Wednesday, February 15, 2012, 6:30 PM

Caplin will be hosting an “Agile UX Safari” in a couple of weeks. It will be a little different to the last one at MindCandy (we don’t have a tree house in our boardroom!) but we share their passion for design and development and mixing the perfect Agile/UX cocktail.

Check out the event –  We look forward to hosting a healthy discussion on all things design, UX and agile.

Most mental processing occurs unconsciously

The brain often acts without our conscious knowledge. The reason for this is that we have three brains. The old brain, the mid brain (emotional), and the new brain.

The old brain makes most of our decisions

…based on food, sex and danger. These things grab our attention because they determine our possibilities for survival. The old brain was the first to be developed in the evolutionary history of animals and humans. It is the part of the brain that constantly, unconsciously, assesses your environment, deciding what is safe and what isn’t. It controls automatic unconscious processes like breathing and digestion.

As the old brains is concerned with survival above all, nothing is more important that ‘YOU’ to your old brain.

As soon as something relates to you, or the word ‘you’ is used, your old brain switches its focus to that thing. Susan Weinschenk gives this example in her book ‘Neuro Web Design’ where she demonstrates the power of using the word ‘you’ to sway people towards a product.

“First product description: “This software has many built-in features that allow for photos to be uploaded, organised and stored. Photos can be searched for with only a few steps.”

Now read this paragraph for the same product: “You can upload your photos quickly, organise them any way you want to and then store them so that they are easy to share with your friends. You can find any photo with only a few steps.”  Which product would you buy? You’d likely buy the one that says “you” and “your”. This is not a conscious decision. Your non-conscious brain will tell you that the second product is better for you.”

In addition, the old brain is always looking for potential threats, food or opportunities for sex and therefore is very skilled at noticing change. As mentioned above, it is constantly scanning its environment observing changes. And there are a LOT of changes in your environment. The estimate is 11 million piece of information every second. Of that, only 40 are conscious. The unconscious mind lets us process all incoming data and evaluate what is good or bad.

“The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of high-level, sophisticated thinking to the unconscious, just as a modern jet liner is able to fly on automatic pilot with little or no input from the human, ‘conscious’ pilot. The adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner.” -Timothy D. Wilson

It is a hugely efficient tool that shows us what to pay attention to consciously while skimming through the rest. As you might remember from my previous post, multitasking is impossible– we can only focus on one thing at a time– so we need to make sure it’s worth our conscious attention. That’s why it’s such a successful system.

“The only way that human beings could ever have survived as a species for as long as we have is that we’ve developed another kind of decision-making apparatus that’s capable of making very quick judgements based on very little information.” -Malcolm Gladwell

The emotional brain is impulsive.

The emotional brain is (obviously) where all emotions are processed, and it is the root of impulses. Because of this it makes a big impact on our decision-making. The old brain and the emotional brain are very connected in the sense that if the old brain is highly aroused (by fear, or desire) the emotional brain deeply processes this information and etches it in our memory.

Because we are natural visual processors, we respond to pictures and imagery the most. Changes in visuals are easily picked up. Similarly when we think of stories or read, we break the ideas into images in our minds. These images arouse emotions in us. Imagine a news story of a plane crash with a front-page cover of burning, twisted metal shrapnel. That’s going to affect your emotional brain quite a bit. Similarly photos of a sexual nature, food or potentially dangerous scenarios will grab our attention with the old brain and sway our emotions with the midbrain.

Our behaviour is affected by things we aren’t consciously aware of.

“Unconscious processing can give rise to feelings, thoughts, perceptions, skills, habits, automatic reactions, complexes, hidden phobias and concealed desires.”- Wikipedia

One way that scientists have observed this is in the instance of ‘framing’. In ‘framing’, your old brain and new brain receive these unconscious messages and you act upon them. In one study, they saw that using the words “retired”, “Florida” and “tired” actually made people walk slower. Amazingly, a great portion of people’s behavior is driven by factors that they aren’t even aware of.

Both brains act without our knowledge. Rational reasoning is normally not the deciding factor.

