Functioning of mind and human behavior
September 8, 2021
Designing has been a conscious and constant effort to make things interactive around us so that it satisfies the goal of the user. Human behavior can be comprehended in a series/sequence of actions and endless feedback. We execute actions to achieve our goals and evaluate them by the outcome after the event ends. But most of our actions are cognizance and emotion-driven in our subconscious mind. And that’s why we need to study the functioning of our mind and its reactions (called human behavior) to understand people’s goals before designing anything.
Our brain is a complex neurological system because it is highly structured and engineered so that we can respond to the surroundings around us. Our perception depends on the information that we react to through seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching (aka senses). But most importantly, distinguished by our goals. As Gestalt’s principles rightly implies, we tend to look at things with proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, symmetry, figure/ground, and common fate, even though our vision is poor. We see and structure things to simplify and understand how to perform actions. The knowledge we gain from the world and mind helps us in deciding to bring about solutions.
Our mind registers knowledge in short-term and long-term memory. Short-term memory or working memory retains memories from our most recent experiences. Whereas, long-term memory keeps from the past. Both memories help in building natural mapping, which aids to reduce the need for any information from a user’s memory to act. It brings control and movement to execute the task to achieve the user’s goals. To be a good UX designer it is imperative to understand human mind and behavior.