-User psychology aims to understand the cognitive factors influencing how users interact with products. The end goal is to create products that users will love and naturally find easy to use.
-Psychology is a primary subject in the field as we can understand how humans think with the help of their cognitive processes. This helps in the knowledge/data while considering to build an application or a system. When conducting user interviews and usability testing, knowing the principles of UX with psychology to back it up, will leverage your background to identify how users feel when interacting with a product. In UX, we’ll be concerned with users’ emotional journeys when interacting with a product, service or system.
So what is psychology?
Psychology is the study of human mind and behaviour. Understanding a human behaviour is itself called psychology. When you study psychology with technology, the by-product you get is UX. Psychologists are actively involved in studying and understanding mental processes, brain functions, and behaviour patterns to keep a track on the trends.
Types of psychology: Psychology includes four major areas: clinical psychology (counseling for mental and behavioral health), cognitive psychology (the study of the mental processes), behavioral psychology (understanding behavior through different types of conditioning), and biopsychology (research on the brain, behavior, and evolution).
Cognitive psychology is the science of “how people think”. It’s concerned with our inner mental processes such as attention, perception, memory, action planning, and language. Each of these components are pivotal in forming who we are and how we behave. Each of these cognitive functions work together to integrate the new knowledge and create an interpretation of the world around us.
In this article, we focus particularly on first process of cognitive psychology i.e Attention and its theories.
Attention is the ability to choose and concentrate on relevant stimuli. Attention is the cognitive process that makes it possible to position ourselves towards relevant stimuli and consequently respond to it.
CONSCIOUSNESS = ATTENTION
Attention is also referred to as conscious. When we are attending to a particular object or thought or event that we are experiencing, and we can report that we are attending to it, we are exhibiting our use of conscious attention. This cognitive ability is very important and is an essential function to carry our daily lives activities and everything in environment.
Examples:
Staying focused on a flying bird, you may consciously watch the bird with your eyes, tracking and predicting its movements.
Focusing on the vessel while straining tea in a cup and not trying to spill it out on the kitchen platform.
Reading a book while focusing and understanding every line.
Laptop screen presentation.
Watching your favourite TV show or listening to music
Why does attention play a major role in our lives?
Attention is selective, means we choose which stimuli to choose and focus. It is a mental process, where hearing and looking takes place which the brain converts into many processes. In a given time, we can concentrate or focus our consciousness only on a particular object
Types of Attention:
1.Arousal: Refers to our level of alertness, whether we are tired or energised.
Ex: hiking on mountain. if you were hiking in the woods and started to hear sounds of an animal coming toward you.
2.Focused Attention: Refers to our ability to focus attention on a stimulus.
Ex: Driving a car, you have to pay attention to the road, to other cars, to speed and traffic signs.
3.Sustained Attention: the ability to focus on an activity or stimulus over a long period of time. Ex: Students at school have to pay attention when they’re in class and when they’re studying at home.
4.Selective Attention: The ability to attend to a specific stimulus or activity in the presence of other distracting stimuli.
Ex: Reading a book on a public transport bus
5.Alternating Attention: The ability to change focus attention between two or more stimuli.
Ex: Cooking while referring to a recipe book.
6.Divided Attention: The ability to attend different stimuli or attention at the same time.
Ex: A waiter in a restaurant attending to four tables at the same time.
Selective attention: giving focus to specific stimuli or activity and ignoring the rest.
Cocktail Party Effect: The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of the brain’s ability to focus one’s auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, such as when a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room.
In the early 1950s, cognitive scientist Colin Cherry first began researching what he referred to as the cocktail party problem. Cherry wondered how it was that people could have private or individual conversations amidst a large group of people who were all talking at the same time. As a result of his research, Cherry came to conclusion that the body’s auditory system was capable of filtering out other sounds in order to actively focus on one conversation. Out of this initial research, Cherry and other scientists began to delve deeper into how the brain receives, organizes, and processes auditory information.
