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UX Crash Course: User Psychology

Understanding user psychology is one of the keys to building a profitable online business. After all, people will be interacting with your products through various screens and devices, and whatever product or solution you release, will always be just a set of bits and bytes under the surface.

Understanding how those bits and bytes work and what influence do they have on the human brain can make it much easier for you to build a good user experience.

Earlier this month, Joel Marsh published a crash courser on UX and user psychology. The whole course consists of 31 individual lessons and goes really in depth into the whole idea (we encourage you to check it out).

But here, we’re just going to focus on some of the core aspects and ideas.

What is User Psychology

In short:

User Psychology is everything that can happen in a user’s mind when they use your design. And a few things before that. And a few after.

For that reason, user psychology is mainly based on understanding the typical human behavior.

Once you can accurately predict how (and why) your visitors act in a certain way, you will be able to develop truly effective campaigns, apps, or products.

The 3 Whats of User Perspective

A well-designed offer communicates three things:

  • What is this?
  • What is the benefit for the user?
  • What should they do next?

Although the concept may sound really really simple, applying it when building new promotions is actually ultra effective because it allows us to look at our projects from a bird’s-eye-view.

Always try to answer the three questions above when planning a new campaign/product and you will deliver great user experience.

The Building Blocks of User Experience

There are six main building blocks that are crucial for user experience:

  • What the user feels.
  • What the user wants.
  • What the user thinks.
  • What the user believes.
  • What the user remembers.
  • What the user doesn’t realize.

You should keep them all in mind. A good approach here is to challenge the user’s beliefs, desires or things they don’t realize.

Understanding Emotions

There are three interesting facts about emotions:

  • There are two categories of emotions: gain and loss.
  • Emotions are reactions. Not goals.
  • Time makes emotions more complicated.

So in short, your job is this: (1) appeal to the fear of loss or an awesome possibility to gain something, (2) cater to what people want, as opposed to what they need, (3) convince them to act fast, the more they wait, the more likely they will leave.

Guide Your Users

One of the toughest challenges in marketing overall is to guide the visitor along a specific path that you’ve prepared.

You want users to do something.

Users want to do something.

Those two somethings might not be the same.

This is what you need to solve.

Make sure that through your offer, the thing you’re promoting aligns perfectly with the user’s current situation.

What’s Next?

Again, if you want more info on user psychology and how to truly master it when constructing new promotions, feel free to visit the complete crash course linked above.