Psychology Driven UX/UI/Web Design - PART 1 Fundamentals (Udemy.com)

There are over 250 million regularly updated websites on the internet, that look, in one way or another, similar. How can yours stand out in this crowded place? How can you make sure that your first-time visitors have an engaging user experience and come again? And when they do, quickly find what they’re looking for to accomplish their goals? Can you change their mood to the better and use that positivity to achieve your website goals? Or anticipate their unconscious desires and cater to them?

This course will enable you to create effective and affective websites that are centered around how human beings work. By teaching you how to take findings in applied psychology into account when designing, it will empower you to predict how people will interact with your website and to take their perceptual biases, motivations, emotional states, and unconscious cognitions into consideration.

Only when you thoroughly understand the human mind can you hope to create designs that are simple yet pleasing and engaging at the same time. Psychology driven design aims to help accomplish that, by making you aware, at every step of a creative process, how humans think, feel and act. And the result of it is a product that appeals simultaneously to the intellect, emotions as well as unconscious desires of users.

Some people refer to this method as “designing for the mind” others as “designing for humans” or even “neurodesign”. We prefer the term “psychology driven design”, because the concept relies on findings in cognitive, behavioral and social psychology to determine, how, for example, the structure of a website influences users’ perception of it; how the colors and types used by its designer affect their mood; and how they interact with it to connect with others.

The psychological impact of the design of a website determines if users will trust it or not, if they will feel important, or at ease, or curious and so on. In short, it is the number one determinant of a good or bad web user experience, and regardless of whether you are new to web design or a seasoned professional, if you would like to understand how you can use its power, then this is the right course for you.

WHO THIS COURSE IS FOR

This course is useful for all web designers, to a great extent also app designers, independent of their level of expertise and years of experience, from individuals who are using readymade templates to publish their first personal conceptions, to highly professional designers who are creating original web interfaces for Fortune 500 companies. This course is very useful even for those content creators, who are not versed in web design at all, but wish to insert some content into an existing web-based platform in an impactful manner.

The course is especially beneficial for those who want to accomplish the creative part of designing a website, to then have a web developer do the coding; for those who use ready-made web templates that can be modified by users to quickly personalize them; and of course, for those who are already proficient in developing websites but who can use deeper design knowledge to make their creations more effective. If you are in this last category, this course can give you sound reasons for much of what is felt intuitively, and yet not fully understood.

HOW THIS COURSE WILL BENEFIT YOU

Website elements have become more or less standardized, so that by combining them within some context you can quickly end up with a fairly good-looking website. But the problem is, content and design are interrelated. Websites that are based on off-the-shelf themes by themselves cannot claim the kind of relationship that makes a website impactful, as a theme is always built on dummy content. This means that, in order to select content appropriate layouts, visuals, colors, typography etc., to create content that is scannable and shared more, to design user experiences that are gamified and personalized, you do have to master the way to influence the perception of your visitors, whether you design from scratch or use a template. In that sense, learning about psychology driven web design will enable you to:

• Understand why successful websites have been designed the way they have been;

• Evaluate why, in some context, a certain design generates positive emotions and thoughts while another leads to user frustration;

• Create designs that increase conversions by taking latest findings in applied psychology into account;

• Design websites that support the quirks, biases and defining features of the human mind;

• Design displays that support human visual perception and improve the user experience.

In a word, by the end of this course, you will be able to create better websites and be more successful at what you do.

MAIN LEARNING OBJECTIVES

PART 1

Learning to design with user focus, from goal setting, through user research, defining personas, creating scenarios, devising user journeys and user experiences, user motivations, all the way to information architecture, usability and usability testing, and accessibility issues.

Learning to take the characteristics and limitations of human attention, memory, perception, language and reading skills, learning abilities, and different types of emotions into consideration when designing a website.

Learning how to account for perceptual biases of users in order to create websites that are more appealing to their subconscious mind and easier for them to navigate, by understanding the gestalt principles of perception.

Learning to create perceptual organization using similarity and contrast, visual weights, visual directions, dominance, focal points, compositional hierarchy, flow and rhythm, compositional balance, proportion, whitespace and much more to achieve strong visual hierarchy, simplicity, unity, variety, and consistency in design.

Learning to use the impact of color on human psychology to convey specific feelings and messages in your designs.

PART 2

Learning to create content that is suitable for scanning, better legible and readable, more impactful, socially accepted, and shared more, which are essential skills for any blogger.

Learning to judge the purposefulness, appropriateness as well as psychological impact of visuals, multimedia, and typography by taking into consideration such issues as the psychological impact of faces and anthropomorphic forms on photographs, the attractiveness bias, the meanings of common shapes, the use of digital arts, infographics, iconic representation, the psychology of typography and much more.