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Reflection on the class - This class had a lecture and a design challenge, the design challenge was a really good exercise that I thought was useful, as it helped focus everyone's ideas and thoughts about university life. It helped me see and think of multiple areas about the idea I had, to create a better picture of it all. I also really liked the last question that allows you to reframe your original one to become more focused and aimed.
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The simple definition of Hicks's law is “the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices available”. This means that sometimes the user will have a better experience if there are fewer choices for them to have to think about.
The main elements of Hicks's law are if the response times are critical minimize the choices to then increase decision time, by breaking down complex tasks into smaller tasks will decrease cognitive load, highlighting recommendations avoids the user becoming overwhelmed, using progressive onboarding that will minimize cognitive load for new users, and you have to remember not to oversimplify to the point of abstraction.
“Ultimately, our objective is to understand what the user seeks to accomplish so that we can reduce or eliminate anything that doesn’t contribute to them successfully achieving their goal(s).” This law is about creating an experience for the user that doesn't feel like a task to them, that takes too long or needs much thought. There is a fine line between being too simple, so you have to consider what the user really wants, that's why user testing is really important to understand what they are trying to do.
Hicks law came from psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman in 1952, who were studying the relationship between the number of stimuli present and an individual’s reaction time to any given stimulus. They discovered that the more choices available the longer it took the person to make a decision.
Laws of UX - Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services by Jan Yablonski pages 23-24
Cognitive load is when a user starts using a device or has to learn how it works and then determine how to find the information they are looking for. This is about their understanding of how to navigate, process the page layout, interact with UI elements, and enter information into forms. The main focus of cognitive load is about allowing the user to achieve the task they are doing easily while learning how to navigate a new platform. This is to do with our working memory capacity which can store information relevant to the current task and if the task is too complex we start to lose some of our working memory capacity trying to process this new information.
Laws of UX - Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services by Jan Yablonski pages 25-26
Cognitive load originated in the late 1980s by John Sweller who was studying problem-solving and the don't expansion of information processing theories of George Miller. He published in 1988 "Cognitive Load Theory, Learning Difficulty, and Instructional Design" which then researchers later developed the idea of cognitive load.
https://lawsofux.com/cognitive-load/
In class, we discussed dark patterns which I think are really interesting because of how many people fall victim to them and how easy it is to not fully read something and fall into a dark pattern. These are deceptive patterns a deceptive pattern is a design pattern that promotes users to take action that benefits the companies employing the pattern by deceiving, misdirecting, shaming, or obstructing the user's ability to make another choice. They end up causing the user harm by financial loss, loss of privacy, and legal control, this is more likely to affect vulnerable users that perhaps have lower literacy skills and digital literacy levels.
The dark pattern was coined by Harry Brignull in 2010 since then they have become common practice in some designs and are present in over 10% from a sample of 11,000 popular e-commerce sites in 2019 and another study in 2019 found that deceptive patterns were in 95% of 240 Trending apps on Google Play Store with over half of them having an average of seven deceptive patterns.
There are different types of deceptive patterns...