The Psychology of Design

Bad design, that's the problem. It severely hinders reading.

Right away, the headings and list at the top of the page are much more readable. I find myself anchoring not to the emoji but to the actual headings on the page, like "Meaning".

But then we've the list, with all those circles that used to contain emoji...

If you want to remove the circles, use:

    document.querySelectorAll('.rll-bias__icon__wrapper').forEach(x => x.parentElement.removeChild(x))

    .type-post .post-content .rll-bias__container { padding-left: 30px }

The lists, on the other hand, immediately feel less visually approachable because my mind is asking for simple visual examples of each, but those aren't present until I click, at best.

It's interesting. To me, the emojis add an artificial sense of "completeness" to the page that make the page visually rich but don't necessarily add to the experience as much as creating new visualizations for each list item would. And they obscure how much of the list isn't finished yet, in terms of having examples and a detailed explanation.

But reading the list with emojis, there is definite value, especially because it has me questioning what each emoji means to the list item. Some of them seem very literal to the point where they're not helpful - some distort the meaning, such as "Framing" or "Contrast" whose emojis represent a different use of the word (a picture frame vs framing an argument; happy/sad extremes vs isolating an element to draw attention to it).

And I can't download the cheat sheet without turning off my adblocker/tracking protections, it seems.

The more I read the page without emojis the more I realize, it's a list of definitions. One could imagine this alphabetically sorted at the back of a book on this topic. Useful? Yes. But easy to apply? Not really.

If these were cards or checklists or if I could swipe through, see a random example, and remind myself of how I could creatively one of these principles to a problem at hand, I think I'd find these very useful. Alternatively, I could see myself looking over an entire site and asking myself, for each of these principles, where it might be useful or violated in a current design, then marking comments for future improvements.

Thinking about it without examples makes it feel too much like a flash card memory quiz. Quick, what's the "Von Restorff Effect"?! It's a bit mentally taxing. :D It's only when you expand and add examples that I feel I've enough context to remember more than just the name of something.

I wonder if the human brain is starting to segregate emoji from iconography the way we instinctively don’t look at ads on pages. (Last year I insisted a web app did not have a feature and after conversing with the vendor they showed me it was there, in a little ad-shaped rectangle to the right side of the page. My brain did not let me look at it)