UX Design and Cognitive Load

• The text covers the foundations of User Experience (UX), Customer Experience (CX), and Service Design.

Introduction to UX, CX, and Service Design

• Objective: Understand differences between UX, CX, and service design; learn usability principles and human-centered design, and apply Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust (PET) strategies in UX design.
• Understanding these concepts is crucial for creating user-friendly and business-aligned digital experiences.
• User Experience (UX): Focuses on how users interact with digital products to achieve a goal, optimizing interactions to match user expectations and ensuring intuitive, seamless, and enjoyable experiences, prioritizing depth over breadth.
• Customer Experience (CX): Encompasses all touchpoints (digital & physical) that shape brand perception, including marketing, customer support, and sales, prioritizing breadth over depth.
• Service Design: Takes a holistic approach to designing and optimizing services, involving backend processes, multiple stakeholders, and touchpoints.
• Client → Customers → Users: UX focuses on improving individual digital interactions, while CX covers the entire customer journey and brand perception, and Service Design ensures seamless backend operations and service delivery.
• UX history began in aviation to improve tool usability
• It is important to remember that designing for humans differs from designing from a builder's perspective.
• Good UX aligns with human psychology and mental models, requiring understanding of business and user goals.
• Mental Models evolve and change, so research is essential to accommodate cultural differences and user needs.

Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust (PET) in UX

• Persuasion: Encourages user actions through design and content, employing scarcity tactics, social proof, and onboarding nudges.
• Emotion: Crafts memorable, engaging experiences using microcopy, animations, and color psychology.
• Trust: Builds credibility and reduces friction with security badges, transparent pricing, and clear error messages.
• Mental Model Alignment occurs when users have predefined expectations for task completion
• Training users through intuitive UX creates familiarity and aligns business goals with user expectations.
• Behavioral Psychology in UX shows users react more strongly to loss (pain) than gain (pleasure), also known as loss aversion.

Operant Conditioning

• Influences behavior through rewards and punishments.
• Encouraging engagement with small, consistent rewards is more effective than large one-time incentives.
• Optimizing Usability can be done by reducing friction by simplifying navigation and cognitive load
• Cognitive Load Theory suggests that minimizing unnecessary mental effort improves usability.
• Efficient user movement enhances usability by reducing unnecessary hand or eye movements
• Use persuasion, emotion, and trust strategies to encourage user engagement.
• Feedback and Error Prevention: Provides immediate, clear feedback to prevent errors and enhance user confidence.
• Accessibility Considerations: Ensures usability for all users, including those with disabilities, through proper contrast, keyboard navigation, and alternative text.
• Consistent CX across all channels is essential for brand trust and loyalty.

Visual perception and design

• How eyesight influences usability perception and UX should optimize readability and information processing.
• Important elements should be designed for efficient eye tracking.
• When asking users to resolve visual interpretation, it is more difficult and slower to process it
• Assist users through visuals in effectively achieving tasks
• Too much fixation prevents efficient scanning and could indicate cognitive overload
• Design accommodates scanning behaviors by placing critical content in high-attention areas like F-Pattern Scanning for text-heavy content.
• F-Pattern Scanning is common for text-heavy content where users read headlines and skim sidebars,.
• The Z-Pattern Scanning is typical for visually balanced layouts, guiding users across the page. Layered Scanning directs users to focus on key focal points first, drilling into details based on need. .

The Brain

• Faces are interpreted through the FFA (fusiform face area) which is close to the amygdala
• Eye-tracking is highly contextual.
• Key Visual Processing Concepts shows that saccadic Movement is how users stitch together incomplete visual inputs
• Foveation occurs when Users focus on specific areas while ignoring others.
• Rapid Serial Visual Presentation guides attention through controlled motion.
• Orienting Response means that visuals can seem closer or further depending on the context
• The Startle response ensures that users aren't shocked.
• Subtle motion improves content clarity
• UX needs to design for readability and optimize contrast

Color Psychology in UX

• Cognitive interference in color-text mismatches affects reaction time and readability
• Redundant Coding uses multiple cues (color, shape, text) to improve accessibility.
• Different colors evoke different psychological responses

