The Intersection of UX and Psychology in Understanding User Behaviour

As the UX (user experience) and UI (user interface) disciplines evolve and become evermore prominent in our lives, truly being able to understand the behaviour of your users is crucial to creating products that deliver exceptional experiences as well as simply meeting their needs.

At the heart of this understanding lies the intersection of UX design and psychology. By applying well-known psychological principles, designers gain deeper insight into how users think, feel, and act, ultimately leading to more intuitive and engaging solutions.

In terms of these fundamental psychological principles, look no further than Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In his rather neat pyramid, Maslow describes humans’ needs in five categories, each lying on top of one another. It begins at the bottom with the most basic of human needs (sustenance, air, shelter, etc.), going all the way up through economic security, love and belonging, self-esteem, and finally self-actualisation.

Maslow argues that humans thrive on a multitude of these needs simultaneously, but that the order is not completely fixed. For some, prestige may outweigh love, whilst others may be able to achieve levels of self-actualisation despite living below the poverty line.

How we can translate this into UX, however, is where things get interesting. Meeting the basic usability standards, such as quick load times and reliable functionality, covers the base level of the pyramid. Implementing strong security measures in order to protect user privacy and provide clear feedback and error messages to help users feel in control covers the second lowest level.

Whilst fulfilling basic needs is of course essential, designers should be looking at the very least to cover the third level in the pyramid as well, love and belonging, in order to tap into that most innate desire for connection. To do this, designers can incorporate and use various social features that enable users to interact with each other and with the business.

User-generated content, such as reviews and ratings where users can leave their comments and rate products or services can not only provide valuable feedback to the business, but can also help other users make informed decisions and give them a sense of credibility and control.

The ability to share their own experiences through photos, videos, and stories related to the product or service they obtained on the platform or through social media is also an extremely powerful tool that can be used to achieve this.

Forums and discussion boards can make a drastic change when it comes to feelings of connection and community. Introducing community forums and Q&A sections are great ways of getting users to ask questions, share experiences, and provide and receive advice. Gamification elements have also begun to be introduced into more experiences recently to drive this forward, as it boosts the users’ sense of achievement and belonging.

When designing these features we must make sure we strongly consider privacy, security, inclusivity, and encouragement of positive interactions. By focusing on this third tier through a thoughtful experience design process, businesses can create platforms that genuinely enrich their users’ lives.

For the fourth level of the pyramid, self-esteem needs, offering personalisation options that allow users to express their identity within the walls of the design is an excellent way to tackle this.

Finally, for the highest level of the pyramid, self-actualisation. Maslow describes this level as the one that is not often achieved and, if done so, is almost impossible to maintain. It stands to reason, then, that designers should look to gear their designs towards allowing users to achieve their “full potential”, whatever that may look like within the designed experience.

Enabling users to explore and discover new features that would enhance their skills and/or knowledge, as well as designing to allow for flexibility and creativity, are ways we can look to create evermore rewarding encounters that allow users to fully customise and enjoy their experience.

Once those users are engaged, however, it’s vital not to overload them with information, as this will undo all of that previous design thinking by making the experience too intense or overwhelming to use.

Cognitive load is the term used to describe the amount of mental effort that’s required to process information. When designing interfaces in particular, though this also applies to all possible user experiences, it’s essential to minimise this load in order to prevent users from being put off from the experience.

The ways in which this can be achieved is by simplifying complex tasks into smaller, more manageable steps using clear and concise language that avoids jargon and unnecessary information, and organising content in a way that guides users’ attention to the most important elements first.

Now we’ve got the users engaged and not bowled over by the information available to them, and hopefully a fair way up Maslow’s pyramid, we need to motivate them. Self-determination theory focuses on the psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness in order for people to be motivated to take positive action in their lives. The experiences we design can act in the same way.

We can provide users with choices, offer challenges, and encourage social interaction to achieve senses of autonomy, accomplishments, and belonging. By aligning our design strategies to these intrinsic motivations, designers can create even more compelling and appealing experiences.

Habits can also be powerfully leveraged to deliver experiences that users want to come back to, not just feel as though they must.

The habit loop, consisting of a cue, routine, and reward, is a useful framework to use for this. Designers must identify triggers that prompt user action, design straightforward and repeatable actions that users can integrate seamlessly into their routines, and provide immediate and satisfying rewards that reinforce the desired behaviour in order to take advantage of this.

Now, it’s not lost on us that some of this may sound like a recipe book for a disaster capitalist who runs a Big Tech company. However, designers cannot just focus on the cold, hard analytics of human behaviour to create engaging products; they also must, of course, be aesthetically pleasing and appealing to users’ emotions.

Emotions significantly impact how users interact with products. The term “emotional design” refers to the creation of positive emotional responses to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty, and it’s vitally important that this is deployed alongside whatever other methods designers decide to use, as it serves to neatly package this psychological analysis into a marketable product that users can enjoy.

Aesthetic appeal that reflects the sort of emotions you want to convey is quite clearly the most important aspect of this, but understanding users’ emotions and designing solutions that actually address their pain points and desires is the key to users’ hearts. If they believe that a product can solve a problem for them, they will use it.

Designers should look to incorporate elements of surprise and delight into their products, such as microinteractions and animations, to create more memorable experiences and make products connect with their users on an emotional level, not simply a functional one.

Finally, going further than meeting all of Maslow’s principles and nailing the aesthetic appeal of the experience, understanding how users process information and make choices can lead designers to create a more effective and efficient product that relates to the user and truly serves their needs. So, how can designers put these key psychological concepts to practical use and achieve this?

We need to focus on anchoring, which refers to the human tendency to rely heavily on the first piece of information encountered (the “anchor”) for our perceptions and decisions. It’s vital to put the most important and user-experience-improving features in that anchor role so that users are quickly captured, but not so much that it increases cognitive load beyond a tolerable level for the user.

We then need to understand and deal with confirmation bias — the tendency for people to search for, interpret, and remember information that confirms their preconceptions, expectations, and beliefs — in implementing these concepts in our work.

By thoughtfully incorporating these psychological principles, we can create solutions that make the experience a smoother, more intuitive decision-making process. This approach leads to a better user experience with a higher user satisfaction and benefits businesses as well.

~ Written by Kareem Metawea
~ Edited by Sam Hannah