The psychological skills that UX designers have to master

We often say that 100 people will have 100 hamlet, the same, a user experience design problem, in the hands of 100 UX designers may have 100 kinds of solutions. It must be admitted that user experience design is not an exact subject.

Behind each user experience element is a rich psychological phenomenon behind the support, although not enough to make a precise deduction, but we can use these principles to drive user behavior, impact experience. So, today's article we will explore how to use this information to get better design and effect.

Before exploring how to influence and change user behavior, we first need to understand what factors can affect user behavior. So, let's look at the user experience design from a psychological point of view.

　　1. Time and Effect

In the face of a task, the user is always as far as possible to the minimum amount of work, the fastest speed to complete it. So when it comes to UX design, we need to adjust and progressively present the whole picture of the task, rather than showing it all at once. Each time give the user a certain amount of information to attract them to complete, and give enough choice.

In the product information and details of the show, is the same truth. Information to the user all at once, so that users have a psychological burden of the risk is very large, you should only let them see what should be seen. Easy-to-read text, concise views and feature descriptions, clear paragraph segmentation, which are characteristic of friendly content that users can easily absorb.

Don't let your users handle multiple tasks at the same time. The vast majority of people in the car when the call process, can not completely avoid traffic accidents, this is supported by data. So, don't let users do similar things while browsing your site.

So, the key point here is: Don't waste users ' time and energy. Let the site provide users with a clear and concise description of the function and approach, and this is Steve Krug's book "Don ' Make Me thinking" in the repeated point of view.

　　2. Social identity

Another key pillar of the user experience is the psychological motivation that triggers social identity through design. Social identity is often manifested in the use of other people's behavior as a guide to their actions.

The most typical case is the response of the fans after the new iphone was released every year. When someone queues or even camped at the door of an Apple store, others are consciously and unconsciously joining the ranks based on other people's perceptions of the iphone, which is social identity.

There are many ways to motivate user behavior on the Internet using the principle of social identity. Many sites are based on backlinks from other authoritative websites to provide recommendations and suggestions to users. The efficiency of this strategy is very high, and here are some examples to show you:

　　A) User reviews

Taobao is a typical case, the user has bought the product of the comments will affect the buyer's purchase image, the praise will make the purchase image of strong buyers quickly under the order, and even the evaluation and evaluation can make users a clearer understanding of products, and may even promote users to buy products. Part of the "bad comment" may become a reasonable compliment.

　　(b) Social behaviour filtering

When you browse the product on the Electronic Business platform, you will see that "users who have browsed this product have also purchased ..." Such recommendations, so that the expected personalized recommendation is to use the principle of social identity to provide users with interested in product links.

　　c) the same hobby

Etsy provides users with the product point of praise, when a user is interested in a product, you can see who is the project point of praise, the sense of urgency can strengthen their interest in the project itself and focus on the project itself to strengthen the scarcity.

3, visual and unconscious psychological process

The final key pillar involves the subconscious psychological process and the visual description of the information. Since most psychological processes occur unconsciously, you can use different triggers to influence the user's different emotions and behaviors.

From the most basic point of view, pictures and stories can trigger the emotional part of the user's brain, and emotions affect the user's decision to a large extent, so we can use this to affect the user's behavior.

In UX design, you can start with a few basic aspects of font size, color matching, and information organization. Through eye tracking, we can learn a lot about visual design experience:

• Do not let the visual effect too heavy to occupy the entire Web page center of gravity

• Video is easier to attract users ' attention than text or pictures

• The image of women and children is more likely to attract the attention of the user

• The visual track of the user browsing page is "F" type

Take all the psychological factors into consideration, and then you need to translate them into highly operable ways to drive user behavior.

Using UX design to drive user behavior

We have a lot of information to build elements for UX design, but how do we get them to drive the user's behavior and achieve our ultimate goal? The answer is the Fogg behavioral model:

This model considers three specific elements to occur simultaneously to trigger the behavior, and the three elements are:

• Motivation

• Ability

• Trigger

By incorporating these three factors into your consideration, designers can identify factors that hinder users by analyzing and observing them. If you want the user to send a message back, but the user does not do so, generally speaking, push the user message three factors do not have.

The first element "motive" can be divided into external motives and internal motives. External motives can motivate people, such as physical rewards such as money or gifts.

internal factors are undoubtedly internal, usually happy and satisfying in such emotional and emotional way. If you want the user to do something that is not something that the user is willing to do, or is willing to do, how should this problem be solved?

The answer is simple, give them rewards or motivate them to do it. Pact this financial application is a typical case where you have a cash reward when you reach your health goals. Given that many people are not keen on hard work, such rewards can give them enough incentive.

On the other hand, we should be cautious about the "excessive rationalization effect", which usually occurs when the rewards you give are overlapping with what he is already "enjoying". In this case, when you no longer give a reward, he will do less, and will not even go on.

And the health site called Freeletics to circumvent this problem, it is to complete the basic movement requirements of the user to put forward higher requirements, so that users in the gradual upgrade to get the fun of sports.

This is a case of motivation, so how can the ability and trigger be combined into it?

Trigger behavior

Pure motivation is not enough to produce behavior. If you want to go fishing, but don't have a fishing pole, bait and boat, it's hard to do this thing. In this case, people need to be motivated to go fishing, whether he obtains physical rewards (fish) or spiritual rewards (fulfillment, or affection) that conform to the Fogg model. Only when the power is strong enough, the ability is complete, under the premise of reasonable trigger, will have behavior happen.

This means that simply having 3 factors is not enough. The way to motivate a person may not be strong enough or useful to another person, if we really want to trigger certain behaviors completely, then we need to understand what motivates the user, which requires you to delve into your users, start from both inside and outside, and create truly meaningful UX designs, Stimulate their desires and motivations.

such as user experience maps, user histories are pretty good tools to help you learn more about user roles, not just the simple roles of age, address, and gender.

　I'll say the last few words.

There is not only one thing that motivates the user, rather than a fantasy, let them try out the product, at least through the process, to find the difference between the target and the actual effect, to hinder the user's obstacles, to understand their desires, and to create a new trigger mechanism to drive them into action.

Simply put, user experience design is about people's psychology, you have to find problems in the user's brain, solve them, push them, and fix them.