Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services 1st Edition

Pdf Book Name: Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services 1st Edition
Author: Jon Yablonski
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
ISBN-10, 13: 149205531X,9781492055310
Year: 2020
Pages: 137 / 153
Language: English
File size: 20 MB
File format: PDF,EPUB

Laws of UX: Design Principles for Persuasive and Ethical Products 1st Edition Pdf Book Description:

This book had its origins in what felt at the time like the most arduous point of my design career, while I was working on a very challenging client project. From the beginning, there were several indications that it would be an exciting albeit difficult project: a relatively short timeline and a somewhat unfamiliar space, but a well-known brand and the chance to help design something that’d be seen by many across the world. These have always been my favorite kinds of projects because they are the ones that offer the most opportunity to learn and grow, which I’ve always striven to do. But this project was somewhat unique in one specific way: I was being asked to justify a number of design decisions to project stakeholders, without any data to support them. Normally, when you have quantitative or qualitative data available to draw upon, this a pretty straightforward task but in this case the data wasn’t available, so the process of justifying the decisions would have to be a little different. How do you validate initial designs without any proof that there is a need to change the existing designs to begin with? As you can imagine, design reviews quickly became a matter of subjectivity and personal bias, resulting in designs that were more difficult to validate. Then it occurred to me: psychology, which provides a deeper understanding of the human mind, could be helpful in these circumstances.

I quickly became immersed in the rich and expansive fled of behavioral and cognitive psychology, and found myself reading through countless research papers and articles in order to end empirical evidence that supported the design decisions I was making. This research became quite useful in convincing project stakeholders to move in the proposed design direction, and I felt as if I had found a treasure trove of knowledge that would ultimately make me a better designer. There was only one problem: ending good reference material online quickly turned into an exhausting task. Searches led me to a vast array of academic papers, scientist research, and the occasional article in the popular press—none of which felt directly relatable to my work as a designer. I was looking for a designer friendly resource that just wasn’t available online, or at least not in the form I wanted it. Eventually I decided to dive in and produce the resource I was looking for myself, resulting in the creation of a website called Laws of UX (Figure P-1). This passion project became a way for me to both learn and document what I was discovering at this time. I wrote this book in order to make complex laws of psychology accessible to more designers specifically designers that don’t have background knowledge in psychology or behavioral science. The intersection of psychology and UX design has become an increasingly relevant topic in an era when design roles are having an ever stronger impact within organizations. Along with a growing focus on design, there has been an increase in debate around which additional skills designers should learn, if any, to increase their value and contribution. Should designers code, write, or understand business? These skills are all valuable, but perhaps not essential. However, I would argue that every designer should learn the fundamentals of psychology.