Psychological terms associated with real-world physical objects and experiments on animals.

In my last article, we mainly focused on Cognitive, Social psychology, and Brain Systems along with various psychological terms, laws, and effects that will make us better product designers.

Now let’s discover a few more psychological terms particularly associated with real-world physical objects and experiments on animals. We also cover human behavior and their limitation.

Pavlov’s dog experiment, Law of effect, empiricism, Human Behavior, cognitive dissonance, cognitive biases, negative bias, Restrictions of Perception, change blind, Color Psychology, and discoverability.

Pavlov, Classical Conditioning

The Pavlov dog experiment is perhaps the most well-known psychological experiment on classical conditioning (The concept of conditioning behavior), it tells animals (including humans) can be conditioned to respond physically and emotionally to social cues.

Pavlov would ring a bell right before he fed a group of dogs. The dogs quickly learned that the bell, an audio signal not related at all to food, meant food was on its way. Unconsciously, instinctively, the dogs would begin to salivate every time they heard the bell, even if there wasn’t any food around yet.

The law of effect

The law of effect principle developed by Edward Thorndike suggested that: responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation, and responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation.

Thorndike placed a cat in the puzzle box, and it was encouraged to escape to reach a piece of fish placed outside. The cats experimented with different ways to escape the puzzle box and reach the fish.

Eventually, the cats would press the lever, and the door would open so that the animal could receive the reward. Even though the first pressing the lever occurred simply by accident, the cats became likely to repeat it because they had received an award immediately after performing the action.

Rewards act like reinforcements for a user and can be both positive and negative.

Positive reinforcement — A user places an order on a site. Everything went smoothly and after the transaction was complete a discount coupon/gift is given to the user.

Negative reinforcement — A user places an order and the page gets stuck while the payment was processing.

If you work hard and then receive a promotion and pay raise, you will be more likely to continue to put in more effort at work. — Positive reinforcement

Empiricism

It is the idea that all learning comes from only experience and observations. These experiences shape the mental model of a user. While designing any product it is important that we understand the mental model of the user.

Human Limitation

Human perception is not always perfect. It depends on the experience, goals, and context — people usually see what they expect to see. Sometime perception may be restricted by medical conditions. Below are some of the restrictions:

Color vision is limited

Also, known as color blindness - an accessibility issue, where people have one defect cone type: They’re either red-blind, green-blind, or blue-blind.

Peripheral vision is poor.

Peripheral vision, or indirect vision, is the vision as it occurs outside the point of fixation, i.e., away from the center of gaze. In product design, if something is outside the central vision, it is quite difficult to view.

That is why it is always a best practice to show visual feedback (confirmation or error message) in the central vision or provide micro animation to grab human attention.

Change blindness

Humans ignore changes in a scene when they occur in a region that is far away from their focus of attention.

Change blindness can affect critical information such as error messages and navigation menus, leading to user confusion and task failure. Placement and contrast of content are key when designing to avoid being overlooked by users.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

In the field of psychology, Cognitive dissonance (things are not in harmony) is the discomfort a person feels when their behavior does not align with their values or beliefs. It can also occur when a person holds two contradictory beliefs at the same time.

Cognitive Biases

Humans have a tendency to think in particular ways or make all sorts of mental mistakes that can affect both our thinking, and actions. Refer to know more on cognitive biases.

Negative bias

Negativity bias is the tendency for humans to pay more attention or give more weight to negative experiences over neutral or positive experiences. Even when negative experiences are inconsequential, humans tend to focus on the negative

Human Behavior

Humans are lazy:

They don’t want to think or work more than they have to. So avoid lengthy forms to fill up by users, they may leave the page. Use the auto-complete or search feature for filling out a form.

People don’t read they scan

Steve Krug’s book, Don’t Make Me Think, People typically glance at websites and scan the content, clicking whatever they first see that catches their interest or looking for the information they need, rather than reading the whole page. Please read this article on reading patterns.

