Don’t be evil and abuse them to control your finish users
Why doesn’t a good UI always work as it’s supposed to? Maybe because it has a bad UX ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Before we begin
When I first saw this meme I found it mildly amusing, then I had a little thought experiment — why would the cats behave like that and what could the owner can do to solve this hilarious mess? It does have a simple and clean UI, everyone can understand what it is when they see it. But what about its User Experience?
Problem: each bowl appearance precisely the same and every one 3 of them square measure placed within the same picket stand that has 3 very same sized holes. So when three cats show up, how are they supposed to know which bowl to take?
An easy solution (i) to this is to place two small panels in between two bowls to simulate a cubicle as this will give the cats a sense of space subconsciously. A better solution (ii) is to guide the cats to their designated bowl, this will of course require practices and training. Finally, the most ideal solution (iii) is to figure out the three cats’ preferences and to be sure each preference is unique, then place each cat’s favourite bowl with her favourite food inside.
(i) is interventional design. It purposely sets up walls and barricades to isolate a single user’s experience. We’ve already seen this a hundred times — ATMs, bathroom chambers, phone booths, bedrooms and etc.
(ii) is directional design. It uses orientational marks and highlights to help users navigate and locate. Things like station signs, city maps and staircases guide users through complex systems and reach their destinations.
(iii) is proactive design. Instead of shovelling everything you’ve got down the user’s throat, it learns the user’s behavioural pattern and uses that information to serve them. That’s why we start to see Netflix has a brand new “Because you watched…” feature and Google Maps tries to find a cool cafe for you based on your recent activities.
From (i) to (iii), we can see that the solution becomes more and more personal and intellectual. We homo sapiens are social and sentient animals, we cannot separate our emotions from our behaviours. The sense of accomplishment when we succeed and the sense of frustration when we fail, they are the drives we come to develop. Imagine if infrastructure designers and corporate product designers didn’t pay any attention to our behaviours, cognitions and interactions, we will be wreaking havoc in this world, just like those three cats.
User-Experience and Psychology
UX style incorporates a long-run relationship with scientific discipline — specifically, social, behavioural and cognitive psychology. Like I mentioned above, people are motivation-/competition- driven beings. When we want something, we don’t want it to be too easy to obtain, we like a challenge and we also like a reward. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs tells us that right above our basic needs, come the psychological needs. These are what make us desire, make us want to collaborate, compete, create and destroy.
A designer who doesn’t perceive human psychology goes to be no a lot of victorious than associate designer who doesn’t perceive physics.
— Joe Leech
To understand the user’s psychological actions and reactions, we first need to observe. Luck for us, psychologists have long been conducting numerous experiments in various well-controlled environments since the early 19th century. Many of the common psychological phenomena I’m about to explain have already been widely supported, we simply have to understand them and find out how to apply them into UX design thinking.
1. I just pressed a button
Psychological phenomenon: Pavlovian Conditioning
Probably one of the most important experiments, if not the most important, this psychological term explains a learning procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus is paired with a previously neutral stimulus. Many scientists argue that the concept of neuroplasticity may be responsible for this form of the associative learning process.
Thus, when we are getting used to performing a certain action or reaction based on a memorised pattern, we would perform the same action or reaction if the pattern shows up yet again.
In a well-documented design system, all the primary CTA buttons should have the same vibrant colour. A designer would like to place a CTA button when a certain action is required in order to increase its conversion rate, and a designer should always use this button to raise the users to perform a series of actions with identical expectation. The users will eventually get familiar with the colour and shape and would assume that whenever they click a button, it would function just like their predecessors. But what if this wasn’t the case?
Then it is a Dark Pattern. This atrocious design manipulates the users’ expectations and tricks them into actions they didn’t intend to do. Funny how our brains could hopelessly fall for something like this, but it happens to the best of us. Be careful with this power, designers, or your product will end up like what cost LinkedIn in 2015.
