User experience (UX) design places the value users gain at the center of its efforts.
Providing this value to users goes way beyond the technical knowledge of UX designers. What plays a major role in this? Psychology.
Cognitive psychology, specifically, focuses on the way people acquire and store information. This power of mental processing required to use a website, app or a digital feature is a very important consideration in UX design.
The basic UX design principles are keeping the design consistent, meeting the users’ needs and focusing on usability.
In this article, we will explore the connection between cognitive psychology theories and human nature and learn how UX design benefits from an understanding of the relationship.
What Is Cognitive Psychology And How Does It Affect UX Design?
Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as perception, thinking, memory, creativity, use of language, attention and problem-solving.
It focuses on human behavior and how these processes affect it. Because it looks at the link between cognitive processes and human behavior, cognitive psychology helps UX designers find ways to subdue psychological roadblocks in users.
The end goal of applying cognitive psychology to UX design is to create websites and applications that are easy to navigate, intuitive, usable, accessible and readable.
A focus on positive user experience defines every UX design process. The reason for this lies in one of many cognitive psychology theories called “the verbatim effect.” which makes people remember general information but not the form of information or its details.
In fact, how people remember general experience will impact the memory of its details. The awareness of this is what informs the UX designers’ approach to any given task.
Let’s now take a look at some of the most common cognitive psychology theories and phenomena and see how they intersect with user experience online.
Classical Conditioning
Ivan Pavlov was the originator of the famous Pavlov’s experiment, in which he triggered reaction patterns with dogs by ringing a bell that signaled that food was coming.
As his and consequent research proved, there is a striking similarity between humans’ and dogs’ learning. The action-reaction pattern is referred to as “classical conditioning” in cognitive psychology.
The same principle of a dog’s learning is found in people’s everyday activity of learning simple actions and responding to them. For instance, if our tongue is dry, we drink a glass of water.
Online, if we need relevant information, we will click on a button with a copy that promises, in an enticing way, that we are going to get the information we seek.
Classical conditioning in UX design is used to enhance and streamline navigation. Take color perception and how people react to different colors, which helps UX designers pick the right CTA button hue.
According to a University of British Columbia study, the color red increases detail-oriented task performance. Long ago, experiments in cognitive psychology confirmed the connection between red and an attention boost.
Web design companies, well-versed in this aspect of cognitive psychology, will know this and color their CTAs red. They may also know that, for instance, the color blue calms people down and they may choose it as a background color.
The knowledge of classical conditioning is widely used in creating user friendly navigation and interface.
The Schema Theory
This cognitive psychology theory sheds light on why people, in general, find neat, clear design preferable to a cluttered and disjointed one.
The absence of organization, usability and categorization lures people away because, according to schema theory, all humans perceive information as units (or schemas) and their minds store it accordingly. Breaking the information down into categories and smaller visual bits makes it easier to process said information.
People begin developing units of knowledge known as schemata as children. As we grow, more info and data is added to these knowledge units.
The UX design process must recognize info categorization as one of its basic principles. Breaking down the content into bite-size chunks that are easy to understand is giving users what they expect and what they’re used to.
The less time it takes for users to process information on a website or any other digital outlet, the better the user experience is.
Anything that reduces the time needed for users to make a final decision or research something should be a part of UX canon.
Schema theory, therefore, contributes to UX designers’ focus on usability.
Reducing The Cognitive Load With Your Users
Finally, here are some useful UX design tips and best practices based on notions gathered by cognitive psychology.
- Avoid unneeded actions: The more actions a user must take, the more mental effort and strain they will have to invest. To reduce their cognitive load, make them take and memorize as few steps as possible so their working memory doesn’t have to store too much information.
- Keep everything simple: Simplicity of content, layout, design and messaging is paramount. Keep the necessary information to a bare minimum, neatly summarized, on the same page close to the CTA button.
- Use familiar patterns: Design components and elements that are familiar to the user make it easy for them to process the online environment and what is required of them. They understand them because they’ve encountered them already, reducing the mental effort.
- Organize content and information: A well-organized information structure is the cornerstone of a good UX design. It is the only way a user can easily and quickly understand what is offered to them, enabling them to achieve their goal.
- De-clutter the design: To avoid users’ confusion, steer clear of too many colors, conflicting typography and overwhelming animations.
Conclusion
User behavior is driven by psychology. The schema theory in practice is giving users neatly organized and categorized content, while providing them with colors that entice certain action is the practice of applying classical conditioning.
There are more cognitive psychology theories that we haven’t touched upon in this article that also play a role in UX design:
Gestalt laws help UX designers understand why consumers prefer to group objects and perceive them as a singular unit. The Chameleon Effect [LS1] [An2] explains that people mimic others’ behavior so as to remain a relevant part of the group. This informs UX designers how to convince users to complete a certain action.
Lastly, the Verbatim Effect explains why users value the overall experience and not its specific parts.
These cognitive psychology theories are the foundation of some of the most critical user experience design principles.