Both the old brain and the emotional brain act without our conscious knowledge. People will always assume they made a rational and conscious decision, but in reality our decisions always start from our old- and mid-brains, and sometimes finish there too. Some decisions may come from your new brain (rational), but most are based on the subliminal messages our other brains give us based on things we react to in our environment.

How does this affect web design?

When a website addresses all three brains, then we click and engage with the site.

If a site is visually arousing, we’ll pay attention. If it seems to address ‘our’ needs and relates to ‘you’, we’ll pay attention. If there are a lot of changes, such as movement, carousels, videos, banner ads… it will grab our attention (even if we don’t like it).

By tending to our old and mid-brain triggers (food, sex, danger, movement, change, visuals/imagery, and focus on ‘you’) with appropriate web design decisions, users won’t stand a chance at resisting clicking around a bit.

——————————-

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed it. Next time we’ll be learning about how mental models affect how we should design our products.

But what is the reason for this? Why are we so driven to learn new things?

It's no wonder this game was so popular in our youth. Seeking is half the fun.

Can you say 'addicted'?

So what does this mean in regards to web design?

Clear information explaining the product and how to get started

Visual information organised in relevant containers

Choice = Power

Revealing more information with expandable pop-outs

“Ask and ye shall receive.”

How can we give our users satisfaction in the journey of seeking out new information without making it unobvious or tedious? One way we can do this is by providing information to the user when the user asks for it. This also gives them a sense of control, which will heighten their experience. This could be in the form of expandable items, rollovers, contextual hovers, or click-throughs.

Contextual hover reveals relevant tools or actions

Feedback

Because humans like to be aware and knowledgeable, it is equally important to keep them informed of what is going on. Give them feedback as to what is happening behind the scenes. And importantly to do so in a human language. The computer doesn’t need to inform the user that it is requesting file 1458xj via the server. The computer needs to tell the user that their file will be there and when. Progress bars, status updates, live help are just a few ways to do this.

Letting the user know how much is completed

Informing the user of where they are in the process and how much is left

That’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed this post and you learned something! Join me next time when we see how unconscious mental processing affects humans.

“Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.” -Albert Einstein

SO WHAT IS MEMORY?

Memory in its most basic definition is the ability to encode, store, and retrieve information and experiences. It is essential to our lives. We rely on memory to help us remember our identity and that of others, our past experiences, and potential threats.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

There are three memory systems: Sensory, Short Term, and Long Term.

All of the time, our five senses are taking in a surplus of environmental stimuli, filtering it, and discarding irrelevant information. When the stimulus has ended and an impression remains, it is temporarily recorded in our minds. This is known as Sensory Memory. It often happens unconsciously and only lasts split seconds.

Our Sensory Memory temporarily stores input from the 5 senses

Our mind then goes through two processes to get the information from Sensory Memory to Short Term Memory. The first process is pattern recognition, where we actively search through our Long Term Memory to find a matching pattern for the new raw data. The second process involves focusing our attention on the stimulus until it moves into our Short Term Memory where it is encoded primarily acoustically and occasionally visually.

Our Short Term Memory typically only lasts 30 seconds and has limited capacity to store information because it all occurs in the frontal lobe of our brain. You remember the prefrontal lobe from my previous post, don’t you?

Luckily ours lasts slightly longer

There is no definite number to how many items we can store in our STM at once. One famous theory suggested there was a capacity of 7 plus or minus 2, but this has been disproven and is now suggested to be even lower. By ‘chunking’ information into meaningful groups (think telephone numbers remembered in groups of 3’s or 4’s) we can optimise the “space” in our STM.

Grouping info into meaningful "chunks"

After we have stored the information temporarily in our STM we can encode the information semantically  by creating mental associations and with frequent rehearsal in our Long Term Memory which is spread all throughout the brain in our neural connections.

Or maybe that's just me...

The final act our memory performs is retrieval, where we pull the memory out of storage and reverse the process of encoding. But this isn’t always a straight forward process….

