Psychology in UX Discipline
Similar to the medical, psychology is becoming a popular and spreading profession all over the world. There are many reasons for it. One reason is due to less competition in the field of the psychological department; students prefer psychology more often. With the help of psychology, now it is possible to read the mind of peoples. Well, not that way as Charles Xavier did in the X-Men movie.
To some extent, psychologists can read a human's psyche. It only happens when you attend multiple sessions with your psychiatrist. In this article, we will figure out what exactly psychology is? And its different examples in our everyday life. From a designer's perspective, we'll also discuss the relationship between psychology and user experience (UX).
All you have to do is just follow the content mentioned below:
What is Psychology?
In simple words, psychology is the study of human mind behavior. There's no contradiction in this definition. Psychology is proven to be a vast medical field. Yes, you heard that right. Psychology is inherently a part of the medical field related to the mental health of the human being. It surrounds different factors such as biological influences, community pressure, and other environmental elements that affect people's thinking, feel, and act in those situations.
Psychology can help people a better understanding and intuition if they adapt to more in-depth knowledge of psychology. In fact, you can understand other people's actions and insights. As we mentioned above, psychology is a vast field. It includes the study of human behavior, thoughts, personality, emotions, and many more. Therefore, psychology is submerged into 8 different categories; each type has its own specialization.
Following are the different types of psychology:
- Abnormal Psychology: Study of Psychopathy and abnormal behavior. This specialty is used for the treatment of mental disorders.
- Biological Psychology: Also known as Biopsychology, the study of the human mind and behavior.
- Clinical Psychology: Interlinked with abnormal psychology, used to diagnose and treat mental disorders.
- Cognitive Psychology: Cognitive psychology is a study of human behavior like thinking, decision-making, problem-solving, perception, memory, and attention.
- Comparative Psychology: Well, psychology is not limited to human behaviors. Comparative psychology is the study of animal behavior.
- Development Psychology: As the name suggests, development psychology looks at human beings' growth and their development during their lifetime.
- Forensic Psychology: Forensic psychology only focuses on the research work and other fundamentals necessary for legal justice.
- Industrial-organizational Psychology: The purpose of industrial-organization psychology is to do psychological research on the organization's work and enhance or select the workers.
- Personality Psychology: Just like development psychology, it focuses on how personality development and the behavior of human nature.
- Social Psychology: The sole purpose of social psychology is to study the social influencer, their behaviors, attitudes, aggression, and similar topics.
An Example of Everyday Psychology
So far, we have studied psychology and its different types in this article. In this section, we'll go through some psychological examples that we face in our everyday life.
Although psychology has many examples to follow here, we'll discuss only five:
5 Everyday Examples of Psychology
1. Psychological Advertisements
Have you ever observed many digital ads appeal to you or forced you to buy anything? It is because they use advertisement tactics based on psychological principles, which are as follows.
- Scarcity Principle: Means the things people want but what they don't have. This tactic or principle makes the product more desirable.
- Consensus: They use consensus to show that a particular product is famous and well-reviewed. Especially in online business, reviews of the product play an essential role in the business's success.
- Mere-exposure effect: It's a familiarity principle. It means people gain preference for things because they are familiar with them. Every business owner wants their advertisement to remain in front of you as you build familiarity with the product.
2. Health Care
Yes, psychology has a lot to do with your health. It's all about a mind game. It impacts how we think about our exercise and diet.
According to a study, people who are under high stress prefer to eat high calories food. This study suggests how our mental health changes our lifestyle and habits.
Another study suggests playing games, scoring points on screens encourage people to work harder and make more effort to work.
3. Psychology in the Office
How to ask for an increment? Isn't it a difficult thing to do in the workplace? It is better to build some confidence before asking for what you need. Before that, you've to understand the psychological principles to help you with this.
Common Uses for Psychology
Well, as we told you before, psychology is a vast field. The bigger the area, the more chances of its usage in every aspect of life. The apparent use of psychology in the field of mental health where specialists use the different principles to cure the indication of mental sufferings and other psychological problems.
Apart from mental health, there are other uses of psychology in different departments or institutes, including:
- Ergonomics
- Social Programs
- Child Development
- Research
- Individual Personal Health
- Education Program Institutes
- Public Relations
- Political Views
It's hard to explain everything about psychology in such brief content, but there are some topics that we already hint at in our content needs explanation. Psychology is a numerous medical field, and we cannot explain everything in just a single content. It requires depth knowledge of psychology to meet its specific requirements.
The Relationship Between Psychology and UX
What user experience (UX) requires human attention or attraction? Obviously, both. A UI/UX designer's job is to design a digital product that people love to interact with. When a designer starts designing the product, he/she spend a lot of time meeting the needs of the customer or client. Of course, everyone thinks differently and acts differently. Therefore, to meet the demand of different mindsets, a designer must need to understand the process of Human Cognition.
What psychology says about attention?
An ability that helps you to understand and select the information between stimuli and process. The psychology of attention deals with perception that shapes behavior. In simple words, how it deals with how the action is created.
Well, that was the attention from the psychological perspective. Now, move forward to see how to grab people's attention through the human informing process.
As a product designer or UX designer, your priority is to grab people's attention at your product. This is done by understanding the processing of information.
There are different stages of information processing, i.e., Sensing, Perceiving, Decision-making, and acting. As a UX designer, you must be aware of the facts that draw the users' attention, which are intensive changes to your design.
Well, that was a brief introduction to psychology and some of its types. It was necessary to discuss its types because, without its types, it would've been different from creating a relationship between user experience and psychology. Plus, we've also gone through some psychological everyday life examples with their uses. As we told you before, psychology is a vast topic or field. We cannot explain everything about psychology on a single page. Although we did our best to describe to you everything that you're looking for.
