100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

Designers should have a sense of the way people see, process information, feel motivated, and make decisions to understand how to make products that work with our natural tendencies. When creating visuals, they should take into account peripheral vision and patterns. Information should be broken up into manageable chunks and delivered in an accessible form, like stories. Designers should also build around the mind’s tendency to forget and get distracted. Finally, design influences choices subconsciously, so designers should have a sense of what makes for attractive and easy choices.

About the Author

Dr. Susan Weinschenk is a behavioral psychologist and author working in design and user experience. She’s the chief Behavioral Scientist and CEO of The Team W, Inc, and founder of the Weinschenk Institute. She consults Fortune 1000 companies, start-ups, and non-profits on how to optimize their designs. She also co-hosts the podcast HumanTech and writes a column for Psychology Today online. She’s written several other books including How to Get People to Do Stuff and Neuro Web Design.

Topics

Psychology

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Key Insights

What makes certain designs memorable? Why are some designs helpful or enjoyable while others feel like a chore to engage with? Weinschenk’s compilation of behavioral studies sheds light on how our brains interpret the world around us and form positive experiences. In learning these mechanisms, designers can understand how to build designs that attract, influence, and better serve their audiences.

People see with both their central and peripheral vision and find patterns in everything.

When you enter a new room, you look around before deciding whether you like the place or not. Maybe you notice the chairs or the paint color on the wall. Weinschenk explains that this process of vision isn’t just about seeing with our eyes but interpreting this visual information in our brains. In fact, when deciding on whether we like what’s in front of us, our vision contributes the most of all the senses.

The most familiar type of vision is called “central vision”, or what we clearly focus on when gathering details about a scene: the chairs, the paint color. But people also see with their “peripheral vision”, or the blurry edges of the visual field. This is how we notice when people are passing us, or to turn our heads when we see a rustle in the bushes. Peripheral vision evolved as a way to help people process their environment faster. Evolutionarily, we wanted any movement from predators in our surroundings.

Advertisers know this, which is why a lot of banner ads appear on the top and sides of websites. In spotting something moving at the edge of a page, our eyes are drawn in that direction.

Designers should understand that both of these types of seeing the need to be taken into account when designing a product. For example, when designing a web page, the key information should be in the center, making it easier for the central vision to interpret this information without distraction. Similarly, avoiding visual clutter from the periphery will also avoid distraction. This could involve removing advertisements from a website or any blinking buttons.

When looking at things in front of them, people also tend to pick out patterns. This is because the brain sorts visual information into categories it already understands. Weinschenk advises that designers use clear patterns to make this sorting process easier for the brain. These patterns could include groupings or simple 2D geometric drawings.

Everyone is forgetful. To help people remember, break information down into groups of four.

When studying for a test, you’ve likely found yourself at the bottom of a page of a textbook before realizing that you can’t quite recall what you just read. This is a normal function of the brain known as “limited short-term memory”, meaning the brain can only remember a limited amount of information after encountering it. In general, people only remember about 40% of the information they take in through their senses.

Given our tendency to forget, designers should understand that they cannot expect their audience to remember key information. Instead, they should make the...