Social psychology is the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Increasingly, you’re no longer designing for just one user at a time. People use your products simultaneously, and they interact directly and indirectly with them.

Create substantially improved products and designs by understanding psychological principles and managing the presence of people on your product. 

This course will give you greater insight into your users and explain how connections between them influence their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors while they’re using your products. You’ll discover how to get more out of your current user-centered design (UCD) practices and get more competitive advantages from your current design processes.

Topics covered

• User needs online and offline
• User motivation
  • Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
  • Emotional considerations
• How to predict users’ likely response to new designs
• Importance of user expectations
  • Expectations and intuitive design
  • Violation of expectations
• Learning and memory (and what happens if your site is not completely intuitive)
  • Learning theory
  • Schedules of reinforcement
  • Superstitious learning
  • Social learning
• Learned helplessness and withdrawal of effort
• Mere exposure
  • Seeing is liking
• Judgment and decision-making
  • Using mental heuristics for fun and profit
  • Group think
  • The risky shift
• Choices
  • Too many or not enough?
• The relationship between user attitudes and user behavior
  • Which comes first?
  • Cognitive dissonance
  • Self-perception theory
• Know how to shape elements of your product to encourage users to do what you want them to do
• Personality psychology
  • Personas
• Social psychology
  • Power of the situation: Channel factors
  • The importance of construals
  • Group dynamics
• Social facilitation
  • Use the presence of multiple users to create online social norms
• Social loafing
• Capitalize upon the shift toward social media and community
• Diffusion of responsibility
• Deindividuation: How anonymity can influence behavior
• Individuation: How identification can influence behavior
• Stress
• Attitude change, persuasion, and influence
  • Credibility
  • Encouraging users to do what you want them to do

Format

The course is mainly in lecture format with a couple of group exercises to reinforce the learned principles and guidelines.

The course also includes:

• Real-world examples and case studies
• Screenshots of designs that work and don’t work, and why
• Explanations and examples of well-known psychology research studies
• Opportunities to ask questions and get answer