A guide to design for the brain with intention and results. — Exactly how the mind works is still largely a mystery. And as with most mysteries, there are clues that give resolution to the interworking of how we think. How we think involves a swarm of highly interrelated mental processes including attention, memory, and thinking. This article introduces a set of…

I am gearing up to pitch my doctoral dissertation research topic. I have to convince my IRB committee that I know this stuff well enough to conduct the necessary research to answer my research question: Can color, type, motion, directional focus, and reward reacquire and maintain attention through task completion. …

Visitors have a million and one reasons to leave our website once they arrive. Literally, everything is working against us to keep visitors engaged with experiences we’ve painstakingly designed. From the first nanosecond on the website, the brain and its biases are actively making snap judgment calls. In fact, cognitive…

Ever been on a website running a search, reading a page, filling a form, comparing products — and out of nowhere, you get a Slack notification about leftover cookies in the lunchroom? When you get there, you are sucked into a conversation. On your way back to your desk, you…

We can’t talk about how people learn without also talking about memory and retrieval. Learning, memory, and retrieval go hand in hand… in… hand. And they can (should) work together to enhance user experience. — (Skip to the end if you ware just looking for a “so what,” but the journey below is well worth the time) Let’s start with what we know: when we can’t complete a task, nobody wins. On an interface, the reason for why we can’t do something typically comes down…

What does Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning have to do with user experience design? — Even though he wasn’t a psychologist or a user experience designer, Pavlov’s work explains much of why our web designs work today, one-hundred and twenty-three years after he hatched classical conditioning (also known as Pavlovian or respondent conditioning). Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, during a physiological study on digestion, discovered a…

Have you ever made a logical decision? One where you felt reason led you to an undeniable solution? If so, you are kidding yourself. You might as well have eeny, meeny, miny, moe your way through it because every decision we make is an emotional one. And we should design accordingly. — This is Part I of a two-part series. Here’s part II: How web users decide. How we decide has been the subject of much research — and for a good reason. …

The only way web users move through our user experiences is by making decision after decision. Users don’t decide rationally, and yet we keep designing as if they do. — This article is Part II of Eeny, meeny, miny, moe In the first part of this three-part series, we explored the physiology of decision making. We netted out on the notion that our emotional brain (the limbic system) trumps the rational brain (the frontal lobe). …

What does Jakob, Fitts, Miller, Hick, Postel, Kahneman, Norman, von Restorff, Tesler, and Doherty have in common? — Quite a bit. Over the past 80 years or so, these trailblazing psychologists hatched the creative scaffolding from which we create today. Each of their discoveries has advanced our understanding of what makes us tick. Most of these guys had no way of knowing that their discoveries would extend into…

It pains me to write this article because I mostly love the internet. It’s been really good to me. But now that I have kids, I worry about it as much I worry about all the other things that could hurt them. — As I inch through my research, my committee gave me this prompt: The massive changes in technology and media consumption habits over the past 30 years have been theorized to result in negative outcomes for human attention spans and task completion activities. What is the current state of our research…

Neurodesgin is an emerging field of design practice that accounts for how our brains are wired to create designs that promote simplicity, emote joy, and drive action. — After publishing the first part of this article, I’ve come across a couple of additional books that help bring resolution to this emerging design field. Thanks to all the folks that wrote and nudged me to write this sequel. Before we dig in, let’s add some context.

Neurodesgin is an emerging field of design practice that accounts for how our brains are wired to create designs that promote simplicity, emote joy, and drive action. — Since humans are visually dominant, how we perceive and attend visual stimuli should be of particular interest to user experience designers. This is why neurodesign is important. To understand neurodesign, we must first understand many things about so many things. And what better way to learn than by reading? …

How would our design practice change if we suddenly learned that the eye and the brain are in cahoots with one another to trick us? — The eye is a complex and temperamental organ. By the end of this article, designers will have a better understanding of how the eye works with the brain, how it deconstructs images that the brain stitches back up again, and how the two organs work hard to pick and choose…

The brain is an illogical, lazy, guessing machine that designers must understand to create more successful work. — The brain is an enigma. It’s a mysterious and little-understood confluence of neurological circuits firing billions of simultaneous electrical signals while wading in neurotransmitter chemical baths rolling up to billions of years-in-the-making cortical and subcortical structures. …

To create inclusive and universal designs, among many other things, designers need to better understand Color Vision Deficiency. My wife doesn’t miss an opportunity to remind me that I am “captain literal.” It’s both a curse and a blessing — I think, she disagrees. In a case like this, using the right term matters because “colorblind,” as our colloquial understanding goes, is an absolute misnomer.

Driving action by orchestrating designs that tap into how we are wired. — Great design draws out specific feelings from audiences. Ideally, that translates into trust. Trust is essential for marketers to establish — and quickly. Quickly making an emotional connection with audiences is one thing — driving action is another. How do you capitalize on that trust and drive people to action…

Our brains are biologically programmed to unintentionally and automatically attend to human faces. Know how it works to tap into that biology. — A study from the Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied, Suboptimal Exposure to Facial Expressions When Viewing Video Messages From a Small Screen: Effects on Emotion, Attention, and Memory, used facial electromyography (EMG) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia as physiological measures of emotion and attention. …

What if there was a way, through design, to trigger the release of neurotransmitters that affect how we feel and how we do? Earlier this year, I wrote an article about how designers, through their designs, can deliberately promote the release of dopamine. In this article, I will dig in a bit more to show designers why and how to tap into dopamine to emote joy, promote simplicity, and drive action.

Exactly how the mind works is still largely a mystery. And as with most mysteries, there are clues that give resolution to the interworking of how we think. How we think involves a swarm of highly interrelated mental processes including attention, memory, and thinking. — Neurodesign is an emerging field of design practice that accounts for how our brains are wired to create designs that promote simplicity, emote joy, and drive action. Since humans are visually dominant, how we perceive and attend visual stimuli should be of particular interest to user experience designers. This is…