DISTORTED MEMORY

“The process of remembering involves the retrieval of information which has been unknowingly altered in order that it is compatible with pre-existing knowledge.” -Neurophilosophy

Let’s look at one study specific to Short Term Memory that demonstrates how our memory often fails us:

“In a study conducted by Intons-Peterson et. al (3), both younger and older adults were asked to remember the following list: candy, sour, sugar, bitter, good, taste, tooth, nice, honey, soda, chocolate, heart, cake, eat, and pie. They were then asked to take a minute to write down all remembered words. The next test entailed that subjects consider the words taste, point, sweet and identify which word was included in the original list. An overwhelming 80-90% of participants confidently, but incorrectly, selected the word sweet. While the word sweet yields a close association to the presented collective of words, this association should not nullify the fact that its selection still results in a memory malfunction. ….Incidents such as these are frightening reminders of the memory’s fallibility.”

Memories change and adapt based on your current views

Yes, our memory can be deceptive and as Daniel L. Schacter, a Harvard psychologist, explains in his renowned book ‘The Seven Sins of Memory’ it is deceptive in seven distinct ways:

1. Transience
2. Absent-mindedness
3. Blocking
4. Suggestibility
5. Bias
6. Persistence
7. Misattribution

But I’ll only focus on the ones particularly relevant to the web:

TRANSIENCE

The weakening or loss of memory over time, regardless of age. For instance, you might clearly remember what background you chose for your MySpace profile back in 2001, but now it is (fortunately) a vague memory. “I’m pretty sure it was pink and had dancing stars with anime kitten faces on them….”

Close enough

SUGGESTIBILITY

Information that is inaccurately added to memories due to leading questions and suggestion. This commonly happens to eyewitnesses to crimes being repeatedly interviewed as their stories change based on the questions, but can also happen during the interview stages of UX research with SMEs and users. “So would the best solution be something like an Apple product interface?”

BIAS

The editing or rewriting of past memories skewed by our current knowledgeand beliefs. “I always knew online dating would become mainstream.”

MISATTRIBUTION

Assigning a memory to the wrong source or context. For instance, saying “I heard on the news the other night that Farmville was responsible for brain cell depletion in its regular users..” when actually you read it on Twitter.

BUT HOW DOES THIS AFFECT UX DESIGN?

All of the above ‘sins’ of memory are particularly relevant to the user research stage. When one conducts interviews with SMEs or users, they need to take what is said with a pinch of salt: “self-reporting” is often inconsistent due to the fact that memories are not as accurate as we’d like to think they are. In addition, if the user or SME hasn’t used a similar system in a long time, their memory may have decayed . Memories we don’t use are erased from our Long Term Memory.

In another study by Sir Frederick Bartlett, a 20th century British psychologist, he asked subjects to read a Native American folktale and re-tell the story several times throughout the course of a year.

What he discovered was that the subjects reconstructed the tale to fit with their personal biases and beliefs:

“Participants omitted information they regarded as irrelevant, changed the emphasis to points they considered to be significant, and rationalized the parts that did not make sense, to make the story more comprehensible to themselves. In other words, memory is reconstructive rather that reproductive.” – Neurophilosphy

As we can see, it’s almost to be expected that human memory will err. This is why it is so, so, so crucial to conduct observational user research in place of (or in addition to) user interviews. In short, watch what they do, not what they say! Remember that

"You say it's easy-to-use, Becky, but why is the screen still black then?"

During the design phase, we should also pay attention to the ‘Seven Sins of Memory‘. With Short Term Memory only lasting 30 seconds at best, a conscientious interface would ensure that the users will not have to remember every step in a task flow, but will be guided easily through it.

In addition, the limited capacity for STM implies we should not bombard users with a surplus of information all at once that they will never be able to focus on and remember for more than a few seconds. Designs should direct the users’ attention to the task at hand.

Don't give your users information overload

With visual design tools like distinctiveness (making information stand out), primacy (important information first), frequency (information repeated as needed), and associations (positioning information/objects to suggest relationships- think ‘chunking’) we can help our users store more information in their Sensory and Short Term Memory. This will ultimately help them more effectively navigate our system and pinpoint key information they need to remember.

