Psychology in design
Some people think design is a purely artistic job but, there is much more to it. The sense of beauty and inspiration are not enough to create a great design. One of the basic studies that help designers understand users is psychology. User centered design makes designers reconsider their approach to their work and go deeper into empathizing with the target audience. Design is an act of communication, which means having the deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating. In order to get better insight into people's needs, designers should keep in mind the psychological principles of human behavior, aspirations and motivations. Psychology helps designers create applications and websites that will help make users perform the actions we want such as making a purchase.
One of the main psychological theories is the Gestalt Principles. Gestalt principles are based on the observation that humans naturally perceive objects as organized patterns and objects. The theory explores users' visual perception of elements in relation to each other. In other words, it shows how people tend to unify the visual elements into groups. The principles, on which users form the groups.
Similarity is the principle that if a user sees objects that look somehow similar, they may automatically perceive them as the individual elements of one group. The similarity between elements is usually defined with shape, color, size, texture or value. The similarity gives users the sense of coherence between the design elements. Continuation is the principle according to which the human eye moves naturally from one object to the other. This often happens through the creation of curved lines allowing the eye to flow with the line. Closure is a technique based on the human eye's tendency to see closed shapes. Closure works where an object is incomplete but the user perceives it as a full shape by filling in the missing parts. When objects are placed in close proximity, the eye perceives them as a group rather than seen individually even if they aren’t similar. Figure / ground is the principle that the eye has a tendency to separate objects from their background. There are lots of examples of pictures that shows two faces depending on where your eye is focused the object or background.
Viceral reactions are reactions that comes from the part of our head called the old brain which is responsible for the instincts and it reacts much faster than our consciousness does. Visceral reactions are rooted in our DNA, so they can be easily predicted. Designers want our ideas to create a positive impression with our design. It's not that difficult to guess what looks nice to people and what doesn't if we know your target audience and their needs. So, the tendency of using the high-resolution beautiful photos or the colorful pictures at landing pages, websites or any other web and mobile products is not accidental.
Well designed websites and applications usually have common patterns. The reason is psychology. When people visit a website or use an application, they expect to see certain things associated with it. For example, when visiting a barbershop website, we don't expect to see bright colors or pictures with cats. Not only do the colors and pictures matter, some obvious and common things such as a list of blog posts on the front page of a blog or the filters in the e-commerce website are also important for successful navigation. Users become accustomed to things quickly and their absence makes them feel uncomfortable.
Before reading a web page, people scan it to get a sense of whether they are interested. According to different studies, including The Nielsen Norman Group, UXPin team and others, there are several popular scanning patterns for web pages, among which "F" and "Z" patterns. F-pattern is referred to as the most common eye-scanning pattern, especially for web pages with large amounts of content. A user first scans a horizontal line on the top of the screen, then moves down the page a bit and reads along the horizontal line which usually covers a shorter area. And the last one is a vertical line down on the left side of the copy where they look for keywords in the initial sentences of the paragraphs. It usually occurs on text heavy pages like blogs and news platforms. Z-pattern is applied to pages which are not so heavily concentrated on the text. A user first scans across the top of the page starting from the top left corner, looking for important information, and then goes down to the opposite corner at a diagonal, finishing with the horizontal line at the bottom of the page, again from left to right. This is a typical model of scanning for landing pages or websites that doesn't have a lot of text and not requiring scrolling down the page, which means that all the core data is visible in the pre-scroll area.
Hick's Law states that the more options users are given, the longer it takes them to make a decision. This means that the more options you give to users, be it products to choose or pictures to look at, the more time and energy it takes to make a decision about the next step of interaction. The possible result here is that the users make the choices but get unpleasant feelings after using the product, or in the worst case, they may not want to take such a significant effort and just leave. Designers are recommended to keep any options including buttons, pictures, pages to a minimum. Removing unnecessary choices, you make the usability of the product more effective.
Psychology is an effective tool in design which makes the creative process more productive while the result become more user-centered. The Gestalt principles confirm in practice that our brain tends to make tricks with us, so designers should consider that fact during the creation process to exclude the possibility of misunderstandings. Knowing these patterns, designers can place the elements in an effective way for users’ perception and help them perform expected actions.