and you keep doing
this
you put another token you pull the lever
spins
doesn’t work out but once in a while it
is going to work out
and you’ll feel happy and you’re like
okay so if i try more i’m going to get
more wins
and that is the kind of habit that’s
being
uh paralleled over here to create a sort
of an
addiction now personalization
personalization is a very very big
important part of app design so the app
should be able to work better for
you basically and how is this
accomplished this is accomplished by
building a model of you based on what
you like and
based on what you dislike and based on
your interactions with the app
so let me give you an example so in
spotify when you first
sign up and log in for the first ever
time
it’s going to ask you to select five
artists that you enjoy listening to
or three genres that you enjoy listening
to and that creates base model
of what your likes are and as you
continue
interacting with the app it would
give the model will be better built
around you based on your interactions
based on the
likes based on your dislikes based on
the songs that you’re adding to your
playlist
and all of that so as to better suggest
songs that you would enjoy
ultimately the aim is to make an
app that would be better for you
particularly to use that’s a goal
now hedonic adaptation what is this this
is
let me put in layman terms we get
accustomed to
positive and negative stimulus
so for example if i eat cookie dough ice
cream every single day for seven days
straight
i’m not gonna enjoy it anymore i’m not
gonna enjoy it as much as i had it on
the first day
and that’s because that stimulus is no
longer
providing happiness to me so
that is what hedonic adaptation is and
this will can be translated in many many
areas in our lives there’s always a
genetic set point
and the amount of happiness that we do
experience on it on a constant level
good circumstances and bad circumstances
do come and go
but that even if that happens we would
return
back to a genetic set point of happiness
so let’s take a look at this all right
this is fortnight in season one
and this is the lobby of how it was this
is
fortnite in season eight look at the
amount of changes
there are a lot of changes a lot of new
cool dance moves for sure
but the important thing to notice is
that there’s been all these frequent
updates
to get to this point and why were there
so many frequent updates
that’s so that you don’t get used to how
the app
feels once you get used to how the app
feels you want to you want something
else
it’s the same thing with me and cookie
dough ice cream now i’m tired of that i
want chocolate chip maybe
so that’s how it is so since by
providing
more updates more frequent updates and
changing how the game feels for you
they can keep you more interactive with
the app
so persuasive design this is very
important as well this is one way to
motivate the users of the app
to behave in certain way that the
developers
want you to behave you get it so
what that means is that for example
let’s take
uh let’s say the example of instagram
all right so you’ve been
sharing photos online has been around
for a long time
but then instagram came in and uh
sharing photos
was never more fun and never more
interactive and never more awesome to be
honest
so when you post a picture what happens
your followers get notified about it and
every interaction that
anyone has on that picture on that photo
or video
you’re going to be notified with the
prompt of a notification about it
and that prompt will make you personally
to interact more with the like or
comment or anything that your followers
has done with your photo and that is the
design of notifications to make you
interact with the particular app
more and this is done across many many
apps
so all of this all of the influence on
our senses
is to ultimately target the dopamine
system in our brains
so what is dopamine dopamine is the
chemical that is released to make us
feel happy and the ultimate part is if
you feel happy about using an
app you would use it more and that is
what
it’s all about so let’s talk about
social media addiction cycle let’s
see that what happens is when you
perform an action by writing a post
or sharing a picture what you do is
you wait for a reaction that is what all
of us do
i’m pretty sure the day where i post a
picture or photo or video that’s a day
when i open instagram
like 10 times more than any other day
just to see how i’m doing maybe
so what you do is you wait for reaction
it creates an anticipation about it
and it goes on so why is all this so
important
back when phones used to look like this
for all you did was call
and sms and maybe play the snake game on
your phone
and that’s pretty much it but now when
phones look like this
what you do is you have 100 other apps
out there
which are competing for your attention
and all your users attention is what the
companies want and that’s what apps are
designed for
now i want to leave you all with this
quote
there are only two industries that call
their customers users
illegal drugs and software
now that’s something to think about
thank you
you