One final thought on an approach to making the system more user-friendly: maintaining consistency throughout navigation menus and with interaction patterns means that the user only has to program their mind once to this behaviour.

"Hey, I'm programming my mind here! Do you mind?!"

“If we remembered everything, we would have too much information to sift through to find the important things that affect our livelihood.”

So now that you’ve finished reading this blog post, read it again. Over and over, until your mind can recite its key points and hopefully then it will be encoded for Long Term Memory.  Thanks for reading!

———————-

The next part of the ‘Psychology of UX’ series will be on how humans are social creatures.

Sources: Neurophilosophy – http://bit.ly/b1fwHK

What Makes Them Click- http://bit.ly/3j1w4N

AllPsych- http://bit.ly/d6zpK1

Psychology Today- http://bit.ly/pLpGR9

American Psychological Association- http://bit.ly/92rwFK

Spark Notes- http://bit.ly/o7RKBo

The 7±2 Urban Legend - http://bit.ly/FsPVV

PsyBlog- http://bit.ly/y95mj

UX Mag- http://bit.ly/9I2OAW

Hello again and welcome back to the Psychology of UX series! Today’s topic is all about MISTAKES. But before we begin let’s just define…

What exactly is a mistake?

“..a decision or action, or lack thereof, that we fear we’ll come to regret. They usually cause some degree of pain, loss or struggle,” says Mel Schwartz from Psychology of Today. For a more software-based explanation we might say a mistake is simply something that is wrong or that causes a problem with a user’s normal workflow.

Yes, mistakes. We all make them. We wish we hadn’t. One snooze button too many. Spending money on things we shouldn’t. Having that extra cocktail at work drinks and breaking out your embarrassing dance moves….I’m divulging too much of my personal life. But what about mistakes in the digital world? What happens when a user makes a mistake on a computer? These are things we will cover in today’s post.

‘Assume people will make mistakes. Anticipate what they will be and try to prevent them.’

Susan Weinschenk stated the above in her ‘Psychologist’s View of UX‘ post, the inspiration for this series.

Why would we want to prevent them though?

Well aside from mistakes causing users great frustration and pain when interacting with a system, mistakes can be rather costly, particularly in the financial sector where a user might be trading thousands, or even millions, of dollars with one click. It’s imperative when designing the user experience for financial interfaces to make the workflow easy-to-use and error-free.

There goes my retirement fund!

So how do we prevent errors?

The best error message is no error message. What this means is that a system that is designed well will not allow the user to make an error to begin with. The main way we can accomplish this is by predicting what mistakes a user might make, based on knowledge gathered by researching  the environment they operate in and their needs with the system. We can then adapt our designs accordingly to avoid allowing those mistakes to be made in the system.

If the task the user will be conducting is very complex or error-prone, a further approach is to break up the task into smaller steps so that each step can act as a quality gate before the user is allowed to move onto the next. We often see this design solution in online payment portals on retail websites, like Amazon or this donation website below.

One step at a time...

How do we treat errors in the system?

Not like this. Can you read that? Honestly? Even you developers out there (who often are the ones who have the mission of writing these error messages). You are human too —  we don’t talk like that. The first crucial step to dealing with errors in a system is speak in human language! Explain that an error has occurred, what the error is, how the user can correct it and where they can go for more help to fix it. In plain language. When something goes wrong in a system, it’s of the highest importance that the user knows what to do about it.

The below images are great examples of clear, human language communicating to the user the problem with visual cues (symbols and colours) and sometimes even contextual hints as to where the problem went wrong (i.e. a highlighted password field when the password is wrong)

Suggestions of what to do next

Effective colour and symbol usage

Everything wrong is in red. Perfect.

Human language! Yippee!

Simple. Problem. What is it. Do this.

We should also allow users to UNDO actions, such as mistakes they have just made. Ctrl-Z, anyone? It’s been a godsend for me. Users need autonomy within a system and this can only be achieved if the system is so well designed that the user can’t get so lost down a path they can’t find their way back to where they were. Allow them to undo and reverse steps. Similarly the ‘ESC’ key can be used to exit a curtain task that isn’t yet completed, to prevent the damage from being done.

