Psychology and UX Articles & Videos

  • Psychological Ownership: Own the Right Things

    Psychological ownership can make you more effective, but you’ll struggle if it attaches to things you can’t control. Spot misplaced ownership and redirect it.

  • The Hidden Why: Behavioral Economics for UX

    Use behavioral-economics frameworks to uncover hidden friction in your experience and design UX solutions that better support user action.

  • Designing for Serial Task Switching

    Serial task switching, or rapidly shifting attention between tasks, is a natural user behavior that lowers productivity and increases stress and the chance of errors.

  • Clean the Sludge from Decision-Making Workflows

    Help users make choices they’ll be satisfied with to boost satisfaction and retention by simplifying decision-making workflows.

  • The Picture-Superiority Effect: Harness the Power of Visuals

    People often remember visuals better than words. Designers can leverage the picture-superiority effect to make their products memorable and learnable.

  • Attitudinal vs. Behavioral Research in UX

    Attitudinal research captures user opinions and feelings in the form of self-reported data; behavioral research observes user actions.

  • Comparison Tables for Products, Services, and Features

    Use this versatile GUI tool to support users when they need to make a decision that involves considering multiple attributes of a small number of items.

  • The Aesthetic-Usability Effect

    Users are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing, and this effect can mask UI problems during usability testing.

  • Mental Models

    What users believe they know about a user interface impacts how they use it. Mismatched mental models are common, especially with designs that try something new.

  • Memory Recognition and Recall in User Interfaces

    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.

  • Sycophancy in Generative-AI Chatbots

    Large language models like ChatGPT can lie to elicit approval from users. This phenomenon, called sycophancy, can be detected in state-of-the-art models.

  • Psychology for UX: Study Guide

    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.

  • Common-Knowledge Effect: A Harmful Bias in Team Decision Making

    Teams often make worse decisions than individuals by relying too much on widely understood data while disregarding information possessed by only a few individuals.

  • Groupthink in UX Work

    Groupthink is the human tendency to follow the opinion of the majority. This instinct can save time but can also lead us on the wrong path.

  • Three Pillars of User Delight

    Delight can be experienced viscerally, behaviorally, and reflectively. A great design is supported by all three of these pillars and is best evaluated with specific research methods.

  • The Context CUEs Framework in Field Studies

    Context CUEs framework is rooted in distributed cognition theory and guides in-depth observations of users’ physical and social settings.

  • Two Tips for Better UX Storytelling

    Effective storytelling involves both engaging the audience and structuring stories in a concise, yet effective manner. You can improve your user stories by taking advantage of the concept of story triangle and of the story-mountain template.

  • Ink Thinking Improves UX-Decision Making

    Ink thinking is a method of journaling your decisions and their subsequent outcomes to reveal patterns in your intuitive decision making.

  • Three Methods to Increase User Autonomy in UX Design

    Designers should help people use interfaces in ways that align with personal preferences and priorities.

  • Confirmation Bias in UX

    People tend to prefer information that confirms their existing beliefs and to undervalue information that contradicts their beliefs. With the appropriate research methods, the confirmation bias can be recognized and avoided in UX design.