Above scenario: John and Lisa both have been invited to a children’s birthday party. In the amidst of all, the music, crowd and the kids playing games, they are seated at a table. John being a talkative person initiates the conversation. “Hey Lisa, how was your trip to Disneyland ?” answering to that Lisa replied “It was awesome!! My husband and kids were totally overjoyed with the entire experience at disney”. “Great to know as I am planning to take my niece next month. I hope the weather is good to us” says John. That’s amazing man. I hope the kid has the best time too” Lisa says with a big excitement wishing the best.
In the above scenario, John and Lisa are two colleagues who happen to be in a same birthday party. Even though they are in an environment where there is loud music, a large group of people like party organizers, servers, singers, dancers etc Lisa and John were able to have a focused conversation regarding Lisa taking her family to Disneyland. Both the individuals were having a change of information, ignoring the environment around them. This is an example of cocktail party effect which was designed by Cherry Colin.
Another Experiment of Selective attention, please do have a look at the experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
Key observations from the above experiment are:
1.When you were told to focus on the no. of counts, everyone was focused on the white team and completely ignored/missed the gorilla that entered dancing.
2.When the gorilla entered, your focus shifted from the white team and their counts to the gorilla completely, simultaneously you lost the no. of passes.
If people had to pay attention to every stimuli present in the environment, they never would get anything done. Nature of human itself lies in focusing certain/specific things and giving it a conscious (attention)
How does psychology create a foundation in Web design/UX?
An experiment was conducted with the help of students to understand selective attention towards web design. The participants had to search for Specific Article on the above new platform.
After the experiment, it was evaluated with the help of heat maps that the users focused majorly on a particular news article/topic at the centre of the screen among the entire web page. Thus, web designers should know which information to put and make the users aware only of the relevant information. Testing with real users is the key to any web usability design.
What is Stroop effect?
The Stroop effect is a simple phenomenon that reveals a lot about how the brain processes information. First described in the 1930s by psychologist John Ridley Stroop, the Stroop effect is our tendency to experience difficulty naming a physical color when it is used to spell the name of a different color. This simple finding plays a huge role in psychological research and clinical psychology.
The Original Stroop Experiment: In Stroop’s original study, he used three elements: names of colors printed in black ink, names of colors printed in different ink than the color named, and squares of each given color. He then conducted his experiment in two parts:
In his first experiment, he asked participants to simply read the color printed in black ink. He then asked them to read the words printed, regardless of the color they were printed in.
For his second experiment, he asked participants to name the ink color instead of the word written. For example, “red” might have been printed in green and participants were asked to identify the color green instead of reading the word “red.” In this segment, participants were also asked to identify the color of the squares.
Stroop found that subjects took longer to complete the task of naming the ink colors of words in experiment two than they took to identify the color of the squares. Subjects also took significantly longer to identify ink colors in experiment two than they had to simply read the printed word in experiment one. He identified this effect as an interference causing a delay in identifying a color when it is incongruent with the word printed.
Selective Attention Theory: In relation to the Stroop effect, identifying the color of the words takes more attention than simply reading the text. Therefore, this theory suggests that our brains process the written information instead of the colors themselves. The effects observed in the Stroop task provide a clear illustration of people’s capacity for selective attention and the ability of some stimuli to escape attentional control.
TUNNEL VISION
Tunnel vision is a vision defect where objects cannot be seen unless they are in the peripheral vision/focus of the eye. It is one’s tendency to focus on a single goal or point of view.
How does this work biologically and psychologically?
Cells: There are two types of cells in the retina that respond to light: rods and cones. The cones are concentrated in the center of the retina known as the macula which is responsible for detail and colour perception.
Rods function even in dim-light and are responsible for general vision. Cones are functional from moderate to bright light and are responsible for colour vision.
They are the part of the eye responsible for converting the light that enters your eye into electrical signals that can be decoded by the vision-processing center of the brain.
