To guide the users to use a system or interface means to persuade them, to divert their thoughts without force. This requires designers to understand human cognition and behavioral psychology. This is an attempt to bring to light some psychological principles that may come in handy while crafting user interfaces.

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Psychology and its types
Psychology is the study of human mind and its functions, especially those affecting thoughts and
behavior in a given context. Psychology is a vast domain, which covers many aspects of our lives
including the interaction we have with our devices and gadgets.
Types of
Psychology
Clinical Cognitive Developmental Evolutionary Forensic Health Organizational Social
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• Benefits are always the priority against the efforts taken by
humans
• If resources are easily or freely available people tend to use
more and on the other hand if resources are scarce, the
scenario is vice-versa
• In human-computer interaction, not only cognitive psychology
but developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology and
social psychology, all play a crucial part
• Observation plays a major role in in psychological behavior
Psychology and its types

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• Love is one of the most widespread concept about visceral reaction
• It is an instinctive, gut-deep bodily response to a stimulus or experience
• For example: The color green and flora fauna are always considered to be calmin
and soothing
Facial Recognition
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• Facial expressions are universal throughout cultures
• Mimetic desire is a strong emotion which persuades people to desire
something just because others have it
• For example: People having ice-creams or chocolates with heavenly feeling
can make others want to have it too
Visceral Reactions (Evolutionary)
Key experiments in Psychology & Design Thinking

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• Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes,
beliefs or behaviors.
• This conflict produces an inherent feeling of discomfort leading to a change
in the attitudes, beliefs or behaviours to minimize or eliminate the
discomfort and restore balance
False Consensus
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• In lay terms, this focuses on how people can incorrectly conclude that others
think the same way they do, or form a ‘false consensus’ about the beliefs and
preferences of others.
• An experiment was conducted in order to outline how the ‘false consensus
effect’ functions in humans.
Cognitive Dissonance Experiment
Key experiments in Psychology & Design Thinking

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• Participants in a study were asked to watch a video and count how many
passes occurred between basketball players.
• Keeping track of the passes is a relatively easy task.
• People fail to notice amidst their counting, a man in a gorilla suit walked
onto the court and stood in the middle
Visual Cliff
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• Psychologists conducted an experiment where infants crawled on a flat
surface with a visual illusion of depth (visual cliff)
• They wanted to know if depth perception is a learned behaviour or if it is
something that we are born with
• Infants didn’t cross the visual edge which made the surface seem deeper.
Selective Attention
Key experiments in Psychology & Design Thinking

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• The Halo Effect states that people generally assume that people who are
physically attractive are more likely to be intelligent, friendly and display
good judgment.
Conformity Study
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• A study that was designed to evaluate a person’s likelihood to conform to a
standard when there is pressure asserted.
• These individuals will answer a prefixed option which is wrong. The
participant will face confusion as the group is answering another option which
is visibly wrong.
• This will make the participant doubt his own self and may be change their
answer just to match with others’ opinion.
Halo Effect
Key experiments in Psychology & Design Thinking

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• In a lot of ways user perception is an effect of their thoughts and thus it affects their
behavior with products.
• Understanding the psychology behind user behavior allows designers to come up with
interventions which increase user involvement, enhance user experience and in turn
yield higher ROI.
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Conclusion

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Thank you
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