100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter)

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Don't miss this chance to boost your skills and stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving world of UX! One of the professional development training items on the books for FY17-18 at work was a book I’ve had on my to-read list for several years: 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People by Susan Weinschenk, PhD. The notion that we are not actually good at this thing we think we are great at begs for a simpler, more focused approach to the way we live and work. And the totality of your audience’s experience is profoundly impacted by what you know — or don’t know — about them.

If you design with forgetfulness in mind, you’ll make sure to include and prioritize important information, blending it into the design or making it easy for people to look up. So, if you’re ever conveying information, whether in a presentation or an ad, make sure you don’t provide too much at once. Maybe you’re fixing your bike or finishing a marathon, whatever the case may be, you enter a flow state when you’re journeying toward a certain goal, uninterrupted by thoughts of other goals.

The result was that people were more motivated by the second scenario because although they had the same remaining coffee slots to fill, the fact that they already had two punched was more motivating. Weinschenk is a practical guide to human behavior, revealing 100 things that designers need to know about the brain, cognition, and perception to create effective designs that resonate with people. Frankly, it’s rare that an analysis of anything to do with human emotion would veer towards de-complicating my understanding of humanity, but this one did. This book is hugely relevant for anyone interested in the basic psychology of design and how it influences and impacts peoples’ perceptions, motivations, decision-making, behaviours and actions.

On a particular chapter about the bidirectional influence between emotions and facial expressions, she implies that if you have small text on your design this will make people frown when reading, and this will make them feel unhappy with any content they come up with next. Many of life’s failures are men who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. In other words, if you were the owner of that imaginary restaurant, it might be wiser to offer one kind of dessert – ice cream, for instance – with many variations (vanilla, strawberry, pistachio and so on) than a wide variety of dissimilar desserts. She is also the author of several books including 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, 100 Things Every Presenter Needs To Know About People, and How to Get People to Do Stuff.Patterns make it easier to sort out all the new sensory information we’re constantly bombarded with.