Looking at UX as a science
Recently, I've been looking at the relationship psychology and my role as a user experience designer. I’ve always loved psychology, and was a psych major for a short time in college as well, my question going into writing this article was simple: how can looking at my job from a psychology perspective help me with clarifying customer experience challenges? As I went through looking for new ways, new ideas, and new approaches to tackle user issues I realized how similar UX and psychology can be at times.
For Science!
Both follow a scientific method, with a few deviations but not many. Firstly, we create a hypothesis, or what we think will be the outcome. Whether it is on the subject of how people react when they see something or the ordinary exercises of an application’s user, both studies oversee human practices.
Also, we as UX researchers and designer guide examination to find more information. For those in the psych field, this would join techniques, for instance, composing reviews and holding examinations. Similarly, UX researchers scope out the business, through online channels most often, and perform research through audits, customer interviews, and user solicitation.
Taking everything into account, we test the hypothesis. Get-together most of our examination disclosures, we are set-up to start our testing. UX teams usually test by showing a model, or early type of the thing to its goal customers and record and study their response to it. The how, the why, and the what if’s are all important questions that get added to our idea, filtered, and developed out into new tests to find the best route to an outcome.
Can you feel it?
A broad piece of psychology as a science oversees how we feel when certain conditions happen. Case in point, in case you feel hopeless, we understand that an hour of cat videos online can occasionally be the perfect cure (don’t fight it, we all watch those videos).
Similarly, by exploring the aftereffects of things, we can find things that are working and what things are not working and may require more change. Regardless, we wouldn't have the ability to pinpoint those components unless we asked the individuals how they felt while they were playing out a specific action.
Too know someone, is to know about them
When chatting with various parts of a team or others involved in a project, this question constantly arises: How might we build a personal connection with this application? The only way to build a personal connection between people and your app, is to see what feelings, moods, joys, frustrations, and needs the app meets.
We should take Gestalt research as a great bridge to understanding UX and psychology. Set up by Max Wertheimer and his partners, the tenets of Gestalt have affected craftsmanship and visual insight since its birth in 1910.
Case in point, the comfort we feel when we see shapes like circles, squares and triangles can be cleared up by the Law of Simplicity. Despite when pictures may have all the earmarks of being significantly more multifaceted, our brains are wired to isolate those photos into less troublesome, absorbable bits of information.
Many of us may not see the relationship amongst psychology and UX, yet essentially like many diverse things, there is a familiar feel to both that can help people in the UX field learn and make the internet a more personal place, that brings out the emotions and connections everyone wants a user to feel when they interact with a design.