Design and Psychology-1

We make many subconscious decisions on a daily basis, and most of the time these decisions lead to an irrational or a bias action. We all have these traits hardwired in us, and it’s important for us to know how and why these actions work. Understanding psychological processes like memory, information processing, and cognitive biases can help designers make better decisions. We know that people have different mental models, and a specific design can be perceived in different ways by many people. But the goal is to use the design the way it’s supposed to be perceived.

All the good designers incorporate psychology to inform their design decisions. And cognitive psychology helps us in understanding the underlying mechanism in which people process information and here are certain biases that have been observed through experiments, and must be kept in mind before designing something. I will only cover the first 6 biases in this article, and the remaining ones will be followed in my next article

1. Choice Overloading

An excess of choices can lead to fatigue and can make people feel dissatisfied with the experience, or even worse, abandon the process altogether. Not only do we feel mentally exhausted when we have to compare too many options, but also, once we’ve decided, we are often leftover with a nagging feeling that they missed something important.

A behavioral economics principle, that explains the negative effects of having too many options to choose from.

• Buyer’s Remorse: sense of regret you have after purchasing a product, which can lead to lack of trust in the product and company

When you have lots of options you are responsible for what happens to you. Bad choices make people regret only if they bear responsibility. Although adding options makes it easier to choose something we’ll really like, it also makes it easier for us to regret choices that don’t live up to our expectations. Greater choices equal greater opportunity for buyers remorse, and we are prone to regret aversion. We do our best to avoid it because it feels bad.

For example, when you’re purchasing a product on an e-commerce store, you’d be overwhelmed by the variety of a similar product offered by many companies, and if you buy a product of one company and it doesn’t turn out be good, then you develop a negative impression for that company.

Or another example would be if you choose to have a dinner in a buffet, chances are that you might not taste everything that’s available, which would lead you to underappreciate what you already had. And there would be a sense of not availing the full value that you paid for. Hence limited no. of choices are usually better.

• Analysis Paralysis: procrastination( overthinking followed by zero action)

It occurs when there are too many choices/variants of a single product. Which might lead to indecision and wastage of time. This can lead to a decreased user engagement and fewer sales.

The best ways to tackle this bias are:

• Reduce offerings( if two given products aren’t exactly different then remove one of them)
• Categorize offerings ( also helps in SEO)
• Highlight top products/services
• Help users compare offerings

And these solutions are already incorporated by bigger e-commerce stores such as amazon

2. Halo Effect

The Halo Effect says that any one element in a user’s experience with a company will outweigh their interpretation of other elements( like a typo in website) 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.

Remember the phrase

Don’t judge a book by it’s cover

The reason we tell this is because that’s exactly what we do, we judge a book by its cover! Because until and unless the cover is engaging enough to draw your attention, you wouldn’t go for it, no matter how good the content inside that book is. The Halo effect is a double-edged sword and it should we use wisely to turn the things in your favor.

3. Negativity Bias

Imagine you’ve worked hard on a project, and finally, when you show it to your peers, they are amazed by it and give encouraging compliments, but then there’s one person who just blatantly criticizes your work, now you tell me, whose comment will influence you more?

Negative experiences have a stronger emotional impact on humans than positive experiences do. Thus, in designing the user experience, we need extra emphasis on avoiding those lows.

So why are humans attuned to the negative? Bad news or negative traits signal danger. From an evolutionary perspective, learning to identify potentially hazardous situations was vital for survival in a harsh environment rich in predators. While today’s world has arguably fewer threats, humans are still wired for self-preservation.

In usability studies, a single flaw in your website will outweigh other positive features, and even if the site is improved in the future, the chances of increasing user satisfaction remains less, because studies have shown that UX failures count more than UX successes, and as Jakob’s law states, that people spend more time on other websites rather than yours, so they are bound to judge yours in comparison to other sites.

