A product evokes feelings, thoughts, and emotions in the consumer. But which ones? Is it possible to decompose the user experience into its components and systematically examine them? Is it possible not to guess, but to design
a positive user experience for your product or service? Learn more in the book User Experience Design.
Cognitive Symphony
When we are conscious, a myriad of cognitive processes are automatically going on in the brain at the subconscious level. For example, how do you determine that a chair is a chair? Vision comprehensively identifies an object, forms a three-dimensional image based on a two-dimensional image on the back of the eye, and then compares that image with those stored in memory, tying it to a linguistic unit – “chair.”
If there are so many steps in simple chair recognition, and each of them is produced in a specialized processing system, then what about the processes that shape the user experience? It is a veritable symphony of cognitive processes. You can count hundreds of individual processes in the brain, but in the end that number boils down to the six components most associated with the development of products and services
:
-
- Attention and visual perception
- Navigation
- Memory
- Speech (language)
- Decision making
- Emotions
This is the quantity that can realistically be measured and influenced.
What are these processes and what functions do they perform? Let’s explain it with a concrete example.
Imagine you need to buy a chair for your home. You want to buy it online and go to the websites of online furniture stores.
1. Visual perception, attention and automatism
When you first open the website of an online furniture store in search of an armchair, your attention and gaze are immediately riveted to the pictures, because you want to make sure you have come to the right place. Perhaps you will use the search function and type “Eames chair” into the search box. Perhaps you’ll scan the page with your eye for links like “furniture” or “chair” and then start looking for the right category. If you don’t find the right link, then look for other furniture categories that may include chairs.
2. Navigation
In the real world, we learn the geography of the area around our home, in particular how to get to some of the most visited places like our favorite store or coffee shop. In the virtual world, however, our brains do not always get enough navigational guidance of the type to which they are adapted, that is, characteristic of three-dimensional space. We often find it difficult to understand where exactly we are on a website, in an application or in another virtual space, because we do not always know the laws of navigation that apply in that particular place.
For example, on Snapchat or Instagram apps – many people over 18 have trouble navigating by haphazardly clicking on links, tapping on their phone or even shaking it.
Understanding your whereabouts in both real and virtual spaces and how to navigate within them is critical to building a first-rate user experience.
3. Language
Completely different terms can be used to refer to the same concepts, depending on your level of training. If you’re an interior design professional, you can easily navigate a furniture company’s website because you know the difference between an egg chair, a lounge chair, a Swan chair, and a Diamond chair. On the contrary, if you are far from this topic, you will have to first search on Google for these names to understand what we are talking about at all.
To build a positive user experience, we need to understand the terms that our audience uses, and communicate with them in an appropriate, professional manner.
Asking experts to search too abstractly under the category “Chairs and Chairs” is as meaningless as asking someone who has nothing to do with neuropsychology, for example, about the differences between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the frontal cingulate gyrus.
4. Memory
When you go to an online store’s website, you have certain expectations about how it should function. So, you assume there will be a search engine, pages of different product categories, product pages (chairs), and descriptions of ordering and payment procedures.
We have expectations about almost any concept, and we automatically form them in relation to people, places, processes, and more.
Product designers need to make sure they understand consumer expectations and anticipate misunderstandings that might arise if expectations diverge.
5. Decision Making
Ultimately
you are striving to achieve your goals and make a decision, and this is where you need to understand whether or not you will buy a particular chair. While you are making this decision, you may have countless questions on your mind. Will it look good in my living room? Can I afford to buy it? Will it fit through the front door? What if it gets scratched or damaged during shipping? Can’t it be found at a lower price elsewhere? Does it require special care?
If we are responsible for developing a product or service, we must be mindful of all stages of the individual buyer’s mental journey and be prepared to answer any questions that arise during that journey.
6. Emotions
We may like to think that we make decisions based solely on logic, like Spock in Star Trek, but there’s plenty of evidence that a wide variety of emotions affect our user experience and our thinking
.
Perhaps when you look at a picture of a chair, you think about how it will impress your friends, how it will accentuate your status and generally about the fact that you did “make it”! Or maybe you’re thinking, “Gosh, how pretentious!” or “$5,000 for a chair?! How am I going to pay for it, plus rent and groceries?” – and a quiet panic grips you as you do so.
Identifying hidden emotions and beliefs is critical to creating a positive user experience.
The different processes discussed in the previous paragraphs usually occur in specific areas of the brain.
They interact to create what each of us perceives as a single user experience. Of course, cognitive neuropsychologists will immediately claim that this is an extremely simplistic approach to the structure of the human brain and the processes that go on in it, but it is at this level that we can combine product design and neuropsychology.
The user experience is not created on the screen, but in our heads.
Prepared from the book User Experience Design.
The post Business and Neuropsychology: how to make great products and services appeared first on Business.
