The Psychology Behind UX Design

Part 1, The Conscious and Unconscious States of Mind

For the most part, the machines that our civilizations have built have been mechanical.

We have mostly interacted with them physically. For years, we have extensively cataloged the size and capabilities of the human frame. And with this knowledge, we have learned to design machines with a high degree of likelihood that they will work reasonably well for their human users.

For instance, you would not design a machine that required one person to simultaneously operate two switches 3 meters apart: we all know humans are not that large.

However, modern innovations require a different approach. You wouldn’t design a digital consumer product, such as a mobile or web application, as you would a chair. Such digital innovations have come to the aid of intellectual rather than physical pursuits. If we want to design digital interfaces that are likely to work well, we must therefore master the ergonomics of the mind.

The conscious and unconscious mind.

As long as you’re awake, your mind exists in two states: the cognitive conscious and the cognitive unconscious. Your unconscious mental processes are those of which you are not aware when they occur. Conscious mental processes are those which require your attention.

What is the last character of your first name?

Until you read the previous sentence, you were probably not thinking about this alphabetic character and its relationship to your name. You know — and have long known — what that character is and where in your first name it lies, but you were not paying attention to that knowledge. You were not thinking of it, you were not considering it. Or, to use our preferred terminology, you were not conscious of it.

The information was not being accessed, yet you could recover it on demand. We will call that place where you fetched the character, the cognitive unconscious.

This change of state of your thought, from unconscious to conscious, demonstrates that you have at least two forms of knowing. It just takes a stimulus to trigger the migration of an item of information from the unconscious, where it is stored, to the conscious, where you are aware of it.

The stimulus could be anything, such as reading a particular section of this post. Such a stimulus not only triggers information, but also sensations, feelings, or any other aspects of your memory or knowledge.

Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity

The conscious and unconscious minds are more than just different places or states for storing thoughts or memories. They have different ways of interacting with the world and with concepts. Psychologists over the past century elucidated that the cognitive conscious and unconscious have properties beyond our awareness and unawareness of them.

But you have seen that cognitive consciousness is brought into play whenever you encounter a situation that seems new or threatening. Or whenever you have to make a non-routine decision — that is, one based on what is happening in the here and now.

To this effect, you cannot determine whether a proposition is logically consistent until it’s in your conscious mind — until it has your attention.

In addition, cognitive consciousness operates sequentially. You can be conscious of only between four and eight distinct thoughts or things at once. But it can only consider one question or only control one action at a time. Even so, the conscious memory fades in, at most, a few seconds.

Branching and Non-Branching Tasks

Cognitive consciousness is invoked in branching tasks. That is, tasks that are not performed out of habit. The distinction between branching and non-branching tasks is somewhat unclear. For example, braking for a traffic light may be either.

It is nonbranching — handled by the cognitive unconsciousness- if you are simply reacting to a red light by pressing the brake pedal.

However, if a light that you’re approaching turns yellow, such that you have to decide whether to continue through the intersection without pause or to stop, your cognitive consciousness comes into play.

Remember this: when you are learning a task, you may see and react to it as a branching event requiring conscious attention. With repetition, your execution of the task may become nonbranching and automatic, depending on how fast you can learn.

Why is this important?

Designers should be keen to understand these two distinct sets of limited mental abilities. How they work in relation to human-machine interfaces is as essential to designing interfaces as is knowing the size and the strength of the human hand when we are designing a keyboard.

The properties of our dual consciousness (both conscious and unconscious) have wide implications for interface design. They affect our attention, and thus our ability to learn and keep things in memory.

If I tell you, at this moment, not to think about elephants, you will intuitively start thinking about elephants.

Yet, in a few moments, if the conversation does not stay on elephants, the animal will fade away from your consciousness. You will no longer be paying attention to the thought of an elephant. In doing so, the elephants cease being your locus of attention.

In the next part of this series, we’ll see how the divided nature of your cognitive consciousness affects your locus of attention. How it influences the formation of habits and affects the execution of simultaneous tasks. We’ll see why it’s futile to concentrate on two things at the same time. And why tasks must take less than ten seconds to execute if they are to be learned quickly, or made easy to use. We’ll then see how to exploit the locus of attention in the design of user-friendly interfaces.

Thank you for reading this far. Subscribe to my newsletter to get the next post straight to your email, or follow me on Twitter @anothermugo

Sources:

1. The Humane Interface, Book by Jeff Raskin.

2. Baars, Bernard J. A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

3. Anderson, J. R. Rules of the Mind (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993).

4 Cooper, Alan. About Face.

Originally published at https://randomtheory.substack.com on March 29, 2022.