In reality, it is near impossible to create a completely error-free system that guarantees the users won’t make mistakes. But why?

Because people make mistakes and UX Designers are just people.

“If Ernest Hemingway, James Mitchener, Neil Simon, Frank Lloyd Wright and Pablo Picasso could not get it right the first time, what makes you think that you will?” –Paul Heckel

Without sturdy user research, the designer will have a lack of knowledge of the user needs and this can result in an unusable design. That’s why we as designers need more time. More time for research with the users and more time for testing with the users.

At a ‘Lean UX’ workshop I went to last weekend Janice Fraser, one of the founders of the famous Adaptive Path UX consultancy, said rather powerfully in regards to the Agile methodology, “Don’t throw the design out into the world and hope it works. I no longer want that responsibility. We are supposed to get it right the first time, yet the developers get to do it over and over again.”

UX Designers need the allowance of time and budget to be able to test our prototypes on real users before the designs are fully coded and completed for product release. That’s not to say that a design shouldn’t be coded to test if it’s implementable or to test the functioning prototype on a user, but we need time to test the designs before they are finalised.

The problems begin to appear with usability testing

That way we can see what errors the user might run into or what errors are prevalent in your design. And then we can iterate and improve on our designs.

Not enough time?

“The joy of an early release lasts but a moment. The frustration of an unusable system lasts forever.”

Let’s do it right, step by step, and try to design a system that is *mostly* error-free.

————–

Thanks for reading! The next part of the Psych of UX series will be on how human memory is complicated. Until then…

Today we are going to talk about something that most people think they do very well, but in actuality don’t…. MULTI-TASKING.  If you are multi-tasking while reading this blog post, CLOSE THE OTHER WINDOWS. I need your full attention. Seriously. Let’s find out why.

Multi-tasking is a modern trend where we try to mentally manage two or more tasks simultaneously with the (erroneous) belief that we are optimising productivity. For instance, you might be at work checking your emails, while also filling in an excel spreadsheet, reading the news, chatting to your co-worker about internal changes, drinking a cup of tea, and browsing some websites to gather research for a presentation you are putting together– all at the same time. This might be a typical work day for most people.

At home, media saturates the multi-tasking experience even more with people often watching TV while browsing numerous websites on their laptop and texting a friend on their phone. This kind of behaviour has become so commonplace in our society today that most people would agree they do this, and most would also defend their ability to manage multiple things going on at the same time. But they’d be wrong.

Don’t believe me? Try this experiment. Think about the taste of chocolate while you mentally add 38 and 272. Mmm, 310 is my new favourite flavour! No, but in all seriousness, you couldn’t do it. It’s impossible.

The origin

….of the word itself helps us understand how far removed this method of operating is from the way the human mind works. In fact, the term ‘multi-tasking’ came about from the computing industry back in the 1960′s to refer to the ability of a microprocessor to process several tasks at the same time. It wasn’t until 1998 (only 13 years ago) that humans started adapting the word to themselves. So in retrospect it is a very new concept and an even newer practice for human beings to be undertaking.

The resemblance is uncanny

But what about historically speaking? Did our ancestors multi-task without knowing they were “multi-tasking”? Sure. Human beings have always had the capacity to handle several things at once since the time of hunter-gatherers. Mothers would pick berries while feeding their infants, or preparing food while keeping an eye on their children.

This is kind of the same thing our ancestors did....

Men would have had complex, long hunts where they had to have mental maps of where their buddies were in hiding to optimise their approach in hunting the animal, simultaneously remaining quiet, exploring the land with their feet to ensure stability and preparing to attack. Because of this need, we developed part of our brain known casually as ‘the executive system’ and officially as ‘the prefrontal cortex’.

