The UX process aims to achieve the most effective and engaging experiences in a digital product: it shapes the landscape, guides users, offers them something useful and valuable, and affects how they feel. Content, structure, and navigation come together to provide memorable experiences. The ideal experience allows users to complete a task effectively and positively and ends with a sense of satisfaction.
Discover Xpand IT’s UX Framework.
The importance of psychology in UX
The UX process starts with aligning business objectives with the target audience’s expectations. By understanding your audience’s behavioral and cognitive psychology, you can give them an effective, valuable experience.
In behavioral psychology, we know that it is possible to encourage specific behaviors by subjecting people to certain stimuli. In UX, you can ensure that users behave as expected by embedding small stimuli in the interface.
Therefore, when developing a digital product, it is important to consider expected user behavior and what can be done to reinforce it.
Cognitive psychology is the study of internal mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, attention, language, problem-solving, and learning. Studies on perception, memory, and attention are among the most important aspects of the UX development routine: perception is how we capture and interpret external information through the senses and is related to selective attention. Users do not look around much; they generally focus only on the screen section where they are performing a task or where they assume the answer to their problem lies: our brain automatically filters out anything that does not seem necessary.
Furthermore, it is essential that the experience makes sense from the perspective of structure and organization: the human mind is constantly looking for cognitive patterns, and these must make sense to the user.
The relationship between user behavior and brands
Sometimes, we are so obsessed with meeting user expectations that we fail to focus on the brand for which we are designing the experience. In other words, we lose focus on the differential line between users and clients.
Before demystifying UX processes, it is worth understanding the relationship between customer and user experience, as well as the brand in a broader context. Every element of the customer experience contributes to creating a better brand experience.
So, what do the acronyms UI, UX, CX, and BX mean, and how do they relate to each other?
UI = User Interface: The space where interactions between humans and machines take place.
UX = User Experience: How we feel when we interact with a product or service.
- Why did they decide to access a website or an app?
- What information do they need?
- What problems are they facing?
- What solutions are they looking for to solve them?
UX should be guided by empathy
The UX team constantly seeks to put themselves in the user’s shoes and understand their logical reasoning. Their motivations and pain points are researched to understand how all the pieces fit together holistically to help people achieve their goals.
It is crucial to understand their problems and the journey they will take to get where they want to go. Research eliminates assumptions, allowing us to make informed decisions and apply rationales. True empathy cannot exist until we deeply know those we wish to reach.
In conclusion, UX is a multidisciplinary area that encompasses three fundamental elements:
- Discovering and analyzing behaviors and mental models to comprehensively understand them in their entirety (holistic doctrine)
- Putting oneself in another’s place to understand their journeys and pain points eliminates assumptions.
- Acting as a pivotal part of the macro-scenario of the brand’s relationship with clients and potential clients.
In the next article, we will begin at this point to outline the activities and tools we use to design intentional, memorable experiences that meet specific business objectives:
- How we solve a problem “the UX way”
- What activities we perform in discovery, strategy and analysis
- How we design an effective experience and materialize the final product
Read the second part of this article.