How can people overlook something which is right in front of them?
Highway : If you are driving on a highways, there are a lot of elements to focus on such as speed, gear change, overtaking, the route, the other cars and their speed. In this entire process, we sometimes tend to miss out the direction board because the board is hanging over the top which our eyes tend to miss, or the direction boards are placed at a wrong angle.
Why is that? The reason we tend to miss the direction board is where the focus of the
peripheral vision is absent. A lack of peripheral vision is usually termed “tunnel vision.”
How does tunnel vision occur in web usability?
A UI design from a recipe source webpage showcases Jeanine’s introduction, who is the owner of the brand. She is the creator and director at love&lemons. While reading the “About Us” Page the users read through the entire body text before finding the book being on sale on the right side. Users ignored the actual item that Jeanine’s promoting on the web. Tunnel vision, as being stated.
How could this be improved for usability?
By positioning the “book sale section” on top of Jeanine’s picture showcasing book in her hand. By making it a part of the information tribe on the left.
Where in the first image, the ‘2000’ is placed above the photograph, which made the users skip/ignore the year at first. They focused on the image and the read the paragraph, later realising the year “2000” above. How could this be fixed? By positioning the year “2000” below with the heading “ Westfield in the united Kingdom”. By making it a part of the information tribe below the image.
The solution to tunnel vision usability problems is to position related items close together.
Key Observations & Learnings: The sequence, order, emphasis, distance, placement matters relevantly to the information. The design works very well for accessibility. Low-vision users who employ a screen magnifier to blow up a small section of the screen are much more likely to understand the information when it’s all in one place.Should be used actively and only where it’s needed to be on web. Makes it easy for the users to find a section at one place.
CHANGE BLINDNESS
It refers to people’s tendency to ignore changes in a scene when they occur in a region that is far away from their focus of attention.
So what is change blindness? In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, one of the most famous movies of all time, detective Arbogast looks at Norman Bates’ house projected on a dark cloudless sky. The camera moves back to the detective’s face, and follows him as he starts walking toward the house. The scene is still dark, but the sky has suddenly become full of clouds.
Whether the change in the sky’s texture was intentional (perhaps Hitchcock’s subtle warning for what was to come) or a continuity error, chances are that most viewers won’t notice it. Motion pictures often have small inconsistencies like this from one scene to the next — changes in the background, in the actors clothing, makeup, or positions, but these get ignored when they are made during cuts between scenes.
This phenomenon is called change blindness and goes beyond movies — it applies to how people perceive scenes in general, whether projected on a screen or in real life. Change blindness is very robust: even when people are warned that a change may happen, changes in a scene can go undetected.
Door Study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWSxSQsspiQ&list=PLuT-1zxj9hBgBmlzyr7RH-HahexZNhBqI&index=2
In the above video, the participant couldn’t recognise that the person who was asking the address was completely different person. There was a lack of attention and awareness.
How does change blindness occur in web usability?
In the bottom application, when users tap on the hamburger menu in Aldiko’s Android app, they expect that the changes on the screen be related to that action — namely, that the new elements will be localized in the area enclosing the menu contents. Their eyes will stay around that area and they will be unlikely to notice that the action-overflow button in the top right corner of the screen has been replaced with a search icon.
Similar goes for vans website, where the red colour shoe is chosen with the size 8.5”. The change has been occurred but isn’t visible as the “add to cart” to “out of stock” has no colour differentiation. Here significant changes in a web page can remain unnoticed when they lack strong cues like animation/motion, colour contrast.
To understand more, this video can help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O71iuTPTTI
How/why does it happen?
Interruption: White screen or flicker- when a page reloads or when it’s in motion and the cue is very weak.
Speed: Changes in visual details
How can we Prevent in web terms?
One change at a time. Keeping changes close to focal point of eye. Use of animation/motion to notify changes in the interface or screen. Contrast of colour on screen: Dim light, Colour contrast.
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