You'll be slapping your head in the same area when you try to multi-task unsuccessfully

This front lobe of your brain conducts your focus by helping you ignore distractions and switch from task to task. But nowadays it seems our assuredness in our ability has surpassed the ability itself. You might have experienced this if you ever have tried to type a message to a friend on a computer while someone else talks to you in person. Your mind tunes out the voice and while you can pretend you are paying attention, you will most likely have to ask them to repeat themselves.

The way the prefrontal lobe works is that it can only process one thing at a time, but it can switch between two tasks very rapidly. You can do more than one thing seemingly at the same time, but in reality you are ordering them and deciding which to do at that specific time. However the negative side to switching from task back and forth again and again is that it takes about one minute to recover our train of thought, breaking our concentration and making us unfocused. For full concentration on one task to be re-established, it can take fifteen minutes! In this mode we are only capable of superficially scraping the surface. This in turn is more counter-productive than anything else.

If Dilbert says it, it's true.

“The general understanding people have of multi-tasking is a bit of a misnomer. I’ve never seen any examples of anyone who can do three or even two intelligent tasks simultaneously,” says neuropsychologist Prof Laws

Nowadays the speed and amount that we multi-task has exploded due to technology. Software often requires us to think about multiple things at the same time. For instance, if the predictive text feature on your mobile phone is correctly amending what you are writing as you write it, you are forced to pay attention to two very similar tasks. And if the tasks are too similar they compete for the same space in the brain, and you mentally can NOT focus on both at the same time.  Yet if one task is something more automatic or highly practised like walking or breathing, we can do another conscious task simultaneously as we require very little processing to perform the first function.

The last photo of Earl ever taken

So why should we care?

The ideal worker? 19 heads and 20 hands for multi-tasking

Multi-tasking is very popular these days. It hints at productivity. It seemingly allows us to split our attention (most likely from one or more things we don’t want to do…. and potentially another we do — like watching TV while you do your homework). This makes the work become less tedious. While this practice can be easy to fall into, we should avoid it as it will take us longer to accomplish any one task, not to mention the quality will most likely fail.

Even more importantly, the brain needs time to recover between switching between tasks to gather its thoughts. Without this time, the individual will be over stimulated and quickly become stressed out with all of the effort they are giving to multiple tasks. Too much multi-tasking can condition the brain to an overexcited state which makes it hard to focus even when you want to. This makes for unhappy, unproductive and exhausted workers. Do you really want that?

How can we overcome this?

Well, the honest answer is: we can’t.

“With such complicated tasks [you] will never, ever be able to overcome the inherent limitations in the brain for processing information during multitasking. It just can’t be, any more than the best of all humans will ever be able to run a one-minute mile,” says David E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan

We should respect the way our mind works and work in a similar fashion. From a UX perspective, we can design software, websites and all digital interfaces to minimise distraction and focus the user’s attention onto one task at a time. This means you can’t have all the tools in the toolbox in front of you when you work. We can give our users more of a holding hand as they are guided through a clear workflow that helps them accomplish one task, and THEN another… and another. One at a time, considering what communication and information is really worthy of interrupting your precious concentration and when you should seek out new data.

This is a myth. Humans don't operate this way.

We at Caplin are really starting to consider ways that we can incorporate this approach of one task at a time into our designs so that our users won’t be as overwhelmed with the amount of data available to them. The financial world seems to LOVE throwing every single piece of data onto every possible screen they can, which must overwhelm users of these systems immensely. While seemingly giving the user a feeling of power with all of this information at their fingertips (this is the upcoming topic for The Psychology of UX: Part 7 coincidentally), realistically they are only able to focus on one item at a time, flitting from one to another to another to another to another, trying to remember what they were thinking just a second ago. Are you exhausted yet? I am.

One way we can ‘trick’ our mental system though…

is to multi-task tasks that don’t share attentional resources, i.e. use different sensory inputs. Like visual and auditory, which can work together without interfering at times. One really cool example we found of this was a chart that has supporting sounds to reinforce the direction of movement of the graph, which helps reinforce understanding. Check it out for yourselves! Imagine the potential for tapping into our user’s various senses to help them quickly understand what they are seeing, as well as helping them focus, and in turn be more productive.