2. It does feel oddly satisfying
Psychological phenomenon: Placebo Effect
This psychological term says when giving the patient a substance with no intended therapeutic value, the patient may feel they are receiving clinical benefit and even believe they are getting better. Some studies found no evidence in this placebo effect and this way of treating patients are often regarded as dishonest and misleading. Despite all the controversies, this psychological phenomenon is still very much real in many daily scenarios.
There is simple speculation behind it —maybe we just need reassurance sometimes and we like to be told what we already believe. it’s all about how to let people feel like they are in control even though they are not.
One of the most iconic examples is the Pull-to-Refresh animation. Anyone who owns a smartphone for more than 3 days knows how this works, but do they know there is a Placebo Effect? Because the users expect the refresh to work but they have no control over how long a page will reload. So instead of doing nothing, we designers create this Pull-to-Refresh animation to reassure the users that the loading is now indeed undergoing and the page will show up in no time. From the user’s perspective, “I did this, I made the reload happen, I pulled down the page like a boss, I am in control.” but the reality is, that page will refresh when it’s done no matter how hard the user pulls it, but the animation distracts the users away from the technical limitation of processing massive data flow in the backend. I know, it may sound like deception, but no harm is done. 😉
3. Aww, don’t cry, you’re making me cry
Psychological phenomenon: Chameleon Effect
This psychological term addresses that people subconsciously tend to mirror each other's behaviour or emotion when they are in close proximity. Have you ever picked up a word your friend said and you then said it right back to him?
This mimicry is actually a way of showing affiliation with others, especially the closed ones like your family or friends. We inevitably do this to show them that we are paying attention to them, that we are being empathic.
In our personal experiences with products, every interaction is intimate and instant. We are not made of machines, we feel when we use them. With a visual guide, our emotions can change in a result of how the products want us to feel. That’s why since last year, Emotional Design has become such a buzzword in the design community because designers are eager to find the connection between the users and the products through psychological familiarities.
Duolingo knows how to make its users feel bad about themselves.
4. But but…it looks beautiful…
Psychological phenomenon: Aesthetic-Usability Effect
This psychological term states that people with less technical background are more inclined to believe that aesthetically appealing designs are generally more intuitive than the less appealing ones. When those aesthetic designs fail them, however, the users tend to blame themselves instead of the broken functionalities. Maybe an impressive photograph caught your attention, or maybe the product happens to be using a lot of your favourite colour, or maybe those fancy animations really wowed you. Nonetheless, those positive emotional responses further reinforce your interactions with the products, they overcompensated the usability drawbacks and made you more tolerant.
This is equivalent to “Whoa, what a good-looking guy, he must have such amazing personalities. If we don’t get along, it must be my fault, I’m terrible.”
Let’s use this shot as an example. On the left screen, three icons are too translucent to be seen clearly, the accessibility is poor to people with colour blindness and low sense of contrast; there isn’t any indication as to which icon means what; by sacrificing usability in favour of unnecessary negative space is a big no from me. On the right screen, scrollable vertical tab design in mobile is probably one of the worst ideas, not only it’s nearly impossible to implement, but it also reduces the experience of general scrolling on a mobile device (there is a reason why no one has done it in app design, because it doesn’t work).
But you don’t give a f*** about what I just wrote, do you? You thought, well, it looks clean and pleasing. So next time when you see a shot on Dribbble that impresses you so much you forgot all about UX, don’t worry, it’s not your fault, you can’t help it.
5. Aren’t you that weirdo kid from 20 years ago?
Psychological phenomenon: Von Restorff Effect
This psychological term is also known as the Isolation Effect, it predicts that people are more likely to remember an object that stands out from the rest. Many theories argue that people’s perceptual recall is often linked with substances’ contextual properties.
Memories work in groups and categories, people organise their memories based on how the shape, size, weight, colour, smell or sound of the substance is like. If this property is unique, it allows people to perform a free-recall task because it is its own category.
Notification design is a very good example of this effect. We look at our smartphone’s home screen every day, hardly there is any change going on unless a notification pops up. Whether it’s just a badge or a beep, it draws our attention toward it.
To be continued.
@Medium
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