Think of it in this way, that you went to a restaurant, and ordered something. But unluckily that dish wasn’t cooked properly and it left a terrible aftertaste. Now the question is, do you think that all the different dishes served by that restaurant are bad? Possibly no. Do you have a poor opinion about that restaurant now? Mostly yes. Will you come back to the said restaurant even if they have improved the quality of food? Probably not.

This is the proper representation of the Halo effect and Negativity bias in work

To overcome this bias, the following actions can be taken:

1. Follow design standards, as explained earlier, according to Jakob’s law it’s wise to follow the trend that people usually see on other websites.
2. Conducting user research to get an insight about the users mental model and try to match with it.
3. Write encouraging error messages, As insurance, counteract negative experiences with delightful ones. Don’t be afraid to make your users smile. Sometimes, serendipitous encounters can leave lasting impressions.
4. Do usability testing to figure out the flaws and keep reiterating.

4. Framing Bias

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.

And one of the most common examples is the framing bias, according to which different conclusions can be drawn from the same information

Framing is a well-known phenomenon in psychology. A frame is the context used to describe an idea, question, or decision. Frames heavily influence our interpretations and conclusions by emphasizing (or ignoring) certain aspects of a situation. This seems obvious if you frame something really simple in a complex manner people might find it hard to understand.

A common usage of frames is in displaying error messages, if a person isn’t able to understand it perfectly then that will lead to zero action and frustration.

Probably that’s why in every design challenge, the problem statement is reframed into a simpler version to make things clearer.

Imagine you are working on a website design, and have just completed a usability test with 20 users. One task involved using the website’s search function, so you now have a numerical measurement of how many users were able to find and use the search function.

The task results could be stated in 2 different ways:

• 4 out of 20 users could not find the search function on the website.
• 16 out of 20 users found the search function on the website.

Logically, both of these statements describe exactly the same result, which is an objective data point. But if you’re like most people, the conclusions you come to might be very different depending on which phrasing is used.

The trick is to become aware of your decision frame, so that you aren’t unconsciously overlooking important information. These three strategies can help minimize the impact of framing bias:

1. Resist the urge to go with the first thought/instinct, try to take your time to slowly understand the problem. And put it in an efficient manner
2. Gather more context before making a decision
3. Experiment with different frames, and compare the results during usability testing.

5. Status Quo Bias

This one talks about our tendency to resist change, and not taking that extra mile. This can have a dramatic impact on a design such that if you don’t try to get out of that comfort zone then you wouldn’t try to improve an almost working design to a better one.

It’s related to loss aversion as we’re afraid to lose or change what we already have and don’t want to do something about it. Thus it should be made sure that if there’s something in a design, it’s not just because of “ that’s the way it has always been”

The only way to overcome the status quo bias, is by constantly questioning the status quo. Because it’s also important in developing your mental model for user’s benefit.

6. Change Blindness

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.

The fundamental reason for which change blindness occurs is a limitation in our attention capacities. Any complex scene has a multitude of details, and it’s hard and inefficient for people to attend to all of them. What we normally do is take shortcuts. Change blindness occurs when movement as a cue for change is weak or completely absent

The most common example of change blindness is while filling an online form and submitting it, yet it still won’t submit because of an unchecked box that you missed, and a tiny error message alongside it.

While interacting with a UI element, there’s a change in the state of the interface, like refreshing of a page or moving an image in a carousel, there’s a chance of change blindness to occur.

Change blindness can cause users to commit errors by missing important details, or increase the overall time to perform a task like submitting a form.

In sites with an infinite/long scrolling feed, there are chances that people miss the semipersistent navigation bars that appear at the topmost corner of the screen here “top stories”, and they simply have to scroll all the way up. This is also an example of change blindness.

There are ways in which change blindness can be avoided, which are as follows:

• Make one change at a time
• Group all elements that will change
• Use animation to signal change
• Dim the areas of the screen

So these are the 6 cognitive biases that a designer must consider before starting a project. The remaining ones will be covered in the next article, I hope you found this useful. Do let me know by pressing that clap button!