10 Psychological Heuristics by Susan Weinschenk

The easiest way to overwhelm your users is to ask them to take too many actions at once. Sadly, the world is full of poorly designed products. As a result, the solution to users' problems is often more complicated than it needs to be. Here are some things you can do to avoid making the same mistakes:

• Reduce the number of clicks needed to complete a task. For example, provide an option to sign up using third-party accounts at Facebook, Google, or Apple. Among other registration best practices is allowing users to stay logged in or at least have their username remembered to speed up the login process.
• Provide smart defaults when possible. If there's an easy way to auto-populate specific inputs, then do it! For instance, you can allow users to provide their location to auto-fill the Country, City, and Postal Code fields.

We, humans, crave pleasure and positive emotions and avoid things that make us bored or uneasy. Having a long registration page with too many inputs is the best way to make sure users never finish the signup flow. 

So how do we avoid this?

• Practice progressive disclosure. Avoid "serving" big chunks of content at once. Instead, reveal information step by step and move from simple actions to more complex ones. For example, you can divide forms into steps and heavy content into digestible blocks. The goal is to provide only the information users need at any particular moment.
• Use headlines for structure and capturing attention. Headings help you kill two birds with one stone. First, they generally increase legibility and scannability. Second, a clear heading hierarchy is crucial for users with visual and cognitive disabilities.

Albert Einstein, the greatest physicist of all time, once said that the only people who don't make mistakes are those who never do anything new. In other words, you can't learn new things without making wrong assumptions or taking the wrong path. When designing a product, keep in mind that user errors are part of the journey.

• Anticipate mistakes and try to prevent them. Input constraints are an excellent example of preventing typos. For example, limit the input of a phone number only to digits and apply an input mask. Remember to ask for confirmation before irretrievable actions like deleting an account or data.
• Provide an emergency exit. Allow users to cancel accidental actions like sending an email to the wrong person with an "Undo" option.

The Rashomon Effect, named after Akira Kurosawa's film, is a psychological phenomenon that describes having two sides to every story in any situation. In short, people who witness the same event may have a very different recollection of it. When applied to design, this means that we shouldn't expect users to rely solely on their memory.

• Users can only remember 3-4 things at a time. Avoid asking users to memorize more than 4 items at any given time. Also, if they need to double-check any information, ensure that it's visible and easy to find when needed.
• Help users recognize information rather than forcing them to remember it. For example, instead of asking taxi app users to type in the pickup and destination locations, offer predictive inputs and recent routes.

What do chocolate cake, Instagram likes, and recreational drugs all have in common? The answer is, they all cause an outburst of dopamine. It's a chemical that stimulates rewarding behavior and forces us to repeat actions that bring us pleasure. Simply put, it makes us addicted to small (or big) pleasures like social media or food. As designers, we can use this to encourage certain behaviors.

• Provide ratings and reviews. Users seek social proof — assurance that other people like the product they plan to buy. People especially rely on the opinions of others in uncertain situations.
• Show how many users are doing the same thing right now. Scientists call this effect "mirror neurons." People get more enthusiastic about engaging in an activity when they see others doing it. You can use this effect to your advantage. For example, show how many other users are considering this product right now or how many of a users' contacts follow the account they are looking at. 

Conventional wisdom tells us that people notice things that stand out from their surroundings — but it's not always the case. Depending on what they focus on, we can be surprisingly oblivious to major design changes. Psychologists call this phenomenon "change blindness." For us designers, it means we should choose carefully what to emphasize.

• When everything is important, nothing is important. If you need users to focus on specific content, avoid highlighting several things at a time — this will make users feel lost and disoriented.
• Use visuals to grab attention. Colors, fonts, size, animation, and other UI tools are here to help you. Apply them within reason and remember accessibility recommendations on color contrast ratio.
• Users are easily distracted. Unless that's your goal, avoid using flashing videos or animations. Another downside of these is the negative effect they have on people with certain types of epilepsy.

Check out this entertaining video that demonstrates change blindness and allows you to check how much it affects you.

Remember dopamine — the chemical that affects our brain and gets us hooked on repeated actions? It motivates us to seek food and company and makes our brains crave new information—usually, more than we can process. 

It's a paradox of human nature — we want more content, but we get overwhelmed once we receive too much of it. So, what's the solution?

Provide an option to see more information on request. Users love to be in control of their journey and know that they have choices. Elements like accordions, menus, Show More links, and tooltips are some tools you can use. They contain extra information but deliver it only at users' request.

Have you ever noticed that you can't help but tap your toes when you hear a familiar song? Or how many people like hanging out in Starbucks because of the atmosphere, even if they have a coffee machine at home? The truth is, most mental processes occur unconsciously, and sometimes, we can't explain why we do certain things. What can designers do with this knowledge?

People are more likely to say yes to a significant action if you ask them to do a small task first. 

For example, offer users a freebie when they sign up. Having done that, they will be more enthusiastic about buying a premium plan, knowing that your product has reasonable offers.

Be cautious when choosing pictures for your design. Images have a significant impact on decision-making. Studies show that salad consumption among kids aged 6-12 increased as much as 90% when they started seeing images of salad every day in the cafeteria.^[4] The summer camp staff placed a digital display with a rotating image of salad, and campers were far more likely to add vegetables to their plates.

Have you ever looked at the sky long enough to start seeing shapes in clouds — turtles, whales, dragons? It occurs because people are hard-wired to recognize patterns, even when there are none. It's a part of our survival mechanism. Our experience helps us navigate through life and understand if something is dangerous.

When encountering a new design, users base their expectations on their existing mental models. A good example of how we can utilize this phenomenon is skeuomorphism. When we create elements that resemble real-life objects like the phone or recycling bin icons, we are relying on these mental models. 

To make your design functional, match the cognitive models your users already have. Let's say you still want to reinvent the wheel and create a unique experience. For example, you want to introduce a double tap to add a new item to a cart instead of the Add button. To do this successfully, you need to figure out a way to "teach" users this new mental model.

One of the most common design patterns is the search feature. If the main goal of your users at your website or an app is to search for things (accommodation, flights, apparel, jewelry, etc.), the search bar should be where most people expect it to be and at the most visible place. Usually, it's at the top of the website, so users don't need to scroll a page.

It's impossible to create functional and aesthetic products without following fundamental design principles. Some of the most important ones are the principles of proximity, unity, balance, contrast, and proportion. Visual tools like fonts, colors, shapes, and sizes are also an important part of the user experience. 

Here's how you can leverage these visual tools to create an excellent user-system interaction:

• Place elements that go together close to one another

• Use grouping to ease off-the-page scanning

• Make sure fonts are large enough to read easily

• Maintain the color contrast ratio according to WCAG recommendations

• Don't rely on color exclusively to add emphasis or group elements