Good design: It's all in the mind

Design is inherently and implicitly psychological; its practice carries all the psychology it needs, and designers learn it as they go

It seems unarguable that designers carry a psychological armoury that makes their work effective. That, not manual skill, is why we trust them with our businesses, or not. Without it, designers would miss their only target: other people.

If you are looking for ways to use psychology to boost the value of your design rupee, go elsewhere. Try one of several excellent web pages on the topic or the tens of shallow ones. You will find them absorbing, but ultimately disappointing. Incorporating formal knowledge into practice is an act of deep learning that designers (should) do.

Yet every so often I hear some senior designer or the other have this epiphany: why, why, don’t don’t they teach psychology in design school! It surfaces the disquieting question: is psychology’s place in design all important, as deep background or penetrating insight? Or is it just a source of thumb-rules to be opportunistically summoned to justify a design decision, or simply a curiosity? 

Or perhaps, you say, the question is unfair. Design, like all the arts, is inherently and implicitly psychological; its practice carries all the psychology it needs, and designers learn it as they go. It’s just, you add, that psychology has become a formal discipline at around the same time that, say, economics and design did, all relatively recently. As shown in the graphs of the historical frequencies of these words.

Some disciplines feel the want of an explicit understanding of psychology more than others. Economics is one, rescued from improbable rationality by behavioural economics. And since Daniel Kahneman’s 2001 Nobel win, his best selling book has become required reading, spawning a flood of others. Airport bookshop shelves creak with the stuff. Every professional has a pet cognitive bias she loves to quote. 

Perhaps design’s greater age as a word-concept (see graph) protects it against this particular insecurity. Though designers suffering from the odd bout of psychology envy, they tend to believe the ‘implicit knowledge’ defence (see the second paragraph). Art, for another, expresses no desire to learn psychology.

And there’s the rub. The daily practice of a highly psychological art leads to an illusion of familiarity and command; and soon the design practice becomes the insight and the psychological principle it embodies appears to be a pedantic codification. Ironically, there’s a cognitive bias for that: deformation professionelle, when a professional believes that his trade gives him a total, rather than a partial, view of the mind — and the world. 

(Top left) View of the historical frequencies of the words ‘psychology’, ‘economics’ and ‘design’; (top right) traffic light countdown; (bottom right) image of a fly printed on the bowls of men’s urinals; (bottom left) zebra signs painted to look like solid blocks

Scan a typical ‘how to use psychology in design’ page and you find those principles are either too broad to apply, or too specific to be of more than very occasional use — or just obvious. Designers, and you, will likely be underwhelmed by, say, the von Restorff Effect, which reminds us that a single red umbrella will stand out in a row of otherwise identical white ones. Or Hick’s Law, which agrees that people take much (logarithmically) longer to choose with every additional choice presented to them. 

Incorporating formal knowledge, with nuance, into one’s own insights and observation becomes crucial to using psychology in practice. Use it not as a yes-no heuristic, or as a trump card in an argument, but make its mental models (rough mechanisms of how the mind works) a part of your toolkit. Recognise that the real world is much more complex than the research theatre.  

The value of psychological models lies in what knowledge experts call the ‘forced scan’, using deliberate, slow and systematic thinking to check your decisions (a concept popularised by the aforementioned best-seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow) to pick up what intuition or common sense can miss. 

That’s partly why the rationality-loving nerds of digital technology make a fetish of these principles. User experience or UI/UX is its poster child, born when cognitive psychology met engineering. The term ‘mental models’ owes to the foundational book, The Psychology of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman (see the last Deep Design), which was renamed to replace “psychology” with “design”. It’s a close link. 

How many items in a menu can the mind take in and act on (six, most likely, but with caveats), the precise placement or colour of a ‘buy’ button are all matters of interest. As is the psychology of waiting (how my journey through an app can feel shorter and easier, and therefore likely to be repeated). And errors: why the odd ATM appears to have eaten your card. (It hasn’t: you left it in the machine, because before returning the card, it paid cash, the sight of which fired an “end of transaction” signal in your brain. A classic mismatch of mental models.)

Designers also seek to influence users to take certain actions, and Persuasive Design attempts to do just that. The IT industry is its biggest client, with ‘conversion’ as its goal (think ‘buy’ or agree’ buttons). Its oldest success story, though: the image of a fly printed on the bowls of the men’s urinals at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. Men, like boys, like to idly aim their pee at it, improving ‘spillage rates’ dramatically.

Governments love the persuasion design business. The UK experimented with a Behavioural insights Unit, affectionately the ‘Ministry of Nudges’, (named after the book, Nudge, that advocates benign trickery to make us eat better or save more, for instance). In the early 2000s, Delhi’s traffic cops adopted traffic light countdown timers to ease drivers’ nerves (yes, the psychology of waiting). Now they’re playing with zebra signs painted to look, from the viewpoint of an approaching driver, like solid blocks installed on the road. Psychology becomes street wisdom. 

But nudges are for supreme tacticians, not grand thinkers. They are a cognitive hack, to smooth an interaction, or steal and direct attention. But design has a wider canvas. We want it to help us get liked, to bond; to inspire, or defend; to be remembered. Deep Design has always advocated looking beyond the cognitive, into the worlds of affect, emotion and instinct; and the higher cognitive functions of associations. But those are areas where literature, art and the human story may be a better teacher. Get that psychology book, and a novel too. Itu Chaudhuri runs Itu Chaudhuri Design, a design and branding firm, in New Delhi; itu@icdindia.com