Psychology for UX

Introduction

I studied psychology, and before working in UX I was a clinical psychologist trained in systemic family therapy. I came to user research in 2018, after several years in clinical practice and research, and during my first years I did something I only later learned to name: I was using what I knew about psychology all the time, without realizing I was using it. When I understood why someone got frustrated with a screen, or why they said one thing and did another, I was applying things learned in another life, in another context.

When I started, I was obsessed with the crossover between psychology and UX: whether other psychologists like me had made the transition, what their experience had been, what they carried over. Over time I have come to see that you carry over everything: the experience of talking with people, the ethics of the work, the habit of considering the context of what we do, of thinking about everyone involved (which includes my own context as a designer or researcher), and of starting from the goal of whatever we are about to do. Without that clear, no path is going to serve us.

It is out of that curiosity that this course was born: to actually make those connections instead of treating them as loose analogies.

Who it is for. For anyone who designs or researches experiences and wants to understand why people do what they do in front of a screen. Not to quote laws from memory, but to decide with grounding and to recognize when that grounding runs out. You do not need a background in psychology to follow it.

What you will take away. A handful of psychological phenomena that govern how people perceive, remember and decide, each one with its real reach and its limit. The point is not that you walk away repeating "the law of X says…", but that you know when it applies, when it does not, and how to tell an explanation backed by evidence from one that merely sounds good.

How to use it. There are five modules, and it is worth following them in order: each one builds on the previous. Every module comes with a short activity, about fifteen minutes, that makes the reading concrete; doing it changes quite a lot of what sticks. And if at any point you want to go down to the foundation (to the psychology, not the application), each module links the corresponding session of the MIT course.

One last thing, to be honest from the start: this course treats psychology as a useful toolbox and, at the same time, as a field full of badly cited claims. You will find both "this works and here is how to use it" and "this gets repeated a lot and is worse understood than it looks". Both are part of the craft.

Scope of the course

Psychology is not one single mass that pours straight into UX. What we use to design today comes from different traditions: cognitive psychology (perception, memory, attention, biases), social psychology (how other people's behavior influences us), the psychology of learning (how we acquire habits and skills) and the psychology of communication (how we interpret messages and signals). Each has its own findings and its own limits.

This course does not try to cover them all. We focus on the phenomena most common in day-to-day UX work, which are mostly cognitive at root, with excursions into the social and the communicational at a few points.