The 4 Key Principles of UX Design Psychology

Magnus Lundström
5 min readNov 1, 2022

The way a product is designed will affect the user experience that people have when they interact with it. The goal of a UX designer is to ensure the user experience is the best it can be and helps users accomplish their goals quickly and intuitively.

The different UX design principles will help you understand your user’s behavior and how you can give them the best user experience when they use your products or services.

If you need to learn about UX psychology, then we are here to help. This article will examine the different techniques UX designers can use to improve their digital products.

Photo by Alicia Christin Gerald on Unsplash
Photo by Alicia Christin Gerald on Unsplash

UX Psychology Principle Of Least Effort

This user experience design psychology principle is simple. It’s all about keeping everything simple and helping users complete their goals the fastest and easiest way possible. You must design your product to make users put in the slightest mental effort to do what they want.

People don’t want to spend lots of time learning how to use your product. It would help if you made it simple. If you have tons of text in your product that introduces the user to the development and how to use it, then you need to shorten that text and keep it concise. If certain information doesn’t need to be there, you must remove it. This will help improve the user experience of your product or service.

Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash
Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash

You can categorize relevant information and group similar information together. This will make it easier to read and understand. UX designers use this technique to sort data and make the user experience more straightforward. If you need to learn how to do this effectively, then you can hire a design agency to help you with this.

There are different ways this principle can be incorporated into your designs. If a user cannot click on a specific button or link, you can gray that link to let users know they cannot interact with it.

UX Psychology Principle Of Identity

Understanding who the product’s users are is essential, and you must let them know that you understand this. People want to have a unique and personalized experience when they are using a product. Giving them this will make them feel appreciated and understood by the designer.

If your product doesn’t let users customize their experience, you need to add elements to the product’s design to let them do this. This can be challenging for new designers and might be different for each product.

Photo by Paolo Giubilato on Unsplash

It would help if you created a way for users to give you feedback. You can add a form to the product that users can fill in and provide input on what they like and don’t like. This will help with communication between the designers and users. When adding this feedback form, you need to make sure it’s easy to find and complete, but it should be manageable. If it keeps appearing and irritating the users, that needs to be changed.

UX Design Psychology Principle Of Perpetual Habit

Users rely on their memory when using products to accomplish what they want without thinking about it quickly. When designing a product, you need to think about what users are used to and then design the product accordingly. If you change how things are done, you can confuse users and cause them to stop using your product.

Designers want to make their products unique, but this should only be done if it will positively affect the product’s user experience.

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash
Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

When using this visual design principle, you need to keep the design simple. Always think about how you can simplify the different actions the users can take to accomplish their goals. This will help improve the user experience and make people want to keep using the product.

To create successful user experience, you should get feedback from users by testing the product’s design. Ask them what they like and would change in the design and why. This will help you make essential changes that will give users what they want.

UX Design Principle Of Mistakes

When users interact with a product, they will make mistakes. It would help if you considered where most mistakes will be made and how the number of mistakes can be reduced. Making these mistakes will irritate the users, and you need to help facilitate this irritation as it can negatively affect the users’ impression of your product.

Photo by David Travis on Unsplash
Photo by David Travis on Unsplash

You should perform testing on the product and find out where most mistakes a likely to be made, and then make improvements to help minimize this.

If the user makes a mistake, you should tell them. This will help the user understand there isn’t a problem with the product but something they have done. This can help reduce frustration. It would help if you communicated the actions taken and whether they were successful. Make sure to allow users to undo their actions instead of starting again.

Thanks for reading!

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