wihl

WIHL: UX Foundation

Narat S

• 2 min read
WIHL: UX Foundation

Yesterday I was at Geeky Base, a place to share tech-related skills, and attended a learning session about UX Foundation by @kamonlojn. Here are some bullet points I caught from the session and are worth sharing.

VIMM model - reduce users' load on four areas:
Vision, Intellect, Memory and Motor

Vision

  • Human brains rapidly scan all surface of media. To design a good UX, users are needed to be guided through essential contents
  • Users don’t like to read something too long, they usually scan all document like an F shape
  • These are prioritized predictions of human brains: Complex Areas, saturated color, dark areas, human faces
  • Be caution to put any faces in a design. Doing that will attract users to focus on the face rather than a content you want them to know
  • You need to understand what they expect and design around it. Because people tend to scan based on their expectations
  • Eliminate all wiggly stuffs from some media that required users to read
  • Stroop effect: linkage of words and colors - show an importance of content and its physical properties
  • Red is the most sensitive color on light spectrum -> consider hardly to use red color, pure blue and pure red should never put together (except you want fatal attention: emergency responder vehicles)
  • Monochrome first then add some color to enhance
  • Canonic perspective - visual testing, be sure it is the canonic form

Intellect

  • Humans respond and focus to only one matter
  • DO NOT expect users to do two things at a time
  • Hick-Hyman Law -> number of options affects time to respond until at one number, time to respond will not increase anymore
    • Complexity affects time to respond -> design simple stuffs so users can react fast
  • 5 - 9 colors are maximum bound of acceptance
  • If you need more attention and you are running out of colors, use movement, sound, smell or something else
  • Yerkes-Dodson Law - best performance of humans is found when humans are not too comfortable but not too stress
    • Stressor can be easily distracted
    • They will redo an unsuccessful over and over again
  • Things cause stress: noise, vibration, heat - cold, dim light, anxiety, anger, time pressure
  • Better know your users’ level of arousal - high stress -> design for self-evidence, efficiency and simplicity -> childlike behaviors

Memory

  • Sensory, Short-term, Long-term
  • Sensory is like a buffer of the brain - too much of information at a time, buffer is flowed
  • Maximum number that humans can remember is 7 +- 2, practically at 4 digits
  • Reduce memory load in users, repeat or show them what they’re doing (ex. Checkout process with items in cart)
  • Good designs do not make people to remember a thing
    • Source or encoding message
    • Recognition is easier than recall - using canonic shapes
  • Help user to remember: recognition, repetition, association, spatial location, mnemonics, Zeifarnik effect
  • Schema - a set of fixed information that users use to recognize something
    • Know your user’s schema and design around it
    • Hang new information to existing schema
  • Whatever you design, control your bias - rethink from users' perspective
    • Users will interpret your designs based on their biases

Motor

  • Fitt’s Law - bigger the object, quicker to respond (until at one size, there is no more improvement on speed)
    • Make targets big
    • Make movement short
    • Estimate how long the whole process is
  • Better performance for users doesn’t mean better UX. Time of use may change performance for users to get better.
  • Do research a design for target audience

Know Your Users

  • Some symbols or signs are not internationally recognized as a same meaning
  • Customize your design for target audience

Banner image by LoggaWiggler - CC0