There are two scanning patterns
Z pattern
F Pattern

User make mistake

There are two types of errors that users make: slips and mistakes.

A slipis when the user has the correct mental model and goal yet makes an error accidentally. For instance, if two buttons are close together and you click one rather than the other on accident, that would be a slip.

Below are a few points to prevent error

• Provide suggestions
• Offering default value
• Provide logical constraint
  E.g., Once the check-in date is selected the date before this date became greyed out

A mistake is when a user has an incorrect mental model or performs an action that is not aligned with the functionality. This happens due to a lack of information related to that particular task or problem.

• Gather User Data
• Follow Design Conventions
• Communicate Affordances
• Preview Results
• Provide constraints
• Provide feedback
• Allow people to confirm choices
• Show preview.
  E.g., show a preview option before submitting an insurance form, allowing the user to show a preview and then submit.

Users want to control and freedom

We should allow users the freedom to control the interaction, in case they make mistakes, and the system will provide a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state and come out from the trouble

Example — Support undo and redo, give the ability to cancel a long download etc.

Endowment Effect — We value something more once we feel we own it

The Endowment Effect says that ownership, or the intent to own, creates emotional bonds between a person and an item. In other words, people place a higher value on things they own or intend to buy.

An everyday example of the Endowment Effect happens when people sell their homes. Often they overestimate how much the house is worth because they’re emotionally invested in it.

IKEA Effect
We place a disproportionately high value on self-made products.

The IKEA effect, named after everyone’s favorite Swedish furniture giant, describes how people tend to value an object more if they make (or assemble) it themselves. More broadly, the IKEA effect speaks to how we tend to like things more if we’ve expended effort to create them.

Human hates changes

Humans resist change, when an application gets a totally different redesign, most users don’t like it as they don’t like to learn different ways of doing things. We should do a progressive change and maintain consistency in design. Watch this video

Users recognize things than recall or remember

Recognition is like an objective test, it involves more cues. whereas Recall is like a subjective test, you put more pressure on your brain to retrieve the information

Recognition is easier than recall because it involves more cues for instance it is easier to recognize a familiar face than recall the name of that person

Now Let’s discuss the fundamental psychological terms associated with Good Design.

According to Don Norman, the father of user experience design -Two of the most important features of good design are discoverabilityand understanding.

Discoverability (the ability of something to be discoverable): Is it possible to figure out what actions are possible and how to perform them?

Understanding: What does it all mean? How is the product supposed to be used? What do all the different controls and settings mean?

Discoverability makes it easier to understand where to perform actions.

In Digital products — how easily the user can find the necessary elements/ features while by interacting with an application/interface

If some things are hard to discover on an interface or the user is easily lost, it may mean that the user flow and information architecture should be reevaluated.

The discoverability of a product is determined by a combination of
6 fundamental design concepts:

• Affordance is the perceived action of an object.
• Signifiers tell us exactly where to perform an action.
• Constraints help restrict the kind of interactions that can take place.
• Feedback communicates the response to our actions.
• Mapping is the relationship between the controls & the effect they have.
• Conceptual models are a simple explanation of how something works.

Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible signals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more importance to designers than affordances. — Don Norman (Norman, 2013)

Affordance

What the thing can do (affordance)An affordance is a perceivable or visual clue that tells you what action the thing can afford.

It is a property or feature of an object which presents a prompt on what can be done with this object. In short, affordances are cues that give a hint of how users may interact with something, no matter physical or digital.

For instance, a door affords (“is for”) pushing and pulling. A switch affords on/off or Flip

The below images are about the types of affordances

Explicit — Obvious clearly identify
Implicit — hidden need to cue to get the affordance

Anti-affordance

Anti-affordances are the prevention of interaction. They are the absence of a feature in an object preventing your ability to perform a certain action. For example — you can’t go beyond the boundary of the Microsoft PowerPoint work area. If you create something outside the boundary (work area) it is not visible on the slideshow.

