Psychology. A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about my favorite psychology and usability books. Since then there have been more great psychology books to hit the bookstores, so I thought it was time to update the list. I’ve also decided to split the list, so this one is just psychology books. I’ll do another post on UX and Design books.
Psychology. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Four Stages of Competence. These four stages are unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. As someone learns and adapts to your design, they are working their way through the stages.
Psychology. The hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow describing the stages of growth in humans. But just like in humans, interfaces go through different stages of growth too. These stages of growth for interfaces are the user experience hierarchy of needs. The most basic needs start at the bottom of the pyramid and end with the highest needs at the top.
Psychology. The Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs [Paperback] Edited by Austin Williams and Alastair Donald Pluto Press, September 2011 224 pages Review by Spiked: A new collection of essays challenges both pessimists who see urbanisation as a human disaster and eco-footprint obsessives who want to corral as many people into towns as possible.
Psychology. Experience design, especially interface design, is perhaps one of the most fertile fields for the idea of scientific design.
Psychology. An article published in Science Magazine in June provides evidence that the Internet has become an “external part” of our memory systems. Rather than remembering information, we seem to have “outsourced” this effortful task to an entity other than ourselves.
Psychology. By Taylor Bastien Users aren't blank slates, so UXD can leverage implicit memory in designs. Ever since those first, uncertain steps we took as a child, we have all held an intuitive sense of the basic laws of physics, if only for survival's sake. When a pencil rolls to the edge of a desk, we listen for it to hit the ground and are surprised if it doesn't.
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Psychology. By Colleen Roller Published: July 4, 2011 “Seemingly insignificant aspects of information presentation can have surprising effects on people’s perceptions and behavior.
Psychology. You and I are different. It’s obvious, but has a profound impact on fulfilling the needs of disparate users. Not only do you and I have different accents, hairstyles, and musical tastes, but even our cognitive processes — the very building blocks of being human — are substantially different. I recently wrote about individual differences in expertise and cognitive style, but there is a third dimension: learning style.
Psychology. By Jim RossPublished: June 7, 2011 “Nowadays, there are multiple techniques and tools, both online and offline, for generative and evaluative user research for information architecture (IA), which provide greater insights on organizing and labeling information. ” In the old days, card sorting was simple.
Psychology. By Colleen Roller Published: June 7, 2011 “People must often make important decisions that involve the ability to interpret and act on numeric data. ” People must often make important decisions that involve the ability to interpret and act on numeric data.
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Psychology. By Tyler Tate The attitudes, preferences, and habitual strategies that determine how people processes information. We pour over analytics, conduct ethnographic studies, and interview users in order to understand the demographics, goals, and tasks of the people using our product. We create personas, write scenarios, and list use cases.
Books. By Susan Weinschenk Two sample chapters from Susan Weinschenk's new book. This article introduces a sample chapter from the authors’ new book, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People. You can download two sample chapters, entitled "How People See" and "What Motivates People," and you can also enter to win one of five free copies in a UX Magazine giveaway.
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Persuasive Design. How you design your call to action buttons can affect whether users click them or not. Most designers focus on how their call to action buttons look. But where you place your call to actions is also something you should think about. This is because users view home pages in a particular pattern.
Persuasive Design. Let’s say you are an art teacher, and you want to encourage your students to spend more time practicing their drawing. You create a “Good Drawing Certificate” to give to your students.
Psychology. You are planning a trip, 7 months away, with your sister to the Cayman Islands. The two of you talk on the phone at least once a week, discuss the snorkeling you plan to do, and talk about the restaurants that are close to the place you are staying. You look forward to the trip for a long time. Anticipation vs.
Psychology. Photo by T. Voekler You’ve heard about fraternities that have difficult initiation rituals to get in. The idea is that if an organization is hard to get into, then the people in it like it even more than if entry was not so difficult. More difficult = more like — The first research on this initiation effect was done by Elliott Aronson at Stanford University in 1959.
Psychology. Let’s say you are a marketing person and you are going to send out an email to your customers about a new product offering. And let’s assume that you use a web application like MailChimp to create and distribute your emails. Here are some directions from the MailChimp web site on how to build an email campaign: (Hint: You don’t have to read it word for word… read a few of the steps and then skim to the end). 1.
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Psychology. Cognitive loads are expensive You are paying bills at your online banking website. You have to think about what bills need to be paid when, look up your balance, decide how much to pay on your credit cards, and push the right buttons to get the payments processed. As you do this task, you are thinking and remembering (cognitive), looking at the screen (visual), and pressing buttons, typing, and moving the mouse (motor).
Psychology. Time Is Relative Has this ever happened to you? You are traveling 2 hours to visit friends. It’s two hours to get there and 2 hours to get back, but the trip there feels much longer. It’s about the mental processing — In his interesting book, The Time Paradox, Philip Zimbardo discusses how our experience of time is relative, not absolute. There are time illusions, just like there are visual illusions.
Psychology. Stories capture and hold attention One day, many years ago, when I was early in my career, I found myself in front of a classroom full of people who did not want to be there. Their boss had told them they had to attend the class I was giving. I knew that many, even most, of them thought the class was a waste of their time, and knowing that was making me nervous. I decided to be brave and forge ahead.
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Psychology. Imagine that you’ve never seen an iPad, but I’ve just handed one to you and told you that you can read books on it. Before you turn on the iPad, before you use it, you have a model in your head of what reading a book on the iPad will be like. You have assumptions about what the book will look like on the screen, what things you will be able to do, and how you will do them—things like turning a page, or using a bookmark.
Decision making. By Colleen Roller Published: January 5, 2011 “Since we do not possess an inherent ability to judge the value of something in isolation, we determine value by comparing and contrasting one thing to another. ” In my last column, I discussed how the number of options in a choice set affects decision making.
Psychology. A story on Hacker News yesterday kicked off a discussion about purposefully adding a delay to a service to increase perceived value. It started off with a link to Dan Ariely’s recent article on locksmiths: how they can open most doors in seconds, but how they typically go through a slow, theatrical act of “solving” the lock to increase customer satisfaction and get bigger tips.
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Psychology. Psychologist and cognitive scientist Dr. Susan Weinschenk explains how her science informs UX design. You may have heard this story about an elephant: A king brings six men into a dark building. They cannot see anything.
Psychology. Psychological concepts underlying good user experience and usability. Imagine that you’ve never seen an iPad, but I’ve just handed one to you and told you that you can read books on it. Before you turn on the iPad, before you use it, you have a model in your head of what reading a book on the iPad will be like.
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