Table Of ContentBottlenecks
Aligning UX Design
with User Psychology
―
David C. Evans
BOTTLENECKS
ALIGNING UX DESIGN WITH USER
PSYCHOLOGY
David C. Evans
Bottlenecks: Aligning UX Design with User Psychology
David C. Evans
Kenmore, Washington, USA
ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-2579-0 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-2580-6
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4842-2580-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932384
Copyright © 2017 by David C. Evans
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Contents
About the Author ix
About the Technical Reviewer xi
Prologue: Memetic Fitness xiii
Part I: The Bottlenecks of Attention 1
Chapter 1: Foveal Acuity 3
Chapter 2: Task Orientation 13
Chapter 3: Attentional Focus 21
Part II: The Bottlenecks of Perception 35
Chapter 4: Gestalt Perception 37
Chapter 5: Depth Perception 51
Chapter 6: Motion Perception 63
Part III: The Bottlenecks of Memory 71
Chapter 7: Working Memory 73
Chapter 8: Signal Detection 85
Chapter 9: Long-Term Memory 95
Chapter 10: Encoding and Retrieval 103
Part IV: The Bottlenecks of Disposition… 115
Chapter 11: Personality 117
Chapter 12: Developmental Stages 129
Chapter 13: Needs 137
Chapter 14: Fun 145
viii Contents
Part V: The Bottlenecks of Motivation 155
Chapter 15: Schedules of Reinforcement 157
Chapter 16: Escalating Commitment 169
Chapter 17: Approach Avoidance 177
Chapter 18: Routes to Persuasion 185
Part VI: The Bottlenecks of Social Influence 191
Chapter 19: Social Capital 193
Chapter 20: Group Polarization 199
Chapter 21: Social Influence 213
Part VII: Receptivity 225
Chapter 22: Receptivity Thresholds 227
Chapter 23: Six Degrees of Recommendation 235
Epilogue 249
Index 255
About the Author
David C Evans is senior manager of customer
research at Microsoft, where he influences the
design and positioning of Office 365, Cortana,
Windows 10, Skype, Outlook, Yammer, and the
Office Graph. He managed GfK’s retail research
for Microsoft in 44 countries, established a psy-
chographic segmentation at Allrecipes.com,
and ran the usability firm Psychster Inc. in Seattle,
where he consulted for Amazon and the States
of Washington and Oregon. His whitepapers, co-
written with enterprise clients, have appeared
on TechCrunch, Mashable, and MediaPost, and he
is a frequent guest on American Public Media’s
Marketplace. Dr. Evans teaches graduate courses in usability testing and the
psychology of digital media at the University of Washington. He holds his B.A.
from Grinnell College and his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University
of Iowa.
About the Technical
Reviewer
Dr Peter Meyers is a cognitive psychologist
and the resident marketing scientist at Moz, a
Seattle-based search marketing software com-
pany. He spent the past four years building
research tools to monitor Google and trying to
understand how the internet impacts the way
we consume information, share content, and ulti-
mately make decisions.
Prologue: Memetic
Fitness
In this series of essays, we seek a better understanding of why some digital
innovations and experiences engage us deeply and spread widely, and why
others do not, drawing upon the lessons of 100 years of psychological science.
Our fundamental assertion is this: digital innovations must survive the psy-
chological bottlenecks of attention, perception, memory, disposition, motivation, and
social-influence if they are to proliferate. Our receptivity to your inventions in
this way determines whether we engage with them and recommend them to
others—or not.
Who are we? We are your customers, your users, and your audience. You are
entrepreneurs, designers, developers, publishers, and advertisers. This series
is only worth reading if we can talk with you directly in a first-person plural
voice. But this is the usability feedback you always dreamed of, because we are
also dedicated students of psychology. Perhaps you were too busy coding in
your dorm room or even dropping out to raise venture funding to fully digest
this body of theory. But if you read on, it’s because you now realize that our
psychological receptivity to your offerings is the difference between success
and failure. For just as chemistry is the science behind good cooking, psychol-
ogy is the science behind good design.
The key lesson of this piece is that our nervous systems are radically bottle-
necked, and the retinae of our eyes are only the first of several constrictions.
Our capacity for memes is wide and deep, but it is filled through a tiny pipette,
one at a time. We are built this way for our protection. We can’t afford to
have our brains colonized by memes that take more than they give. Offsetting
the sheer number of memes in the information age is our supremely adapted
ability to ignore things that, in our words, suck. Our psychological bottlenecks
are simultaneously the challenge you must overcome to succeed and our pro-
tection from exploitation.
■ Key Point Who are we? We are your customers, your users, and your audience. You are
entrepreneurs, designers, developers, publishers, and advertisers. This series is only worth reading
if we can talk with you directly in a first-person plural voice.
Description:“Bottlenecks’ is a tight and eminently actionable read for business leaders in startups and enterprises alike. Evans gives us a rich sense of key psychological processes and even richer examples of them in action.” - Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products “Clients fr
