AI STRATEGY – AUTOMATIONS EXPERTS – CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Cognitive Psychology
Understanding psychological processes like memory, information processing, and cognitive biases can helped us to frame problems on a different light.
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Process
What are the underlying mechanisms on how humans process information?
Recently I was conducting usability tests for an e-learning platform and surprisingly I noticed an interesting behaviour pattern that was occurring over and over.
The users didn’t respond to design accordingly to the content hierarchy laid out on the screen. They didn’t notice elements that were right in front of their eyes.
Cognitive Psychology helps us to understand and predict what drives users to perceive an interface and behave in certain ways.
Behaviour is strongly influenced by unconscious thoughts, but it is often more predictable than you might expect. The foundations of human cognition will help explain and anticipate user behaviour.
Below are the main mechanisms that users navigate through whilst interacting with an interface.
Attention
- Factors affecting attention, how to get people’s attention
- Cognitive load: The effects of stress, interruptions, and multitasking
- Multiple sensory inputs for communicating information
- Adaptation to information overload
Memory and knowledge
- Memory capacity, fallible memory
- Short-term and long-term memory, information retention
- Working memory to accomplish tasks
- Law of practice and forgetting
Mental models for predicting interactions and outcomes
- People form schemas and scripts of concepts and activities
- Considerations for mental models in interaction design
- Perception stronger than the fact
Problem solving and decision making
- Choosing between different possibilities
- People’s tendencies to choose the path of least resistance (minimize interaction costs)
- How distractions affect cognitive processes
Visual perception
- Typography, legibility, and color and contrast sensitivity
- Visual acuity and discerning fine detail on screens
- Contextual effects in perception, how people perceive relationships among groupings
- Eye gaze patterns, where people look
Strategies for information retrieval
- Recognition compared to recall, and why they matter
- Associative priming and information scent affects time on task
- How users select what links to click on
Language
- Factors that influence reading and comprehension
- Online reading patterns
- Word and sentence processing
- Scanning: Where people look and don’t look
Emotion-driven behaviour
- Aesthetics and first impressions
- Pleasurable and desirable experiences
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Process
With that in mind, I noticed when I exposed fewer elements the users didn’t miss the planned path.
The more components I added to the design, the more behaviour patterns reappeared.
Users were now taking in around 15-20% of the total content available. They were driven by aesthetics and first impressions behaviour. Plain text was just not as noticeable. Colour and shapes were added, straight away users were getting where they needed to go in a few taps.
I was able to walk the team through the data and point out the mental model behind user-behaviour and could easily justify my design decisions based on data from the tests and the principles of cognitive psychology.
Artwork: catswilleatyou
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