Aligning UX design with user psychology – David Evans

Author: David Evans Type: #book

Reference: Evants (2017). Bottlenecks: Aligning UX design with user psychology

Introduction

• This book describes "bottlenecks" in the way of a "meme" (information, idea, feature, product) reaching receptivity of people to accept it, engage with it or recommend it.

  • Different parts of human psychology act as bottlenecks (filters) that filter out a lot of things we experience.
  • The bottlenecks are:
    • Attention, Perception, Memory, Disposition, Motivation and Social Influence

• "Just as chemistry is the science behind good cooking, psychology is the science behind good design."

• Authors use the term "meme" to describe any piece of information or product that is being "replicated" by people using it.

• Most enterprises don't pass these bottlenecks and die. Only the best survive. This principle of evolution applies to digital products. Almost every category of human enterprise has a phase of "rapid establishement and later decimation."

  • That's when in the beginning, a lot of different ideas and products may be created, but then, most of them die and only a few remain.

• "The memes that are optimized for receptivity will go on to dominate, while those that are misaligned with human nature will be selected against and ultimately go extinct..."

Part 1 – Attention

• People direct attention differently if they have a goal vs. if they don't: with a goal, attention is very selective to what is (perceived as) useful to that goal and everything else is ignored. Without a goal, attention can be broader but with lower subsequential engagement.
  • Designers should establish if the user has a goal in the first place. They may not have one! It could be a mistake of designers' always assuming that people have a certain goal. They might have a need they're trying to satisfy but that doesn't necessarily mean they have a specific goal in their mind.
  • Brain has two networks:
    • Task-positive: when we intensely focus on a task at hand (e.g. writing a report or navigating in a new city). This network is mostly dominant.
      • i.e. has a goal
    • Task-negative: "mind-wandering mode". We default to this network when we have "nothing to do" (no task/goal).
      • i.e. doesn't have a goal
  • People might use different navigational patterns on websites when they're task-positive (search) or task-negative (links)
  • When people are task-positive they focus their attention where they consciously chosoe to and actively avoid everything else (which is an unwanted distraction). When people are task-negative, they welcome distractions.

Part 3 – Memory

There are three types of memory:

• iconic/sensory – large capacity
• working - very low capacity
• long-term - large capacity

"Forgetting" something is a misleading term, especially in the case of working memory. "Unencoded" is more accurate.

"We can remember forever what we don't forget in a minute."

Working memory

• Working memory decays rapidly – we lose the information there in ~30sec unless we actively work to keep them available.

  • This trait is an issue in UX design when the user has to carry over some information from one part of the product to another.
  • Designers should ask "What information are we asking users to keep in their working memory, and how can we help them keep it from decaying?"
  • People work around this by using "phonological loop" – subvocally repeating the information to keep it from decaying.
  • Good products use their technical memory to free up users' working memory for other things than e.g. remembering a phone number they want to dial.

• Information in working memory are displaced rapidly – when working memory is at its capacity, existing information is pushed out as new information arrives.

  • Displacement is the problem behind distractions – when we e.g. receive a notification, that new information pushes out some of whatever we were storing in our working memory previously. And it's hard to get back to it.
    • We determine if new information is encoded or ignored based on how much signal it has: how much it's related and useful to our current goals or not.
      • In this way, we are active in that process of signal detection.
    • David Green and John Sweet develop this as a "signal detection theory"
    • We adjust our threshold for which information to let in: if we're more receptive, it comes with a cost of dealing with more noise. If we're less receptive, it comes with a cost of missing out on good signals.
    • In the attention economy, it's crucial to be "sending good signals". Attention has a monetary value and is not to be traded away freely (Davenport & Beck, 2002)
    • Ideally, people should be given the opportunity to reduce the amount of noise coming at them (e.g. adjust ads preferences).

• The process of transferring information from working memory to long-term memory is called "encoding". Most information we perceive is lost before it's encoded.

  • Working memory is the true bottleneck in this sense.

• Due to this bottleneck of working memory, multitasking isn't really possible. What we call multitasking is often monotasking with rapid switching.

  • This comes with the switching costs: it takes longer to finish two tasks done simultaneously (switching rapidly) than one after the other (Marois & Ivanoff, 2005, Dux et al, 2006).

• Multitasking is only possible with activities that are well-learned and don't take up much of our working memory when we perform them – they don't need conscious attention. E.g. driving a car. These are "automatic processes"

  • Automatic processes usually involve movement, while effortful processes involve processing of verbal information and logic.
  • We can perform two automatic processes at once, or one automatic process and one effortful process at once, but not two effortful processes at once.

Long term memory

People have a very good long-term memory. Once an information passes the previous bottelnecks of attention and working memory, and is encoded to long-term memory, it stays there for a very long time.

And even when people cannot actively recall something they've seen or heard, they'll be able to recognize quickly.

Seeing or recognizing a stimulus elicits a response (e.g. seeing a picture of a classmate brings up a nostalgic emotion). However, there's such a concept of extinction of that response.

Encountering something for the first time elicits the biggest reponse. Each subsequent encounter elicits a smaller one. It diminishes.

This then means that people need novel experiences to stay engaged. I.e. people won't experience the same engagement when re-watching a movie (and much less when re-watching for the 3rd time).

Encoding and retrieval

Retrieving information is essentialy "re-igniting the neural pathways that were active at the moment of the original experience." Because of that, memories aren't 100% accurate. Retrieving something is an attempt to reconstruct the original experience or information.

Long-term memory works on the basis of neural networks. And when we encode something in our long-term memory, it's encoded with other stuff that was there at the time – i.e. the environment, the context. We're then better able to retrieve things when other elements from the original experience are present – e.g. we're in the same environment.

This means that it's most effective to learn things in the context where we want to use it (retrieve it) later. Think scuba divers learning underwater vs. on dry land.

Recent research has also shown that people spend less energy on encoding new information when they believe they can use a search engine to find it later ("Google effect").

However, it's likely that the ability to remember thigns well instead of relying on looking them up is going to be appreciated as a sign of personal intelligence.