Website Design Lessons from Social Psychology

  • San Francisco: Thursday, April 5

John Boyd
Full-Day Training Course

User-centered design (UCD) practices put users’ needs where they belong: front and center. UCD often doesn’t go far enough, however, because it fails to account for well-known psychological principles concerning users, their behavior, and how multiple users interact. Increasingly, you’re no longer designing for just one user at a time. People user your products simultaneously, and they interact directly and indirectly.

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Users bring their own expectations, attitudes, biases, motivations, preferences, stereotypes, and learning abilities to any given design—and thus to the use of your products. By understanding the associated psychological principles and managing the presence of people on your product, you can create substantially improved products and designs.

This tutorial will give you greater insight into your users and explain how connections between users influence their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors while they’re using your products. In short, you’ll discover how to get more out of your current UCD practices and wrest more competitive advantage from your current design processes.

What You’ll Learn

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to:

  • Shape elements of your product to encourage users to do what you want them to do
  • Use the presence of multiple users to create online social norms
  • Analyze how people currently use your site, and why they use it the way they do
  • Predict users’ likely response to new designs
  • Capitalize upon the shift toward social media and community

Course Outline

  • User needs online and offline
  • User motivation
    • Intrinsic motivation
    • Extrinsic motivation
    • Emotional considerations
  • The importance of user expectations
    • Expectations and intuitive design
    • Violation of expectations
  • Learning and memory (and what happens if your site is not completely intuitive)
    • Learning theory
    • Schedules of reinforcement
    • Superstitious learning (user workarounds)
    • Social learning
  • Learned helplessness and withdrawal of effort
  • Mere exposure
    • Seeing is liking
  • Judgment and decision-making
    • Using mental heuristics for fun and profit
    • Group think
    • The risky shift
  • Choices
    • Too many or not enough?
  • The relationship between user attitudes and user behavior
    • Which comes first?
    • Cognitive dissonance
    • Self-perception theory
  • Personality psychology
    • Personas
  • Social psychology
    • Power of the situation: Channel factors
    • The importance of construal
    • Group dynamics
  • Social facilitation
    • The mere presence of users matters
  • Social loafing
  • Diffusion of responsibility
  • Deindividuation
    • How anonymity can influence behavior
  • Individuation
    • How identification can influence behavior
  • Stress
    • Stress in our 24/7 wired world
  • Attitude change, persuasion, and influence
    • Credibility
    • Encouraging users to do what you want them to do

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures, discussion, and exercises.

Course Materials

Copies of the presentation slides

Who Should Attend

This course is designed for designers, editors, marketers, product managers, researchers, content managers, developers, and others who are interested in understanding the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of their users. Considerable emphasis will be placed on applying principles to topics relevant to attendees.

Instructor

photo of John Boyd John Boyd is Manager of User Experience Research at Google, where he leads design research on consumer products. Prior to joining Google in 2008, he was Director of Design Research at Yahoo!, where he led research on front door, community, and platform-related issues. Upon joining Yahoo! in 2002, Boyd conducted pioneering research on the user experience of online advertising, such as how users respond to “pop-ups,” “pop-unders,” and other rich-media formats. Boyd is also coauthor of the award winning book, The Time Paradox, which investigates how the psychology of time influences our lives. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Boyd was Director of Scientific Affairs at an international consulting firm focused on human factors and performance. He has a PhD in social psychology from Stanford University and a BA in economics from UCLA.