From the course: Design Psychology: Master the Art and Science of UX Design

Types of psychology

From the course: Design Psychology: Master the Art and Science of UX Design

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Types of psychology

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- [Instructor] As a designer, you can play a crucial part in creating successful products. It starts by understanding the human brain, and while there are dozen of psychology branches, you just need three to gain the most useful insight for your designs. After this lesson, you'll be able to recognize the most important insights about how people behave, make decision, and thinks. Let's start by looking at how people think, which falls under cognitive psychology. This branch of psychology explore a wide variety of human mental processes. Mental processes cover how and what people pay attention to, how they think, how they use reason, use their memory, and even the crucial process of decision-making. The decision-making process is the most relevant for user experience and design. With cognitive psychology principle, you can help people make better decisions. For example, when you present smart default settings, you can lead your customer to make better effortless choices. A website might default its language to English because the majority of customer are either from the United States or the United Kingdom. In a list, therefore, the first two countries shown are US and UK. You will also notice that the country code is shown next to the country name, in case user are not familiar with them. The next branch of psychology, which will impact your user design, is behavior of psychology. It studies how humans behave. Behavioral psychologists believe external stimuli, such as environment, past experience, and relationship, are a few factors that can have a deep influence on behavior. These external stimuli can override a person's ability for rational and conscious thinking. By recognizing the impact of behavioral psychology, you can develop and market your organization product and explain why people make purchase decision or not. UX designer have a lot of influence on the design of the product based on user research and psychology. They can suggest the best wording and the best way to obtain the desired result. Finally, social psychology studies how thoughts, behavior, and decision are influenced by other people and social norms. For example, have you ever noticed how you behave differently in different situation and when different people present? This is what social psychology studies. If you ever bought something because of hundreds positive reviews, you have seen social psychology in action. This is why honest testimonial, for example, can help your customer purchase your product, something I always recommend to my clients. These three areas of psychology can help your research phase as you determine why some products of the same quality are a big success and why others fail.

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