VOICES
Interview
“A designer who doesn’t understand
psychology is going to be no more
successful than an architect who doesn’t
understand physics,” claims UX consultant
Joe Leech, who has made psychology for user
experience and product design his speciality.
There is absolutely no doubt that data and
testing are important and that they help you
look at trends on a large scale but it’s quite
hard to determine how individuals think and
behave with data alone. You need to
understand how the brain works to design
products, apps and websites that match
human behaviour.
“The best and most successful teams I’ve
seen look for ideas in psychology,” Joe
explains. “It can help generate solutions to
par t icular problems l i ke the number of items
to put in a navigation menu in an app.
Psychology can give you a clue about that
number and then you can do some multi-
variant and AB testing on the back of what
[that] told you to [...] prove if it was a good
i d ea or n ot. T h e y ’r e d e f i n it e l y c ompl e m e nt a r y.
Dat a w i l l tel l you t hat somet h i ng is happ en i ng
and that something is wrong. Psychology
can tell you why.”Joe helps his clients – startups and big,
established businesses alike – to improve
their products. “I call it product innovation,”
he explains. “It’s taking an existing product
and trying to shift it to a better place. I use
psychology to do that, as well as research
and my 14 years of experience.”
Certainly Joe has plenty of expertise to
bring to the table, having studied
neuroscience at the University of Sussex
before earning the opportunity to study for
a PhD in snail brains. Deciding he didn’t
really fancy specialising in the minds of
molluscs, he instead spent five years abroad
teaching English as a foreign language before
enrolling in a master’s course in human
communication and computing at Bath
University. After working at a couple of web
agencies and anticipating how important the
discipline would become, Joe began to plough
his own furrow in the art of user experience.
He wrote the first version of the Psychology
for Designers pocket guide (https://mrjoe.uk/
psychology-for-designers/) in 2013 and went
freelance in 2015, carrying out work for
clients as diverse as MoMA, Disney, Marriott,
Trainline and Raspberr y Pi.One of the major benefits of psychology
is that it helps with the minutiae of
interaction design. “Let’s look at choice,” Joe
suggests. “If you offer too much choice,
people get ‘choice blindness’. The more
options you give them, the longer it takes
them to reach a decision. People feel
overwhelmed. We can look to reduce mental
capacity and apply Hick’s Law, which
predicts, based on the number of choices you
offer to the user, how long it’s going to take
them to make that choice.”
If you then also use price-framing theory
to show a product that is more e x pensive and
one that is cheaper, you are creating the
frame in which the user views the price of
the item – neither expensive, nor cheap. Both
of these psychological principles should
increase sales.
And psychology doesn’t just help you
design micro-interactions; it can also help
you use mental models to tackle big
experience-design problems. “If you design
a website or app for, say, buying shoes online,
you model it around how your customers
would expect to buy shoes in the real world,”
Joe advises. “You’re going to have much morePhoto: Jon Tan