Psychology of UX Writing

The main goal of any designer is to create an intuitive interface. But what does “intuitive” mean? Does it have anything to do with intuition? What makes an interface intuitive?

First, intuition is the ability or power to know something is true without proof or evidence. It’s like a gut feeling that guides you to behave in a certain way without fully understanding why. Intuitive interfaces or processes have nothing to do with this ability.

An interface or process can be called intuitive when a person’s mental model matches a product’s conceptual model. In other words, a product is considered intuitive when it works exactly how a person expects it to work.

For example, before grocery shopping online, you have a mental model, an assumption about how this process looks like in real life. First, you go along aisles looking at available products. Then, you pick an item, put it in a shopping cart, and continue shopping. When you’re done, you go to the checkout, pay, and get a receipt.

When you first grocery shop online, your mental model adjusts to reality and shapes your experience. If you have no difficulties placing an order, the task has a low cognitive load, and the interface can be described as intuitive.

Understanding how users think and envision their flow is the main component of intuitive interfaces. From a UX writing perspective, the intuitive interfaces should talk to users in their language. Rather than using technical terms, you should listen to what your users say when discussing your product and apply this vocabulary to your interface.

Hick’s Law or the Hick-Hyman Law is a fundamental UX law formulated in 1952. During an experiment, a team of two psychologists — William Edmund Hick from England and Ray Hyman from the United States — found out that the more options people have to choose from, the more frustrated and overwhelmed they feel, and the longer it takes for them to make a decision.

The fundamental rule of Hick’s law is to keep things simple. Wait, but don’t more choice options equal more freedom? The Jam Experiment conducted in 2000 proves the opposite. In the study, it was found that customers were more likely to buy jam from a booth with fewer options available.

More options cause cognitive load and choice paralysis, distracting users from their goals. Even worse — the more choices people have, the less happy they feel after purchasing. They tend to wonder if the other options might not have been a better choice and if they made a mistake. What can designers and UX writers do to solve this problem?

• Minimize choices. It’s especially vital for tasks when the time is limited and users have to decide faster. If you have more options, show the most common upfront and hide the rest behind the Show More button.
• Break down complex tasks into smaller steps. Breaking down a complex task, such as a form, into smaller steps and grouping content by topic decreases cognitive load.
• Highlight the most essential items. Use subheadings, color, and font weight to make the most common or essential options stand out.

Tip! Understand how the number of choices affects decision-making time in the Design Psychology: Hick’s Law lesson.

Effects of Serial Position

Imagine your partner asks you to go to the grocery store and buy a list of products: milk, banana, cookies, pickles, whole wheat bread, cheese, and peanut butter. According to the serial position effect, you’re likely to remember the first and last items but not the ones in the middle. If you haven’t jotted down the list, you will unlikely bring the pickles and whole wheat bread home.

The position of information in a sequence affects our memory, and we tend to remember the first and last items but have trouble recalling things in the middle. It happens because our brains need less processing power to recognize and memorize single items at the beginning. As the list grows, we need to process not just single items but a group of them, and it becomes a much more challenging task.

As for why we do so well with remembering the last objects on a list, we can easily recollect the most recent information we’ve heard or seen. In contrast to the first items that get into our long-term memory, the items at the end of the list hang out in our short-term memory.

In UX writing, always position the most vital elements at the list’s beginning or end and place the less relevant items in the middle if you want users to remember the sequence.

Fogg Behavior Model

The Fogg Behavior Model helps us understand why people act as they do. It says that 3 things must be present for a behavior to happen: motivation, ability, and a trigger. If something’s missing, the behavior won’t occur.

Motivation helps users act:

• Physical: Basic human needs like pleasure or pain motivate us. For example, hunger motivates users to order food through a delivery app.
• Emotional: Feelings like hope or fear can drive actions. Buying medical insurance due to fear is an example.
• Social: The need to fit in makes us join social media or try new trends.

Ability is about how easy or hard a task is. The more complex a task, the more motivation needed to do it. If you want users to act, make tasks less complex rather than trying to increase motivation.

Triggers prompt action. A trigger can be a text or a call-to-action that makes users act immediately, like saying “limited collection” or encouraging them to join a free design course.

The cool thing is, these factors can make up for each other. For example, if you boost motivation, users might click a button even if its label doesn’t seem inviting.

To encourage users to engage in daily workouts, designers can add a feature to compare users’ progress with friends, for social motivation directly relates to the social motivator aspect of the Fogg Behavior Model, harnessing the power of social acceptance to drive user behavior.

Miller’s Law