Usability
Aesthetic-Usability Effect
People often judge a visually coherent interface as easier to use, especially before or during early interaction.
Psychology, behavioral science, perception, human computer interaction, and usability principles explained for working designers.
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80 concepts
Usability
People often judge a visually coherent interface as easier to use, especially before or during early interaction.
Decision making
Large or difficult choice sets can reduce decision confidence or action when options are hard to compare and preferences are uncertain.
Cognitive load
Cognitive load describes demands placed on limited working-memory resources while a person learns or performs a task.
Interaction
For aimed movement, acquisition time tends to increase with target distance and decrease with target size along the movement axis.
Interaction
In practiced choice-reaction tasks, response time tends to grow with the information uncertainty of the possible stimulus-response alternatives.
Gestalt
Elements placed nearer one another tend to be perceived as related, especially when the spacing pattern is consistent and other cues do not override it.
Mental models
A mental model is a person’s internal, partial representation of how a system works and what actions will produce.
Attention
An item that differs from otherwise similar surrounding items is often more likely to be noticed or remembered.
Memory
Organizing separate items into meaningful, familiar groups can make information easier to perceive, rehearse, and retrieve.
Decision making
Cognitive bias is an umbrella term for systematic patterns in judgment that can depart from a task-relevant normative standard.
Interaction
Rapid, meaningful system feedback helps sustain an interactive rhythm; the often-cited 400 ms value is historical guidance, not a universal boundary.
Interaction
Every meaningful action should produce timely, perceivable feedback that accurately communicates the resulting system state.
Behavior
Flow is a deeply absorbed experience associated with clear goals, immediate feedback, concentrated attention, and a workable balance of challenge and skill.
Behavior
Motivated effort can increase as a salient, valued goal appears closer, although progress framing and context shape the pattern.
Mental models
People bring expectations learned from other products, so familiar conventions often reduce the effort needed to begin using a new interface.
Gestalt
Elements enclosed by the same visible boundary tend to be perceived as a group, even when other grouping cues compete.