Simplifying a user’s workflow

…and the maximum things they can do at one time, teamed with tapping into our various sensory systems may be the key to creating interfaces that are designed with the user in mind: a human being, not a microprocessor. Mono-tasking should be the new multi-tasking. Spread the word.

The next part in The Psychology of UX series will be on how common it is for humans to make mistakes. Stay tuned!

P.S. I attempted to multi-task when writing this blog post for the irony and it took me four days of occasionally writing a sentence before I got fed up. On the final day when I decided to mono-task (it’ll catch on ) I managed to compile this in an hour or so. Proof, it works!

References

Think You’re Multitasking? Think Again

Only A Few Can Multitask

Is Multi-tasking A Myth?

The Madness of Multitasking

Learning To Multitask: Don’t Bother

You Can’t Multitask

You Can’t Multitask, So Stop Trying

genM: The Multitasking Generation

Vision And Audition Do Not Share Attentional Resources in Sustained Tasks

Ever since I found the blog ‘What Makes Them Click’ by Susan Weinschenk, I’ve been fascinated with her writing. I’m a natural analyst, much to some people’s dismay, as I mentally poke and prod people till I really understand what drives people to behave the way they do. This has led me to study Product Design, Anthropology and to now be employed in the UX industry in an attempt to understand people and better their human experience. So when I read Susan’s post on ‘The Psychologist’s View of UX Design‘, I was fully engrossed in what she had to say on the matter.

Her article broke down several areas of study relating to the brain, memory and the visual systems in humans to explain how these are relevant to UX. I don’t want to spoil the article just yet as over the course of the next couple of weeks I will break down Susan’s post and further explain my understanding of each of her ten points and what this has meant to my experience of UX thus far or the direction I’d like to take my own UX practices within a professional environment. In the mean time, I will list the ten points that Susan makes in her post.

10 THINGS TO ABOUT HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY THAT SHOULD INFORM UX DESIGN

1. People Don’t Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To
2. People Have Limitations
3. People Make Mistakes
4. Human Memory is Complicated
5. People are Social
6. People are Easily Distracted
7. People Crave Information
8. Most Mental Processing is Unconscious
9. People Create Mental Models
10. People Understand Visual Systems

Keep an eye out for the upcoming ‘Psychology of UX’ series I will be posting over the next couple of weeks!

A BACKGROUND ON SUSAN WEINSCHENK:

Susan has a Ph.D. in Psychology which, for over 30 years, she has applied to design and technology. She has two books published (one being released this month!), Neuro Web Design and 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People. She works for Human Factors International, a leading user research company (and coincidentally the same people who made the ‘ROI of UX’ video I posted about not long ago.)

Breaking Development 2011 (Design and Development for the Mobile Web) is now over. The line up of speakers was excellent with many of the leading voices for the mobile web presenting.

Although I didn’t attend I was following the Twitter stream avidly. It was was full of activity with fantastic insights and quotes aplenty, and links to several of the presentation slides.

Where possible I have collated links to the presentations here, and will continue to add links as and when I find them.

I would strongly recommend that anyone interested in mobile web development, or anyone considering a mobile strategy for their company (and if not, why not?), to read through these. There are many great nuggets of information.

• The Future of the Mobile Web by Peter-Paul Koch
• Beyond the Mobile Web by Stephanie Rieger
• After HTML5: Mobile Device APIs and PhoneGap by Brian LeRoux
• What the web community can learn from Mobile by Brian Fling
• Building Tomorrow’s Web With Today’s Tools by James Pearce
• Native is easier. Web is essential. by Jason Grigsby
• Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski
• Fake it ’til you make it: creating mobile apps that feel like native apps by Jonathan Snook
• Real World Responsive Design by Stephen Hay
• A Perfect Storm: When Mobile Met The Cloud by Brian Alvey
• The Enyo Framework: Designing for Mobile Apps and Speed by Ben Combee
• Building Rich user experiences with Sencha Touch by David Kaneda
• Taxonomy of Touch by Nate Koechley