UX Psychology
A reference guide to affordances, cognitive load, mental models, friction and Fitts law in UX and ecommerce.
Understanding the topic
UX Psychology connects how people perceive, interpret and act with the design of digital interfaces. This collection offers five perspectives for examining an interaction: what can be done, what must be understood, what is expected, what effort is required and how easily a control can be reached.
The concepts answer different questions. Cognitive load concerns mental effort; Fitts law concerns movement towards a target. Mental models describe expectations, while affordances describe possible actions. Friction helps locate obstacles without assuming that every pause should disappear.
In ecommerce, use these perspectives to review navigation, product comparison and checkout. Begin with a concrete task and identify uncertainty, repeated work or errors. Changes should be checked with people and evidence; these principles do not guarantee conversion improvements.
Concepts in this cluster
Related Journal articles
- Affordances: how an interface communicates what people can do
An interactive element needs to provide enough cues for its possible action to be understood before someone uses it.
- Cognitive load: when an interface makes people think too hard
The amount of information is not the only problem. An interface can look clean and still demand too much mental work.
- Mental models: users arrive with expectations
Every previous experience creates hypotheses about how a new interface should work. Design can make use of them or work against them.
- Friction is also a design decision
Every click, doubt, wait and decision has a cost. Designing an experience means deciding which effort is worthwhile and which makes people leave.
- Fitts's Law: clicking is also a matter of distance and size
Target acquisition depends on the size of the target and the distance the pointer or finger must travel to reach it. Applied to ecommerce, it helps explain how to design experiences that reduce effort and support better decisions.