Psychology for Designers

Some great stuff in here.
Source: 7 Practical Facts about the Human Brain I wish Everyone Knew – Leo Widrich

I’ve been talking about the inherent problems with flat design for a few years now. (Affordance anyone?)

We finally have some evidence that flat design is harder to use:

The results show that a search in flat text mode (compared with the traditional mode) is associated with higher cognitive load.

Source: (PDF) Flat Design vs Traditional Design: Comparative Experimental Study

Twice as hard in-fact and much more error prone:

A search for flat icons takes twice as long as for realistic icons and is also characterized by higher cognitive load. Identifying clickable objects on flat web pages requires more time and is characterised by a significantly greater number of errors.

Here’s a video showing the problem well. This is a user new to flat design and well, you can see how he is struggling:

I get asked a lot about numbers and psychology. Here are some common questions and the answers I give.

Q: Are odd or even numbers more attractive?

Humans “prefer” round numbers.

Evidence:

• Individuals tend to recall odd-ending prices less accurately than even-ending prices
• Expressing a price as odd-ending increases the likelihood that it will be underestimated when recalled
• People prefer to ignore the last available digit for conservation of memory
• Americans cluster their tips around multiples of $5.
• Preference for round prices is so strong that restaurant dinners will calculate an exact tip amount to arrive at a round check total.
• Direct evidence that investors prefer round numbers when buying stocks
• Stock prices cluster on round fractions

Source: Aesthetic preference for even or odd numbers

Not as simple as that of course:

• Prices ending in “9” were more likely to find buyers, relative to the prices ending in “4”

Source: Effects of $9 Price Endings on Retail Sales: Evidence from Field Experiments

Q: What is the right number of items to put in a list / navigation menu / widget?

The psychology of lists, how many items is the best. Spoiler, it’s multiples of 10.
Power of Ten: The Weird Psychology of Rankings

I bust the myth of the magic number 7 +/- 2:
Miller’s number 7 ± 2: Psychology Myth Busting #2 – Joe Leech @mrjoe

The magic number when it comes to items in our heads all at once might be 4: (academic paper)
The magical number 4 in short-term memory: a reconsideration of mental storage capacity

Hick’s Law describes the time it takes for a person to make design is directly related to the number of options they have to choose from. Less options. Faster choice.

Hick’s law

Love this. The term Sludge is a great one.

Sludge highlights how companies and organizations can and are taking advantage of innate consumer traits and fallibilities, such as inertia and inattention, knowing that they can profit from consumers’ weaknesses and biases.

Regulators are realizing the need to act as a type of “behavioral economics police” to protect consumers from a deluge of sludge.

From: Sludge Detectives: The “BE Police” Take On Hotel Booking Sites – Behavioral Scientist

Well of course we are. It’s never been about gender. People are just bad at multi-tasking but really at kidding ourselves we can multitask.

Source: Research: Women and Men Are Equally Bad at Multitasking

So now you know. Add that middle initial and look more clever…

Middle name initials often appear in formal contexts, especially when people refer to intellectual achievements. On the basis of this common link, the display of middle initials increases positive evaluations of people’s intellectual capacities and achievements. We document this effect in seven studies:

Source: The impact of middle names: Middle name initials enhance evaluations of intellectual performance – Tilburg – 2014 – European Journal of Social Psychology