Psychology of User Perception
What makes a design successful? Success of a design depends on the user. Design is all about user perception and ease of interaction. Whether it's a face of a building or an app, the main purpose of design is to appeal to a target audience. That is why we rely on psychology for better understanding of User Experience, involvement boost and improvement of the overall design perception.
To get a better understanding of user perception, we have to define the psychological phenomena behind the user / interface communication. It is well known that user's cognition and perception abide by a particular set of ground rules, which have been described by psychologists from all over the world. Unfortunately, our perception is not perfect. It is determined by a our experience, goals, and context; people usually see what they expect to see. Also, perception may be restricted by medical conditions. We will discuss some of the common reception restrictions.
Our ability to discern color is limited. Users find it difficult to differentiate pale colors, small color patches and separate patches in design. About 8% of male and 0,5% of female users of Northern European descent have color-blindness. No interface can rely solely on color.
Our peripheral vision is poor. Precise allocation of elements within the interface is required. The main actions and most important features are implemented into the design in the serial position, it is called Serial Position effect. The serial position effect was studied by German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus. It is the tendency to remember the first and last items in a list better than those in the middle. This effect is a form of cognitive bias based upon two other effects: primacy and recency effects. The primacy effect determines our brain's tendency to remember information perceived at the beginning of any interaction much better than anything that follows it. The opposite one is the recency effect. It is believed to be caused by more recent information blocks to be stored in short-term memory, which generally lasts for 30 seconds.
Our attention is limited and our memories are flawed. Users can simultaneously focus on 3-7 unrelated items: goals, numbers, images, etc. Old behavioral patterns are sometimes forgotten and hard to recall. It explains why it is so important to keep the user involved. We mainly concentrate on visual information. There are two basic types of attention to visual data, spacial and feature based. Spatial attention is when a user's attention is focused on a certain location in the interface. Spacial attention is when the user's attention is drawn to certain features of an object such as color and shape.
Grabbing user's attention is the foremost mission of any app. In order to keep user attention and manipulate the decisions. It’s important for UI/UX designers to learn the psychological basis to understand users. We need to understand how they perceive objects and how they interact with the environment of the software. This is the only way to create a coherent and successful design for the target audience.