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The Zeigarnik effect suggests that unfinished tasks are more memorable than completed ones. In UX design, we can leverage this effect to encourage user engagement and task completion.
A Flow State is an enjoyable mental state of extreme focus provided by the perfect balance of challenge and skill. Follow our 3 tips to design products that allow users to enter the flow state.
Recalling items from scratch is harder than recognizing the correct option in a list of choices because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.
Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about principles of human psychology and how they relate to UX design.
Basic psychological principles can guide you as a UX designer because most users share many common characteristics. Consider learning more about: motivation, attention, memory, persuasion, learning, decision making, emotion, sensation, perception, or cognitive biases.
Using a screen reader on mobile is challenging because users must access information sequentially and they cannot easily scan page content. Screen-reader users do not consider accessibility menus helpful.
People can only hold a small amount of information in their short-term memory, which fades fast. These facts impact most aspects of screen design and dictate many usability guidelines.
People have very limited ability to keep information in their working memory while performing tasks, so user interfaces should be designed accordingly: to minimize memory load. One way of doing so is to offload items to external memory by showing them on the screen.
People can remember about 7 (plus/minus 2) items in short-term memory. This memory limitation has implications for UX design, but not the ones you often hear stated.
With repeated practice, users develop imprecise memory of objects and content in a UI, but still need additional visual and textual signals to help them find a specific item.
Priming is a basic principle of psychology with big impact on user interface design: exposure to something makes a user more likely to think and react in related ways at later steps in the interaction.
A key question in information architecture (IA) is to decide the number of items in navigation menus (including global menus and local menus). 4 main factors determine the answer, but it's not 7, despite a common myth.
#6 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to design user interfaces to facilitate #memory recognition which is easier than recall because there are more cues available to facilitate the retrieval of information from memory.
