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The term "UX" is often tossed around by marketers, designers and others who create digital products. It's a trendy buzzword that can mean many things to many people. But in reality, it's a design discipline that focuses on user goals and needs.
UX is more than just making something look pretty, as attractive as it may be. It's about creating an experience that meets users' needs — one that makes them happy and keeps them coming back for more.
In this article, we'll take a deeper dive into the psychology behind stellar UX design. We'll explore the importance of visual hierarchy and how it impacts user experience.
Evaluating User Needs
The first step in creating a stellar user experience is understanding your audience and what they need from your product. You should identify common mental models for different types of users and then create personas that represent each one.
Personas are fictional characters based on real people who represent common traits and needs that users share with these characters. A persona helps you better understand what drives people in general to use products like yours, and it can help you create an effective marketing campaign that speaks directly to these needs.
But personas aren’t just useful for marketing purposes; they can also be used during the design process itself to ensure that every feature works well for all types of users.
Short attention spans matter
The average human attention span has been dropping since the advent of smartphones and social media – not only because of the constant distractions that they provide but also because people have been conditioned to expect instant gratification.
This is why it’s important to keep your website simple and easy to navigate, especially if you want to attract new visitors and convert them into customers.
To help you achieve this goal, we’ve compiled a list of tips that will help you design an intuitive, fast-loading website that provides an enjoyable user experience for all visitors:
- Use clear headlines and subheads
- Highlight key points with bullet points or numbered lists
- Create white space
- Keep paragraphs short and simple; break up long paragraphs into multiple shorter ones with headings and subheadings in between them.
Gestalt principles and UI
While it may seem like there's no rhyme or reason to it, there's actually a science behind why we perceive things in certain ways. Gestalt psychology is the study of how people put together visual elements and recognize objects. The principles of gestalt can be applied to your designs to create an experience that feels cohesive and easy to use.
Gestalt psychology was developed by Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka in the early 20th century. It focuses on how people perceive objects as wholes rather than individual parts. The theory states that humans tend to organize visual stimuli into groups or patterns based on similarities in shape, arrangement, proximity and continuity (McGraw-Hill Education).
Here are five gestalt principles that will help you improve the user experience on your website or app:
1. Proximity – close together are perceived as being related. This is why you'll often see similar items grouped together on a page, such as all the links on a navigation bar or all the images in a gallery.
2. Similarity – Similar objects are perceived as being related. This is why you'll often see items with similar colors grouped together on a page, such as all the links on a navigation bar or all the images in a gallery with similar colors (even if they're not exactly alike).
3. Continuity – Our brains automatically piece together bits of information into complete perceptions so that we can make sense of what we see around us. For example, if you’re watching a movie scene with someone walking across an open field toward another person, it looks like they’re moving smoothly from one place to another even though there may be several cuts
4. Closure - Closure occurs when our minds fill in missing information in an object or scene based on previous experiences or associations with other objects in the same scene (or other similar scenes). For example, if you see a square with two corners missing then your mind might automatically fill in those corners with edges from other nearby squares.
5. Figure/ground – The figure is an object of focus, while the ground is everything else in a scene. For example, when you look at a picture of a person standing on a beach at sunset, you don’t see anything except for the person until you start to look for details like their hair color or clothes. Then your brain separates them from the background and makes them into a figure that stands out from everything else.
Examples Matters
Here are some examples of how psychology can help you build stellar user experiences:
- You can use cognitive load theory to ensure people don't feel overwhelmed by your product. Cognitive load theory is all about managing the amount of information people have to process at any given time so that they can still perform tasks effectively. You can use this theory to make sure you're not overwhelming people with too many options or too much information at once, whether it's on their screens or in their inboxes.
- You can understand why people like certain colors or fonts, which ones make them feel good or bad about themselves, and how this will influence their perception of your brand or product. Color and font choices are important
Everybody has a different source of motivation
UX design is about meeting user needs and creating a user experience that meets those needs. However, we all know that every person is different. This means that we have to be able to design interfaces for people of all types and ages.
In order to do this, we need to know how different people use their devices and what motivates them. There are many different sources of motivation for people, so let's take a look at some of the most common ones.
We'll start with the top rated section because it's easy to understand. It's also easy to use in your designs, because you can simply review the list of apps that your customers use most often and make sure they're not missing anything they'd want in their app (like reviews or search functions).
The reviews section is another great source of information about what users want from your product . The best way to find out whether your product has features that users want is by asking them directly.
Designs for Humans: Visual creatures
People are attracted to beautiful things, which means that visually appealing products will attract more attention than those that are less than attractive. Visual design also makes it easier for people to understand your product by making it more accessible with less text and more images.
Visuals help users better understand what they're looking at by providing context so they don't have to read through pages of text or skim through long passages before fully understanding what's being offered. A good visual designer will create an experience where the customer knows exactly what they want before even asking for it!
But visuals are also used to solve a variety of other problems in the digital realm:
- Visual displays can help users navigate large amounts of content or data.
- Visual cues aid in the recall process by helping users remember information.
- Visual elements can be used to control user emotions and reactions through color, shape and size.
The goal of incorporating visuals into your user experience is to make sure that everything on your website supports its primary function — whether that’s selling products or providing information about your business services.
Final words
UX design is important, and it's especially important in the development of jewelry e-commerce sites. A great deal of attractiveness studies have been done around the concept of colored objects, how products are displayed, and how they are perceived by consumers. We've never been ones to stick strictly to the rules when designing pieces—but it's always helpful to know what works (and what doesn't) before putting pen to paper and designing your next jewelry website.
