The experiences you remember are not complete, accurate, honest, and sometimes they aren’t even real. That means it is possible to “design” what people remember. So today we will learn a bit about:
Memory
This lesson is about one, simple idea that most people think about in the wrong way. However, that one idea can effect everything in your approach to design. To fix that, we need to understand:
Attention
Regardless of what you are designing, it’s only a matter of time before you have to let your users choose their own adventure. Maybe it’s a menu, or a set of prices, or a list of products. That makes it important to understand:
The Illusion of Choice
Your brain is a system. Certain types of information go in, certain types of information come out. But like many systems, if you give it information it wasn’t designed for, you can get less-than-perfect results. Today we will learn:
What is a Cognitive Bias?
One word you will hear fairly often in UX Design is “intuitive”. That means the user will just understand, without any explanation or training. So today we will learn:
What is Intuition?
In UX design it can be easy to slip into all the structures and techniques and forget about the fact that users are real people, and they can tell when you’re full of shit. Context matters. Honesty matters. So it’s important to learn a little about:
Creating Trust
The internet is famous for making things “go viral” but if your site isn’t designed to create viral word-of-mouth, it won’t. So today, we’ll learn about how to translate emotional content into viral popularity:
Social & Viral Structure
The difference between a game and a non-game has nothing to do with badges and points. It’s all about the psychology. Game design can be very nuanced, but let’s start with a couple fundamentals of:
Gamification
Your job as a UX designer is to create experiences, not just observe them. So we need to do more than reward and punish what users naturally do. We need the science of training people to do something new. And keep doing it. Forever. We need:
Conditioning & Addiction
If psychology were math, today’s lesson would be when we move from adding and subtracting to multiplying and dividing. It’s easy, but it allows you to design behaviour that grows over time. I’m talking about:
Rewards & Punishments
