I've held this presentation for: - ClujPM (3 November 2016, City Plaza Hotel, Cluj-Napoca, Romania) - CodeCamp (19 November 2016, Grand Hotel Italia, Cluj-Napoca, Romania)

1. Let’s talk about
(neuro)science
and its importance in usability/UX of an application

2. Who am I?
Andreea Popescu
speaker and volunteer
andreeazpopescu
@andreea_popescu
usability/UX specialist @Evozon
passionate about (neuro)science, HCI, photography &
hiking

3. What do you think usability is?

4. Joel Spolsky, User Interface Design for Programmers
“Usability, fundamentally, is a matter of bringing
a bit of human rights into the world of computer-
human interaction. It's a way to let our ideals
shine through in our software, no matter how
mundane the software is.”

5. How about neuroscience?

6. Johannes Robbies, UX Redefined
Winning and Keeping Customers with Enhanced Usability and User
Experience
“The human brain weighs about 1.4 kilograms -
that's only 2 percent of our body weight - but it
use more than 20 percent of our body energy.”

7. Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel
“We found that on average the human brain has
86bn neurones [nerve cell that is the basic
building block of the nervous system]. And not
one [of the brains] that we looked at so far has
the 100bn."

8. frontal lobe

9. The frontal lobe is the center of our
emotional network (“How did I
experience it?”) and our cognitive
network (“That’s how I
experienced it.”).

10. frontal lobe
parietal lobe

11. The parietal lobes mediate tactile
and kinaesthetic perception (left
lobe: information processing; right
lobe: combining of diverse visual,
auditory, tactile information into non-
language).

12. frontal lobe
parietal lobe
temporal lobe

13. The temporal lobe serves to
organise hearing and memory.

14. frontal lobe
parietal lobe
temporal lobe occipital lobe

15. The occipital lobe register the
characteristics of what we see
and then send the information on to
the parental lobes for
interpretations.

16. These are some examples about
how our brain works!

17. Prefrontal cortex: not paying
attention to unnecessary
information —> cortical flaw has
been exacerbated by modernity —>
too much information.

19. Rewards and motivation.
Stimulates dopamine, one of the
main neurotransmitters, which is
heavily active in the frontal lobe.

21. Patterns activate predictions and
stimulate neurons, and this way the
user finds it easier to improve their
experiences. Schultz, a physician who
explored the human brain in the 70s,
“if everything goes according to plan,
its dopamine neurons secrete a little
burst of enjoyment”.

23. Cognitive control and value-based
decision-making tasks appear to
depend on different brain regions
within the prefrontal cortex. Too many
options for choosing an activity create
‘noise’ in the brain, that is mentally
exhausting.

25. Left alignment: users can read each
line by simply moving their eyes to the
left edge each time. This makes your
paragraphs faster and easier to read
because the user’s eyes don’t have to
work as hard to find where the line
starts each time.

27. Visual cortex: do not use decorative
fonts, because it’s harder for the brain
to find shapes in them.

29. Reducing the cognitive load (as
remembering, thinking, making
decisions) takes less brain effort. E.g.
scrolling takes less brain power thank
clicking.

31. the auditory part of the new
brain that deciphers sound (told)
vision and text processing (read)
all the vision parts of the brain (to
imagine the characters)
the emotional part of the mid brain

33. - Dr. David Eagleman
“Every single neuron in the brain is complicated
as New York city.”

34. Resources
• “Making Choices: How Your Brain Decides”: http://healthland.time.com/
2012/09/04/making-choices-how-your-brain-decides/
• “SpinalCord”: http://www.spinalcord.com/frontal-lobe
• “UX Redefined Winning and Keeping Customers with Enhanced Usability and
User Experience, Johannes Robbies, 2015
• “How does the brain work when confronted with an interface?”, Marc Van
Rymenant: http://www.simplifyinginterfaces.com/2008/07/09/how-does-the-
brain-work-when-confronted-with-an-interface-episod-2/
• “Why You Should Never Center Align Paragraph Text”: http://uxmovement.com/
content/why-you-should-never-center-align-paragraph-text/
• “10 ways to design for the human brain”: http://blog.invisionapp.com/design-
for-the-human-brain/
Resources

35. Thank you.