Editor's pick
Designing for Tomorrow - A Discussion on Ethical Design
Ethical design is something we’re spending more and more time thinking about at Spotify. How can we build trust? Encourage meaningful consumption? And make sure we’re using our voice responsibly? One of our product designers Lu Han shares her take on the burning issues with this first piece of our three-part series on ethical design.
Persuasive Design
Persuasive Design: using advanced psychology effectively
“Emotions shape all activity in adaptive ways. In the absence of emotional markers, decision making is virtually impossible.” — Saver & Damasio (1991) Websites have come a long way in a short space of time — it’s really quite amazing just how much some of the sites belonging to the last decade’s most established brands have changed from their first iteration. When websites were first used for commercial purposes, they didn’t pay too much attention to user experience; the aim was to cram as much content into one page as possible. Now they are heavily researched, data-mined, and optimized in order to grab your attention and offer up the right content, functionalities, and options at the right time.
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User Research & Psychology
Empathy Map – Why and How to Use It
Did you know that users are more likely to choose, buy and use products that meet their needs as opposed to products that just meet their wants? An Empathy map will help you understand your user’s needs while you develop a deeper understanding of the persons you are designing for. There are many techniques you can use to develop this kind of empathy. An Empathy Map is just one tool that can help you empathise and synthesise your observations from the research phase, and draw out unexpected insights about your user’s needs. An Empathy Map allows us to sum up our learning from engagements with people in the field of design research. The map provides four major areas in which to focus our attention on, thus providing an overview of a person’s experience. Empathy maps are also great as a background for the construction of the personas that you would often want to create later.
Human Decision Making
How People Make Decisions
We like to think that we are logical and that when we are making a decision, we carefully weigh all of our alternatives. When it’s time to buy a new car, do we read all the specs and reviews, and choose the one that is the safest and most economical? When it’s time to renew the chatbot service, does Kelly do a study to see how much use she has made of the “Pro” services and evaluate whether she should stay with that level and pay that amount each month?
These would be the logical ways to make the decision, and although we sometimes make decisions rationally and logically, there are hundreds of decisions we make every day, and we don’t do a logical think through of every one. Even the big decisions where we think we are being logical, the research shows that most of our decisions — big or small — are made unconsciously and involve emotion.
Video
User Research and Psychology by Mona Patel
Mona Patel is the customer experience expert behind the UX-led innovation and design company Motivate Design. She uses her knowledge of design research and ergonomics to deliver “mind-spinning” solutions to companies with customer-related research problems. But how does she spin their minds? How does she find the insights inside their data? She naturalises the research contexts. In this ProductTank London talk, Mona shares how she puts relevant research methodologies into real-life situations to examine customers properly. Her practices and strategies expose the “truths” of the customer experience; then, her clients find the insights for themselves.