If you’re designing a product and you want to incorporate these human and behavioral science ideas, you have to ask yourself, ‘What are the basic things we know about people?’ Your design prototype should be based on that. For example, we know that we have this thing called the “pre-attention visual area” in the visual cortex, and it is programmed to pay attention to very particular things. It will notice if everything is one color or black and white. But if one thing is a different color, it will automatically direct attention to that different color in the visual field. We know that the same area pays attention to orientation, so if everything is vertical but one thing is tilted slightly, that will be noticed. And if everything is a circle, but this one thing is not a circle, then we will notice that.
So if you’re designing a page on a website or in an app and you want to grab attention or make people notice something, it means you can only mess with one thing, right? If you have five different colors on the screen, nobody’s going to notice anything. But if you have everything in black and white, but the button to register has color – and it’s the only bright color on the screen – that’s what people will notice. If you understand these basic principles of vision, memory and decision, you can then evaluate your product or design to get people to pay attention to your desired target.
The other big question is: if I want them to take an action, what drivers of motivation are going to be most powerful for my audience? You can then ask yourself, “What’s the one thing I want people to do in my app, in my website? And which of these seven drivers is going to be most powerful for this audience?” If you bring those two things in, you are going to design a product that is more engaging.