I have always had an interest in psychology, its an interesting subject area but I never saw the use for it as a teenager and was always worried about its application in real life. I felt it was theoretical rather than solving real-life problems but what really is psychology?
Psychology is the science of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, as well as feeling and thought.
I didn’t major in psychology but I am a master at it as I use it daily in building products people love Which contradicts the thoughts I had as a kid — that psychology doesn’t have a real-life application.
people need to think less and put in less effort in understanding how to use the product I build. as I think of how frustrated I get when explaining or teaching my mum how to use a product ( physical or digital ). I love what I do a lot and have spent most of my time devoted to it and strive every day to get better at it. My dream has always been to make radical changes and question the norm.
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as “attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and thinking”.
Cognitive psychology focuses on the way in which people acquire, process, and store information within their brains. In UX designing, we may think of cognitive load as the power of mental processing required to use a feature. If you bombard users with information, their performance will likely suffer. Individuals may feel overwhelmed, confused, and ultimately abandon the task or site
As it is aimed at studying human behavior in correlation with cognitive processes, cognitive psychology can help UX designers find ways to overcome psychological barriers. Thanks to this, We designers can create usable, accessible, readable, and easy-to-navigate designs. our inherent desire as designers is to keep things clean and simple. We are trying to reduce cognitive load. Every item we add to an interface increases cognitive load and reduces the chances users can see and process more essential elements.
I will be discussing the principles and theories behind the design decisions we can make backed by psychological principles. By understanding how different psychology principles influence human behavior, we can design your products to elicit specific responses and actions from our target users.
To illustrate the impact of cognitive psychology on UX design, let’s consider the following principles.
Most times we call humans that work a lot of machines, but the truth is even machines get tired too, for example running too many Applications on my system ( especially After Effect ) at the same time slows down my system and sometimes crashes my Macbook. Just Like machines, the human brain has a limited amount of processing power, When the amount of information coming in exceeds our ability to handle it, our performance suffers. We may take longer to understand information, miss important details, or even get overwhelmed and abandon the task.
Cognitive load refers to the load on working memory when carrying out a task. When the cognitive load of a task exceeds our working memory capacity, processing information, decision making, and remembering information becomes nearly impossible.
The history of cognitive load theory can be traced to the beginning of cognitive science in the 1950s and the work of G.A. Miller. In his classic paper,[7] Miller was perhaps the first to suggest our working memory capacity has inherent limits. His experimental results suggested that humans are generally able to hold only seven plus or minus two units of information in short-term memory.
In the field of user experience, we use the following definition: the cognitive load imposed by a user interface is the number of mental resources that are required to operate a product. The fewer users have to think about the interface or design, the more they can focus on accomplishing their goal on your website. Your job, as a designer, is to give them a straight path to their goal by clearing out the obstacles beforehand.
In psychology and cognitive science, a schema (plural schemata or schemas) describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them.