Affordance & Pattern Recognition

• Users rely on pre-existing cognitive patterns for interpretation
• The Mcgurk effect explains how conflicting sensory information affects user perception.
• Ensure visual consistency and avoid ambiguity in Ul design.
• How users expect to view objects versus unexpected viewpoints
  • this is termed canonic and non-canonic perspectives
• CX Encompasses all brand touchpoints and integrates digital and in-store experience

Intellectual UX

• Intellectual UX involves understanding how cognitive processing affects user decision-making.
• UX designers can optimize UI elements for better cognitive processing.
• Don Norman's 3 Levels of Processing:
  • Visceral: Immediate, gut-level reactions (e.g., fear of a snake).
  • Behavioral: Learned responses based on experience (e.g., driving a car).
  • Reflective: Conscious thought and long-term reasoning (e.g., career choices).
• Selective Attention Blindness occurs when a person fails to notice an unexpected stimulus due to focused attention elsewhere.
• UX needs to ensure design cues must be well-coordinated to prevent conflicts
• Reaction Time in UX varies based on context and user experience level
• The Hick-Hyman Law illustrates how the more choices available the longer decision time increases.
• Reaction time RT = a + b * log2(n)
• Creates cognitive bottlenecks that must be accounted for in design

Design

Signal detection theory (SDT)

• How users detect weak signals and noise
• Key components:
  • Sensory processing requires the actual detection of stimuli
  • Design has a Decision Criterion based what an invidual thinks is present or not
  • Optimize signals for UX

Detection outcomes

• Hit: Correctly detecting a present signal.
• Miss: Failing to detect a present signal.
• False Alarm: Detecting a signal when none exists.
• Correct Rejection: Correctly identifying no signal is present.
• Visual design Increase contrast between the options for clear decision making
• Utilize progressive disclosure for non negotiable choices

Yerkes-Dodson Law:

• Performance improves with arousal (stress) up to an optimal level, then declines if overstimulated.
• low arousal and poor performance is due to lack of engagement
• high arousal: performance declines due to overload
• Motor: -Design for UX should ensure user engagement is appropriate
• Memory: - Memory and UX looks at supporting user memory and their impact in UX
• Good design enhances memorability for its intuitiveness and ease of recall

Types of memory

• Sensory memory is the shortest type of memory
• Iconic Memory (vision) lasts less than a second
• Echoic memeory (sound) lasts 3 to 4 seconds
• Haptic memory (touch) lasts 10 seconds
• Short term memory (working) is temporary storage that occurs for 15 to 30 seconds while decision making is processing
• Long term memory occurs indefinitely and helps with recall and recognition

Memory Strategies

• interrupts task focus and causes loss of context
• use familiar metaphors and chunking 3 to 4 rule

Repetition and reinforcement

• Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve increases the time between repititions to improve long term memory

UX memory techniques

• Primacy -Users who can remember the things they experience

Recency

• Users remember what they experienced last
• Ziegarnik Effect: Users remember incomplete tasks better than completed ones.
• Cognitive biases Affecting Memory means users isolate contents that reinforces their limiting expertise

Motor control and UX design

• The relationship between distance to the target and the time
• The physical design needs to accommodate reach and input methods

Know Thy User

• UX segmentation is attitudinal and not just demographic
• Map the spectrum of users and their needs; consider which segments need specific designs.
• A user experience persona is a consolidated representation of user segments including a persona and their skills.
• Cultural nuances change and need to be adapted to different culture

UX accessibility needs to

• follow WCAG guidelines
• design must adapt to different cultural contexts
• understand PET analysis and ecosytem design
• consider how users segment data in different cultural contexts
• know how the most common devices are to be used
• know where will the devices mostly get placed.

Research

• research helps create deeper understanding and limits information
• clarifies assumptions and challenges
• research must be contextual to users
• be careful about the questions that get asked

Causation

• Data patterns don't always imply its direct influences
• data needs to be visualized for clarity and avoid misunderstanding
• uncanny valley effect: AI avatars look too similar to us and causes discomfort
• people change their behavior when they know they are being observed

This quiz covers UX design principles, integrated brand experience, and cognitive load. It explores user-centered design activities, competitive reviews, and optimizing user interfaces for better usability. It also touches on the Yerkes-Dodson Law and its relevance to UX.