Here we will cover the psychology of design in UX design, principles to keep subconsciously and always follow when designing.

Hick’s Law

The hicks law refers to how complexity can cause users to take longer in finding an answer or solution i.e. the more options to choose from, the longer it will take for a user to decide

Cognitive load

Just like computer memory, human-beings have a cognitive load – which slows down processing when there is a memory overload of information.

Miller’s Law

Predicts that the average person can keep 7 (-+2) items in their working memory, meaning on screen we should also limit the number of items to choose from to 7.

Chunking

Refers to the process of visually grouping items by their relationship making it easier to process and understand. Another way of chunking is with layout. We can use this technique to help users understand underlying relationships and hierarchy by grouping content into distinctive modules

Jakob’s Law

Jakob’s law predicts that users have great user experience on other sites and have a design expectation when visiting your site, Jakob’s law encourages designers to use the same design patterns to avoid cognitive load for the user.

Mental models

Good user experience is when a user can assume they know how your site works based on previous knowledge of a similar platform, they are less frustrated and feel at ease at using your platform. User interviews, journey maps, personas, empathy maps help us identify our users and what they prefer.

A good example is how we use icons today which stem from physical elements we are already familiar with such as radio input, buttons and checkboxes.

As designers, we must close the gap that exists between our mental models and that of our users. It’s important we do this because there will be problems when they aren’t aligned, which can affect how users perceive the products and experiences we’ve helped build. This misalignment is called mental model discordance, and it occurs when a familiar product is suddenly changed.

Source: https://alistapart.com/article/psychology-of-design/#:~:text=As%20designers%2C%20we%20can%20leverage,designing%20how%20people%20actually%20are.
By: Jon Yablonski