The Designers’ guide to product adoption!

A designer who doesn’t understand human psychologies is going to be no more successful than an architect who doesn’t understand physics.

— Joe Leech

As Mr. Leech opined, Design rely heavily on psychology to discern the human behavior. As designers, we have an enormous responsibility to shape the world. We recognize patterns and ensue empathy to develop products or services with a high frequency of use and a high perceived value.

It is imperative to understand the principles and theories behind the design decisions we can make backed by psychological principles. By understanding how different psychology principles influence human behavior, one can design their products to elicit specific responses and actions from our target users.

But how can we create experiences capable of solving a problem when there’s an infinite combination of people and contexts?

If we want to engage users repeatedly, we need to understand what are the reasons that drives their behavior?

OK!

First and foremost, every interaction a person has with a product follows the same pattern:

• 📝 Information — User filters the information
• 🤔 Significance — User looks for its meaning
• ⏰ Time — User takes an action within a time frame
• 🧠 Memory — User stores fragments of the interaction in their memory

Each of these stages of interaction, there are certain design principles and cognitive biases that will help you to build habit-forming products. Let’s get straight into it.

📝 Information

This is the first stage of a users’ interaction with the product, where they are filtering the information in front of them. A few psychological principles to follow when designing for this stage of the interaction would be:

Hick’s Law

Hick’s law is a psychological principle which states that the time required to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of options presented.

📌 Design aid:

• Break complex tasks into small steps to reduce cognitive load.
• Leave the complex tasks for the end of the journey.
• If it’s impossible to reduce the number of options, make the content easy to skim.

Priming

Priming is a phenomenon that affects a type of implicit memory that acts automatically and influences decision-making by temporarily increasing access to units of knowledge related to stimuli previously seen.

📌 Design aid:

• Use images or videos that clearly state the benefit of using your product or service.

Cognitive load

Cognitive load theory suggests that learning is more effective when designers and users share the same mental model.

Memory has a limited capacity, so it’s best to avoid overloading users with additional information that does not directly contribute to the main objective. Information overload will increase the chances of a user abandoning a task in progress due to a growing sense of distress.

Be mindful of the differences when you design a journey. Most of the time, the difference between an expert and a novice user is the familiarity with the material.

📌 Design aid:

• Remove repetitive information.
• Increase working memory capacity by using both audio and visual to convey information.
• Use familiar visual cues to avoid unnecessary learning.
• Organize the information in a way that makes sense.

Progressive disclosure

Expose complex features only when the user can predict the next step. When designing an experience, different levels of user expertise should be taken into consideration, allowing your design to be adapted according to specific needs.

📌 Design aid:

• Identify scenarios and write stories for different user types. Include context and reasons why they should access the product or service.
• Carry out a usability test and evaluate time, precision, success, and satisfaction.

Aesthetic-Usability effect.

An aesthetically pleasing design generates a positive response in people’s brains by increasing the threshold of tolerance for errors. It also improves usability perception while increasing authority.

📌 Design aid:

• Use aesthetics to help users discover how they can interact with an element. If it looks like a button, it must be a button.

🤔 Significance

The next stage of a users’ interaction with the product is when they are making sense of the information presented. A few psychological principles to follow when designing for this stage of the interaction would be:

Social Proof

People observe and accept the actions of others as correct, especially if they are unsure or the information is ambiguous. The greater the number of people who recommend using something, the greater is the acceptance.

📌 Design aid:

• Introduce social proof as soon as possible.
• Video testimonials are the future of social proofing.

Curiosity gap

The difference between what users know and what they need to know might be the necessary stimulus that prompts them to fill the knowledge gap.

📌 Design aid:

• Capture users’ attention with engaging titles that stimulate curiosity.
• People want to feel safe when making a decision. Use sentences that contain the words “like”, “can” or “do”, to reinforce the confidence in your speech.

Mental models

Mental models help us to make sense of reality by creating internal representations of the outside world, regardless of whether they are accurate or not.

We all perceive the world individually, therefore we create our own mental models. Empathizing with our audience means being aware of their mental models and designing accordingly. Every mismatch between your product and the user will provoke inherent friction that could cause a drop-off.

📌 Design aid:

• Whenever possible, use labels that explain how the interface works.
• Use symmetrical elements whenever possible, as they are visually pleasing and convey harmony.

Miller’s law

The average person can only keep 7 items (±2 more or less) in their working memory.

📌 Design aid:

• Group content into small groups to improve processing, compression, and easy memorization of information.
• Keep in mind that short-term memory capacity varies by person, prior knowledge, and context. Don’t use the magical number seven to justify unnecessary design limitations.

⏰ Time

After filtering through information and assigning it meaning, comes the stage to take an action within a certain period of time. Here are a few design tips to encourage the users to take the action one would want them to take in this time frame.

Investment loops

The brain has a unique system that keeps us always looking for rewards. Habit-forming products collect information about user behavior and preferences with every session to craft an experience based on a loop of a trigger, action, reward, and investment. In other words, greater frequency translates to greater perceived utility.

On Twitter, for example, the investment comes in the form of a follow. Even if there is no immediate reward, doing so renders the service more valuable and increases the likelihood of being used again.

📌 Design aid:

• Reward users for taking an action (making a purchase, referring a friend, etc.)

Commitment & consistency

Any interaction with a product is seen as a threat to users since it instinctively involves a compromise. Keep your initial request at the bare minimum and increase complexity as your user progresses through the conversion funnel. Remember, the smaller the commitment, the lower the threat.

📌 Design aid:

• Start with agreeable actions to boost your users’ confidence. Once you have enough positive stimuli, invite them to take the big leap (make a purchase, acquire a subscription, etc.)
• Break down large tasks into small simple steps to streamline the process. By doing so, you’ll reduce the cognitive load required to complete a task.

🧠 Memory

After taking an action, users will store fragments of the interaction in their memory. Here’s how one can make that experience positive and more memorable for their users.

Provide exit points.

Always provide exit points. Invite your users to exit at the peak of the experience. A delayed exit can harm the whole experience because it’s perceived as an unnecessary detour from the user’s main objective.

📌 Design aid:

• Follow the example of YouTube or Netflix and consider creating a queuing system.
• Include messages when a task is complete successfully.

Peak-end rule

Users judge the experience by its peak and how it ends. They don’t evaluate the average or the sum of all micro-experiences. Peaks (highs or lows) and the end of the experience weigh heavily on the brain.

📌 Design aid:

• Celebrate when users have completed a critical task.
• Provide clear starting points to end the experience at a high peak.

Zeigarnik effect

A task in progress creates a specific tension that can only be resolved upon completion. People remember incomplete or interrupted tasks rather than complete ones. Missing information causes stress that makes incomplete tasks more accessible and easier to remember.

📌 Design aid:

• Invite your users to discover additional content.
• Provide a progress indicator that will increase the chances your user completes the task.

Storytelling effect

It’s our natural impulse to impose order and give meaning to our observations. Stories reveal details about characters, places, and events creating an empathetic bond with our heroes. Meaningful stories can strike a chord that can trigger strong reactions and deep memories.

📌 Design aid:

• Use storytelling to convey a point of view to stakeholders.
• Create a plot with a conflict to help users envision how they can overcome a problem using your design.

User experience design has its conceptual roots in cognitive and behavioral psychology and it is a blueprint of a human being’s interaction with a product. I hope next time you are designing a product theses principles and these potential resolutions will help you devise a highly marketable product.