Psychology: The Foundation of UI/UX Design
UI/UX design is one of those phrases that designers throw around a lot, but that few people would claim to truly understand. To put it simply, UI (or user interface) design is the development of digital objects or elements that we as users interact with. This can be anything from the link you clicked to get here, to the way your email opens up when you check it every morning, to any screens, buttons, icons, toggles, or any other visual element you interact with on an electronic device. This page is covered in UI elements!
UX (or user experience) design goes hand-in-hand with UI. Where UI is the process of developing the product to be interacted with, UX is the process of actually using it. It's the frustration and annoyance of a too-small button or a broken link, and it's the satisfaction and contentment of using a well-crafted product.
If UI is the buttons you can see above, UX is how you feel about using them. Most of the links lead nowhere, which might be frustrating or confusing. How do the colors make you feel? The shapes?
All of that is a part of UX design. Together, the term "UI/UX design" summarizes the complete process of creating a digital product for a user and what the users experience when they interact with it.
Proper UX design requires a certain level of meeting the users where they are. In order to design for your audience, you need to understand who they are psychologically. What's their age, their personality, their interests, their technology level? All of this and more helps inform the entire process of product design.
In fact, psychological principles are important to keep in mind for both the developers and the users.
One tool that helps developers keep user experience in mind is creating user personas. User personas are fictional people that reflect your target audience, complete with names, faces, and occupations. If you have multiple audiences, create multiple personas (at most three) to reflect the maximum range of users while balancing feasibility.
Creating user personas allows designers to prioritize the user's needs by empathizing with them. For example, it's easier to think about what 45-year-old yoga instructor Jen and 20-year-old college student David would need from a given product, rather than trying to keep multiple datasets in mind all at once. Creating empathy for your users allows the UX team to produce more efficient, simple, and more easily-understood designs.
