Behavior is strongly influenced by unconscious thought, but it is often more predictable than you might expect. Understanding the foundations of human cognition will help explain and anticipate user behavior.

If you’re involved in interface design and don’t have formal training in psychology or human factors, your work will benefit from understanding the theory that determines which designs work best.

We draw examples from websites and web-based applications, but these principles also apply to software and hardware.

Topics covered

• Origins of human factors, cognitive psychology, and human computer interaction
• Go beyond following usability guidelines to understanding their underlying reasoning
• Apply findings from well-known psychology research studies to explain behavior observed in usability testing and anticipate the impact of future designs
• Design better interfaces from inception by knowing human limitations and easing the load on the user
• Attention
  • Cognitive load: The effects of stress, interruptions, and multitasking
  • Multiple sensory inputs
  • Adaptation to information overload
• Visual perception
  • Visual acuity and discerning fine detail
  • Visual salience: Typography, legibility, and color and contrast sensitivity
  • Gestalt psychology: Perceiving groups of elements as whole objects
  • Eye gaze patterns
• Memory and knowledge
  • Memory capacity
  • Short-term and long-term memory
  • Working memory
  • Law of practice and forgetting
• Strategies for information retrieval
  • Recognition compared to recall, and why they matter
  • Associative priming and information scent
  • How users select what links to click on
• Mental models
• Language
• Factors that influence reading and comprehension
  • Word and sentence processing
  • Types of readers: Normal reading and skimming
  • Scanning: Where people look and don’t look
• Problem solving and decision making
  • Reducing interaction cost
  • Persuasion: Perceived value, loss aversion, scarcity, positive framing
• Social psychology
  • How groups change individual behavior
  • Social proof and how it applies to testimonials, reviews, popularity
  • Group pressure
  • Power of roles and what roles users play online
• Emotion-driven behavior
  • Aesthetics and first impressions
  • Pleasurable and desirable experiences

Format

The course in an interactive lecture. You will learn to apply and practice new concepts during individual and group exercises. Additionally, we conduct in-class experiments to bring traditional studies to life.

The course also includes:

• Findings from our own usability studies, including eyetracking
• Videos from usability testing of people's behavior in response to a design
• Screenshots of designs that work and don’t work, and why
• Opportunities to ask questions and get answer