Cognitive Psychology talks

Cognitive psychology is the study of how people think: how we perceive, pay attention, remember, learn, make decisions and solve problems. It treats the mind as a system with real capacities and limits, such as how much we can hold in working memory or how easily our attention is pulled away.

For UI, UX and product design, cognitive psychology explains much of what makes an interface easy or hard to use. Knowing that people recognise more easily than they recall, that too many options can stall a decision, or that habits form through repeated cues and rewards helps designers reduce mental effort and design for how people actually behave. The same knowledge can also be misused, which makes understanding it part of designing ethically.

The 20 talks here, recorded between 2007 and 2016, cover a wide range. Jeff Johnson’s Designing with the Mind in Mind and Susan Weinschenk’s talks on perception and on vision, hearing and the brain explain how cognition shapes design. Barry Schwartz’s The paradox of choice and Sheena Iyengar’s The art of choosing look at decision-making, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi presents Flow, the secret to happiness, and Ash Donaldson discusses cognitive dissonance. Nir Eyal on habit-forming products, Kathy Sierra’s Badass: Making Users Awesome, Stephen Anderson’s Hooked on a Feeling, Amy Jo Kim on game mechanics, Harry Brignull on dark patterns, Rory Sutherland, Maurits Kaptein, Nishant Kothary and Joe Leech’s Forms are boring complete the collection. Perception has its own sub-topic. Many of these principles appear as patterns in the UI-Patterns.com library, such as recognition over recall and chunking.