The Halo Effect says that any one element in a user's experience with a company will rub off on their interpretation of other elements and their feelings about the company as a whole. Good design in one part of a website will make people like other parts better (and like the company better), but the opposite is also true.
Negative experiences have stronger emotional impact on humans than positive experiences do. Thus, in designing the user experience, we need extra emphasis on avoiding those lows.
It's not just users who are subject to illogical thinking: designers and UX professionals can also make sub-optimal design decisions by falling prey to the same decision biases, such as framing effects when analyzing usability data.
Change blindness is the tendency for people to overlook things that change outside their focus of attention. In user interface design, this explains why screen changes that seem striking to the designer can be completely ignored by users.
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.
Gamification brings the visual design and the mechanics of games to other products. As we examine our ethical responsibilities as UX professionals, social media deserves special consideration. Gamification in social media can make people feel as though their social lives are being scored.
#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.
Designers should consider the physical and mental abilities of children, as well as utilize existing UX conventions. Here are 3 guidelines to consider when designing UX for children, based on our user research with users aged 3-12 years.
Our words define UX research goals for users, stakeholders, and teams. Turning UX research into improved design is already challenging. Why make it more so by setting unsuitable expectations with the words we use to describe research?
What users *think* they know about your system will determine how they interact with the design. Understand users' mental models to design something that'll work well in practice.
People make decisions based on the information that is most readily available to them. Understanding how the availability heuristic works will help you design for the way people think.
The false-consensus effect refers to people’s tendency to assume that others share their beliefs and will behave similarly in a given context. This assumption can lead UX professionals to make the wrong design decisions. Acknowledge your vulnerability and establish checks.
