Bottlenecks: Aligning UX Design with User Psychology

Learn the psychological constrictions of attention, perception, memory, disposition, motivation, and social influence that determine whether customers will be receptive to your digital innovations.

Bottlenecks: Aligning UX Design with User Psychology fills a need for entrepreneurs, designers, and marketing professionals in the application of foundational psychology to user-experience design. The first generation of books on the topic focused on web pages and cognitive psychology. This book covers apps, social media, in-car infotainment, and multiplayer video games, and it explores the crucial roles played by behaviorism, development, personality, and social psychology. Author David Evans is an experimental psychology Ph.D. and senior manager of consumer research at Microsoft who recounts high-stakes case studies in which behavioral theory aligned digital designs with the bottlenecks in human nature to the benefit of users and businesses alike.

Innovators in design and students of psychology will learn:

• The psychological processes determining users’ perception of, engagement with, and recommendation of digital innovations
• Examples of interfaces before and after simple psychological alignments that vastly enhanced their effectiveness
• Strategies for marketing and product development in an age of social media and behavioral targeting
• Hypotheses for research that both academics and enterprises can perform to better meet users’ needs

Who This Book Is For

Designers and entrepreneurs will use this book to give their innovations an edge on what are increasingly competitive platforms such as apps, bots, in-car apps, augmented reality content. Usability researchers and market researchers will leverage it to enhance their consulting and reporting. Students and lecturers in psychology departments will want it to help land employment in the private sector.

Praise

“Bottlenecks’ is a tight and eminently actionable read for business leaders in startups and enterprises alike. Evans gives us a rich sense of key psychological processes and even richer examples of them in action.” – Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

“Clients frequently ask our UX researchers and designers for deeper truths about why certain designs work and others fail. Bottlenecks offers practical explanations and evidence based on the idea that human cognition did not begin with the digital age.” – John Dirks, UX Director and Partner, Blink UX

“Bottlenecks brings together two very important aspects of user experience design: understanding users and translating this into business impact. A must-read for anyone who wants to learn both.” – Josh Lamar, Sr. UX Lead, Microsoft Outlook

Table of Contents

Part I: The Bottlenecks of Attention
Chapter 1: Foveal Acuity
Chapter 2: Task Orientation
Chapter 3: Attentional Focus

Part II: The Bottlenecks of Perception
Chapter 4: Gestalt Perception
Chapter 5: Depth Perception
Chapter 6: Motion Perception

Part III: The Bottlenecks of Memory
Chapter 7: Working Memory
Chapter 8: Signal Detection
Chapter 9: Long-Term Memory
Chapter 10: Encoding and Retrieval

Part IV: The Bottlenecks of Disposition
Chapter 11: Personality
Chapter 12: Developmental Stages
Chapter 13: Needs
Chapter 14: Fun

Part V: The Bottlenecks of Motivation
Chapter 15: Schedules of Reinforcement
Chapter 16: Escalating Commitment
Chapter 17: Approach Avoidance
Chapter 18: Routes to Persuasion

Part VI: The Bottlenecks of Social Influence
Chapter 19: Social Capital
Chapter 20: Group Polarization
Chapter 21: Social Influence

Part VII: Receptivity
Chapter 22: Receptivity Thresholds
Chapter 23: Six Degrees of Recommendation