Psychology and UX Articles & Videos

  • How Chunking Helps Content Processing

    Chunking is a concept that originates from the field of cognitive psychology. UX professionals can break their text and multimedia content into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and remember it better.

  • Priming and User Interfaces

    Exposure to a stimulus influences behavior in subsequent, possibly unrelated tasks. This is called priming; priming effects abound in usability and web design.

  • Why Designers Think Users Are Lazy: 3 Human Behaviors

    Designs should align with common user behaviors like device inertia, momentum behavior, and selective attention rather than blaming users for perceived laziness.

  • Don’t Prioritize Efficiency Over Expectations: The Case of Autosave

    Features meant to increase user efficiency by reducing steps can end up hurting users if they do not conform to existing mental models and expectations based on past experiences.

  • Change Blindness Causes People to Ignore What Designers Expect Them to See

    People often overlook new visual details added to an existing image. This affects the usability of many design elements, from error messages to navigation.

  • Satisficing: Quickly Meet Users’ Main Needs

    Unless faced with life-changing information, most site visitors won't read all of the content provided but settle for a “good-enough” answer. Better sorting and clearer writing satisfy users without exhausting the limited time they’re willing to spend on a website.

  • The Reciprocity Principle: Give Before You Take in Web Design

    Humans tend to return good deeds: use this social psychology law in user interface design to gain users’ trust and motivate engagement with your site or app.

  • Minimize Cognitive Load to Maximize Usability

    The total cognitive load, or amount of mental processing power needed to use your site, affects how easily users find content and complete tasks.

  • The Halo Effect

    The "halo effect" is when one trait of a person or thing is used to make an overall judgment of that person or thing. It supports rapid decisions, even if biased ones.

  • User Expertise Stagnates at Low Levels

    Learning is hard work, and users don't want to do it; they don't explore the user interface and don't know about most features.

  • Usability for Novel vs. Routine Tasks

    Repetitive actions on websites often work well, but when users try something new, they frequently fail.

  • User Satisfaction vs. Performance Metrics

    Users generally prefer designs that are fast and easy to use, but satisfaction isn't 100% correlated with objective usability metrics.

  • Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention

    Users don't see stuff that's right on the screen. Selective attention makes people overlook things outside their focus of interest.

  • Short-Term Memory and Web Usability

    The human brain is not optimized for the abstract thinking and data memorization that websites often demand. Many usability guidelines are dictated by cognitive limitations.

  • Durability of Usability Guidelines

    About 90% of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid, though several guidelines are less important because they relate to design elements that are rarely used today.

  • Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster

    The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems.

  • Novice vs. Expert Users

    Web usability has focused on ease of learning for the new visitor. While learnability remains important, it is time to also consider expert performance.