Cognitive biases and principles that affect UX | Hacker News Reader

Cognitive biases and principles that affect UX

psychology.design

148 pointsdanbenoni41 comments

Ironic the site has such a bad UX. Emoji make it hard to read; all the information is pointlessly in collapsing boxes, it has screwy animations and scrolling, crazy hover effects, bad zoom (it's blurry), silly checkmarks instead of bullet points...

It is indeed ironic. I was initially interested in the content, but I closed the site in less than a minute after getting frustrated by the emojis, blurry text and annoying sidebar and header animations when scrolling.

I remember another site with similar content and also pretty annoying UX: https://lawsofux.com

I'd take a long markdown document with a table of contents over this any day.

I'm still interested in reading about these UX principles though. Is there another alternative, easier to read resource?

Hey falafel, a popular alternative is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases . Hope that helps!

Agreed. It's almost surreally lacking self-awareness. The very first entry is a warning not to display too many items, and it's immediately followed by a very very long list of items.

Most of which are still blank.

If you set out to parody poor UX - in fact poor UX culture - this is probably what it would look like.

I don't hate the textual content - not great, not terrible - but I do somewhat resent the fact that it's selling itself on disinterested helpfulness when it's also clearly harvesting emails, which I assume are going to be used for some other purpose/project.

Removing the emojis in the ordered list at the top would be really helpful. My brain wouldn't let me properly read that simple list with them there. I get that they are trying to introduce the way-finding anchor link piece, but it really gets in the way of the content.

Hey psweber, thanks for the feedback.

You're right.

We checked our stats and barely 5% of people clicked on one of the pills at the top (under the list).

We just revised our intro and removed the colored pills. They were indeed a duplicate of the list. That'll be 50% less emojis and less color overload.

Cheers,

Right on!

I had hoped that reader mode would work. But that was a mess too.

Hey 1ark, sorry to hear that. If you want a version that's more raw, feel free to check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases .

We have a raw database with many more principles, examples and tags, but we have yet to find a scalable way to share them.

This is really nice, and the collection of practical examples is what makes the content here shine.

Presentationally, the emoji are maybe a little overrepresented, but some of the pairings are amusingly clever. Apparently some here don't appreciate the use of progressive disclosure for the navigation, but for content of this length, it's an appropriate alternative to navigating to a new page.

The one thing I'd suggest is limiting the expand/collapse interaction to one open at a time. There isn't really any advantage to having multiple open at once as there isn't a use case for comparing between open boxes, and keeping everything else collapsed makes exploring the index simpler.

Thanks Morten! Great feedback.

You actually understood exactly what we tried to achieve with that progressive disclosure and management of cognitive load ;). It's the #1 positive feedback we get from the people who use this page.

We did quite a bit of user research with different cohorts of people before we released this list. We originally considered auto-closing the other panels when you open a new one (!), but beta testers mentioned that it was convenient to compare two elements or to Ctrl-F through some stuff that saw a few tiles back.

So I guess we had the same thought process, but our beta tester descoped that need for us. So we launched that MVP without it.

I'll definitely keep an eye on the feedback (and comment section) if more people raise that concern.

We intend to update that page regularly.

Cheers!

PS: One of the UX hacks that I added though is scrolling back to the top of your active tile when you close it to avoid losing your anchor. With that said, even that was a bit limit for my JS skills (I'm far from a dev, merely a curious person).

I'm having a hard time filtering the information with all those pictures, animations, pop ups, curvy lines and huge text.

Same here. I'm surprised how jarring the emjoi's are to my focus.

It's ironic that this is the same site which created https://growth.design/case-studies/trello-user-onboarding/

Which is probably the least user-friendly thing I've come across in a while.

Hey Pete, sorry to hear you had trouble viewing our comic book case studies :/. Was it the slide format that threw you off?

Pretty much. I suspect I may be a minority, but I'd rather just have a really good case study in text format, with images where appropriate, rather than having to keep clicking through with cute visuals.

It feels to me a bit like it's cheapening the content by putting it into that context. It's like watching an anime version of Pride and Prejudice; I'm sure there's an audience for it, but I'm not it, and it feels cheap.

EDIT

Having thought about this a little more, it also feels like the analysis is more shallow than I think it actually is, due to the presentation context.

Sure thing! Totally respect your opinion Pete. I really believe in radical candor.

To give a bit of context, most people signup for our content specifically for the case study format (including, surprisingly, Fortune 500 execs). Tech scale-up product leaders tend to use it as a resource for internal education. (They tend to use the keyboard navigation though, not their mouse, the clicking is indeed tedious!)

With that said, we also know that many people prefer long form text—which is totally fine. The good news is that there's no shortage of Medium posts for that!

Thanks for your feedback again Pete. Cheers.

I'm not awared it supports keyboard navigation.

Edit: there is hint to use keyboard on the trello case study, but the hint isn't visible (if any) on the tinder case study.

Oh that's odd. Are you referring to /case-studies/tinder-monetization/ ? It is visible on my side (incognito mode)… I'll look into it. Thanks for the heads up.

I (too?) felt the pretty colours and the pointless mini-pics were patronising.

On one of the slides it says "Great use of my first name" when in fact it uses the whole name or whatever was given in the name field. Since you are here, why did you write "first name" when "name" would be more precise?

You're right, my mistake. Fixed and updated if you refresh! :)

What do you think are the the ethical concerns around using these design principles to almost manipulate visitors of a website into buying stuff?

100% Abdullah. Behavioral psychology should be used for good.

We've been in touch with Nir Eyal for a bit now. He wrote "Hooked", but quickly realized that the ethical side of behavioral psychology was misunderstood completely and started to focus his efforts there.

We asked him for a quote because we believe this is extremely important (just Ctrl-F "Eyal" on the page you should find it).

We also really like his "regret test" regarding the ethical side of behavioral design. It comes down to answering: "If users knew everything the product designer knows, would they still execute the intended behavior? Are they likely to regret doing this?"

Side note: As for us, we don't believe in "growth for the sake of growth". We define "growth by design" as a process at the intersection of Growth (a scientific method to improve) and Design (a human-centered process used to solve problems). It involves crafting meaningful experiences at scale so that an organization can exceed its business goals while delighting their customers. We talk about this and our vision on our /about page if you're interested!

On that note, you make me realize we should probably add something regarding this in the conclusion. Great idea, cheers Abdullah!

> He wrote "Hooked", but quickly realized that the ethical side of behavioral psychology was misunderstood

That’s a charitable interpretation. He wrote a book about how to make products addictive (subtitle: How To Make Habit-Forming Products), then when the inevitable backlash came he got on that bandwagon and wrote a book to teach people how to be Indistractable (in a world filled with products designed to be habit-forming).

Thank you for your service.

UX is to Human Computer Interaction what petroleum engineering is to chemistry.

The methods aren’t wrong per se but it’s probably something we’d be better off with less of, and any questions around “ethics” or “sustainability” are going to be met with lots of entertaining hand waving.

One of the nicest and most unique designs I've seen recently, well done.

I'm just reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and several of those principles are talked about in the book.

Thanks, that's really appreciated.

Yeah, Kahneman is a legend in that area indeed. Huge influence in the behavioral sphere. Another nice read (althought much lighter) that is covering many biases as well is "You are not so smart" and "Super Thinking" (already linked in the article).