The Cognitive Psychology of Technology Design: Why It Matters

Written by Elina & Johanna

We humans are no machines. We are diverse, unpredictable, oftentimes messy, possibly ill-understood, and we all have different abilities. When designing technology, it is important to dig deeper into who we are actually designing for, and how to make the interaction as usable, enjoyable and memorable as possible, so that it caters for a satisfying user experience. This is where cognitive psychology comes in.

Image 1: Designers can greatly benefit from knowing the basic principles of cognitive psychology.

What Is Cognitive Psychology?

Cognitive psychology studies the various information processes occurring in the human mind such as memory, attention and perception. Our world is full of visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory and tactile stimuli that can grab our attention at any given moment, be it a notification from our mobile phone or a honk of a car nearby. Stimulus is something that grabs our attention, for example a meowing sound of a cat. When we hear it, we might react to it by thinking that our cat wants some food – this is a response caused by the stimulus. This is likely a very familiar pattern to anyone who owns a cat; hence cat owners are likely to have a mental model of these events. Mental models arrange information in our minds and are called schemas.

How Cognitive Psychology Can Improve Design?

While we all differ from each other, we are united by our cognitive limitations and capabilities: the constraints and abilities of the human mind are much the same for all of us (Interaction Design Foundation, 2018). Thus, cognitive psychology can help us add more value to the technology we design.

Perception is the processing of sensory information, whether connected to one’s concepts and knowledge (higher-level processing) or not (lower-level processing), in order to represent and understand the presented information, or the environment (Schacter, 2011; Ahtinen and Cowchury, 2018).

Attention is the ability to choose and concentrate on relevant stimuli: our attention can decide if we want to deal with the stimuli or ignore it. Sometimes this process is automatic (automatic attention) and sometimes we focus our attention on a problem which we have to solve (selective attention). With simple tasks involving two different senses, we can also practise multitasking, in which the attention is divided. (Gaal, 2018.)

Guiding Perception with Groupings and Layout

Via our senses, we employ Gestalt perception, which is a precognitive “guess” of what the elements mean or do based on the size, shape, position, or other elements around them (Evans 2017, 35). Consequently, the Gestalt principles describe how humans typically see objects by grouping similar elements, recognizing patterns and simplifying complex images.

Examples of Gestalt principles include proximity, similarity and continuation. Proximity means structuring the information in logical units to aid human perception, whereas the principle of similarity states that objects with similar visual characteristics, such as colour or shape, are seen to belong together. Continuation happens when human eye naturally follows a line or a line-like object from point A to point B. In case of context effect – a concept supported by the constructive perception theory – users use their prior knowledge and experiences of the stimulus to understand familiar scenes and objects, like you can experience in Image 2. To learn more about the principles of design from the perception point of view, we highly recommend watching this helpful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK86XQ1iFVs.

Image 2: How context influences perception (Evans 2017, 38).

Creating Attention-Grabbing Technology Designs

Designers have the power to guide the user’s attention with the design choices they make. We tend to be selective about the information presented to us, and focus on the most important while filtering out the unnecessary. Attention is guided by both environmental factors, such as exceptional and surprising events, strong sensory stimuli, and sudden changes, as well as human’s own information processing, i.e. expectations, goals, earlier knowledge, and the emotional state (Kallioniemi, 2018).

Users should be able to intuitively see the state of a device and possible actions to undertake: there should be clear indicators on how to use the interface while distracting elements should be excluded. Human attention is a limited resource, and designers should keep in mind that simplicity often brings out the best results. Attention can also be attracted by the use of colors, alarm techniques and temporal and spatial cues, such as the location on the screen, as users tend to scan pages in “F-shaped” patterns ignoring the lower-right corner. Another common way to guide the user’s attention is to leverage the pop-out effect: it is hard-wired in us to notice objects that stand out from the rest, like a pop-up window.

One of the biggest challenges of designing novel technologies is creating solutions that are intuitive to use and less distracting. Many smart technologies are already reaching these goals as we try to come up with even better solutions to seamlessly implement interactive technology into our living environments.

Do you think cognitive psychology is important when designing technology? Please share your views with us!

REFERENCES:

Ahtinen, Aino and Chowhury, Aparajita. 2018. Psychology of Pervasive Computing lectures. Tampere University of Technology.

Evans, David C. 2017. Bottlenecks: Aligning UX Design with User Psychology. Apress L. P.

Garbi, Naal. 2018. UX & Psychology Go Hand in Hand — Introduction to Human Attention. https://uxdesign.cc/ux-psychology-go-hand-in-hand-introduction-to-human-attention-a70ffd2c4289

Interaction Design Foundation. 2018. Psychology of Interaction Design: The Ultimate Guide.

Interaction Design Foundation. 2018. Gestalt Principles. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/gestalt-principles

Kallioniemi, Pekka. 2018. Fundamentals of Human-Technology Interaction lectures. University of Tampere.

Schacter, Daniel. 2011. Psychology. Worth Publishers.