Psychology of Design - Essay #1 (A little bit about UX and the human psyche)

This will be my first article writing about User Experience (UX) Design. My thoughts always come out in a type of story-telling type vibe. SO I am no editor or a really good writer... so, here goes!

Ever wondered what people are thinking? That would be great, right? Well, you might think you can, but... you can't.

Humans are interesting creatures, we are capable of very complex emotions, most of which nobody can understand. This may be due to the constraints of human language.

It can be very difficult, at times, to articulate the crazy Neuro-synaptic explosions (yes, I think I made up that word) that are happening in our brains into nicely formed sentences. Think about a teenage boy in an awkward encounter with his high school crush. He has absolutely no idea what is happening to his body let alone the words he wants to say and usually ends up blurting out a string of gobbledygook, which neither party understands. And a red-faced kid wishing the earth would swallow him up right there.

This is just one of many examples that almost every one of us can relate to.

There are behavioural scientists, psychologists, life coaches and other types of very smart people, who have discovered a few ways in which to help the human race interact in a decent manner and try figure out what the other person is trying to tell us. Be it through the ability to read body language or recognise intention through a person's tone of voice, we have many ways to help us not be misunderstood.

That's the deal, right? To help people understand our intentions? But let's be real, as much as we try not be too subjective on any given thing, we are, after all, emotional creatures, driven by passion and desire and the need to be accepted.

OK. So what does this have to with design and where am I going with this psychology stuff?

Each day, generally, in modern society, we encounter design in some form or other. Be it the shape of a chair, the colour and design of our clothes, a picture or video of an ad that annoyingly appears during our aimless browsing through the web or an app that we use on our mobile devices.

We do a lot of stuff every day and we think about a lot of stuff...A LOT of stuff. Some of the things we think about are sometimes not even related to what we are doing at that very moment. Certain activities we do during the day have become routine and so how and when we do them becomes almost subconscious, in other words, we don't actively think about what we're doing. Like driving a car. After driving a car for many years, a person no longer thinks actively about changing gears or pushing the pedals, they become "instinctive".

Now, humans are not born with the instinct to drive a car, it is something we have to learn, but once we learn how, it becomes "instinct". We know what to do when a car breaks in front us without having to actively think about it. Similarly, a child does not know how to use a mobile device or use the apps available on the device, they learn how.

With this premise, I find it interesting when, as designers, we are given a brief to design a website or app and in the brief, we are instructed to make sure the design is intuitive.

Intuitive?

We must design an interface that a someone can use intuitively, without conscious reasoning? The user must instinctively know how to use it?

What if a large portion of your target market has never used, or had very little exposure to a mobile device or personal computer or is not "tech savvy"?

I present Exhibit A:

I randomly picked a video from YouTube that had this clip from the movie "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs".

I am still working on Essay #2. I felt that this could no longer sit in my Google Keep notes.
🤓