Psychology in UI/UX
Every design is about perception and interaction. Whether it's a side of a building or interface of an app. The whole purpose of designing lies in the appeal to the target audience no matter how wide or diverse. That's when we rely on psychology as means of understanding how to apply user's experience into the end product, increase involvement and improve the overall reception. As we center our products within human oriented design, it's important to develop a system of principles and psychological approaches that would increase efficiency of apps and websites, reach essential goals of users. Eventually, any implemented feature, any UX approach is driven by the two main elements: attention and action. The level of engagement becomes a crucial metric.
To get deeper into the perception of a user, we have to understand what psychological connections lie beneath the whole user/interface communication. Although ever changing, user's cognition and perception abide a particular set of ground rules. Users perceives what they expect. It's biased by experience, context, goals. Vision is optimized to see the structure. This rule is detailed in Gestalt theory, when looking at a group of objects, we see the whole, after the individual parts. Close arrangement of elements creates a group association for users. This emphasizes the importance of being careful in locating elements together since users may recognize them as connected with each other. Individual elements that seem similar, will tend to be perceived as a single whole or a group. Users tend to see continuous forms. Human brain tends to perceive collections of fragments and elements as a whole. Very much like closure, user tends to see whole figures in relationship, rather than parts. When objects overlap, user will see smaller figure/element layered on a larger on ground.
Users find it difficult to discriminate pale colors, small color patches and separate patches in design. Around 8% of male and 0,5% of female users of Northern European ancestry have color-blindness. No interface can rely solely on color. It requires very strict and precise allocation of elements within the interface. The main actions and most important features be implemented into the design bearing the serial position effect in mind. Generally speaking, users don't like to think that much. They focus on achieving the goal and prefer familiar paths to exploration of new design. People seek and use structure. It is easier to perceive. Visual hierarchy gets users to goal faster.
UI design must avoid making users deduce things only explicit and exact reasons and demands for action. No extra calculations for user or anything that overloads software's goals. Humans evolved to recognize things quickly, but not to recall arbitrary facts. Short-term memory usually holds 3-7 unrelated items: goals, numbers, images, other information. Long-term memory stores lifetime experience, but can be alternated with time. Some seldom followed routines can appear hard to recollect.
It's all comes to attention as the main metric behind UI/UX design. Call it engagement, call it reaction. Let's break down the most crucial goals any interface pursues in terms of user interactions. Grab the user's attention. Manipulate the user to perform required operations. And finally, Keep the user involved.