Signifiers

A mark/sign or sound (current state or perceivable indicator) that communicates appropriate behavior to a person. They tell us where actions should take place.

A signifier is an additional piece of information that supports an affordance.

Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where those actions should take place.

Example: For example, the icons, labels are the signifier

Constraints

It’s an aspect of the design that constrains, or restricts, a user from performing a certain action at a given moment. There are four types of constraints — physical, logical, semantic, or cultural, which guide the possible actions and ease interpretation.

Below are a few examples — we should insert the key in the right direction or put a DVD or insert the red color pin inside the red hole.

Feedback

It communicates the results of an action (what is happening). It is a visible response from the system/object on performing any interaction. Feedback is about sending back information about what action has been done and what has been accomplished, allowing the person to continue with the activity.

For Digital product/interfaces, below is an example on feedback

In order for it to be effective, it has to be immediate and in the form of visual, auditory, and touch sensors. There is some indication, like a sound, a moving dial, a spinning rainbow wheel, that the user’s action caused something

Mapping

It refers to the relationship between the elements of two sets of things (analogical relationship between controls and devices being controlled). For instance, the mapping of switches to lights specifies which switch controls which light.

For Digital products/interfaces, below is an example on matching

This slider also has a strong mapping, since it’s clearly moving it to the right will increase its value versus moving it to the left will decrease it.

The term natural mapping comes from proper and natural arrangements for the relations between controls and their movements to the outcome of such action in the world. The relationship between controls and their effects, should feel natural and intuitive and mimic what we see in the world

A great example of mapping is the vertical scroll bar. It tells you where you are on a page, and as you drag it down, the page moves down at the same rate; control and effect are closely mapped.

A physical product

Digital product/interface

Conceptual Models

A conceptual model is how a product or system works in real-time. It is an abstraction of a piece of the real world or a design you plan to bring into the real world. An example of a conceptual model is an instruction manual that outlines the correct usage of a product.

The conceptual model explains-

• What users will be able to do
• What knowledge users will need, in order to interact
• How they will interact with the system (at a very high level)

A mental model is a representation of how a person believes something works, which can be different from how it actually works.

A mental model can be the same as a conceptual model if the user’s understanding matches the actual system. Otherwise, it is considered a mismatch.

Now that we know what is discoverability, let’s cover three more principles that enhance the usability of the product/ interface

Consistency

I think I have seen this before

Consistency means using similar elements to achieve similar tasks and having similar functions and behaviors throughout — a consistent interface is one that follows rules, such as using the same operation to do something.

“Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don’t have to worry about what will happen.” — Jakob Nielsen

Using consistent patterns (IOS or material design guidelines) allows users to recognize familiar symbols as they move through a system.

Making things work in a way that matches the expectation of human mental models like search or add to cart icons.

Always be consistent with the layout

There are 4 types of consistency:

Aesthetics — e.g. brand consistency across all platforms
Functional — e.g. traffic lights
Internal — e.g. within the same system: the majority of beach signs are similar around the world
External — eg: different software file bar in the example below

Visibility

Can I see it?

Visibility is a measure of how easily users can locate the elements necessary to accomplish their goals. It’s important that the system doesn’t bury information or encapsulate elements.

A hamburger menu stores a variety of menu items in a mobile app, it comes at a huge disadvantage: the lack of visibility of the contained menu items.

Learnability

How easily can a new user learn to use the object/product and its functionality?

Learnability directly matters to product retention and abandonment. People engage more with an interface once they know how to use it.

Below are a few points sot improve learnability

• User onboarding
• Consistent UI design pattern
• Simple and easy navigation
• Visual Feedbacks

The learnability of a product tells us how fast users reach optimal behavior with that product.

Like the physical product and digital product (graphic user interface), the same principle of discoverability is used for the voice user interface. please refer to my article — Conversational UX design principles.

Here is the link for Psychology for Product Design — Part 1