David C Evans Bottlenecks Aligning UX Design with User Psychology David C Evans Kenmore, Washington, USA Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the book’s product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484225790 For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code ISBN 978-1-4842-2579-0 e-ISBN 978-1-4842-2580-6 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4842-2580-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932384 © David C Evans 2017 This work is subject to copyright All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed Trademarked names, logos, and images may appear in this book Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, logo, or image we use the names, logos, and images only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein Printed on acid-free paper Distributed to the book trade worldwide by Springer Science+Business Media New York, 233 Spring Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10013 Phone 1-800-SPRINGER, fax (201) 348-4505, email orders-ny@springer-sbm.com, or visit www.springeronline.com Apress Media, LLC is a California LLC and the sole member (owner) is Springer Science + Business Media Finance Inc (SSBM Finance Inc) SSBM Finance Inc is a Delaware corporation For brothers and sisters Apress Business: The Unbiased Source of Business Information Apress business books provide essential information and practical advice, each written for practitioners by recognized experts Busy managers and professionals in all areas of the business world—and at all levels of technical sophistication—look to our books for the actionable ideas and tools they need to solve problems, update and enhance their professional skills, make their work lives easier, and capitalize on opportunity Whatever the topic on the business spectrum—entrepreneurship, finance, sales, marketing, management, regulation, information technology, among others—Apress has been praised for providing the objective information and unbiased advice you need to excel in your daily work life Our authors have no axes to grind; they understand they have one job only—to deliver up-to-date, accurate information simply, concisely, and with deep insight that addresses the real needs of our readers It is increasingly hard to find information—whether in the news media, on the internet, and now all too often in books—that is even-handed and has your best interests at heart We therefore hope that you enjoy this book, which has been carefully crafted to meet our standards of quality and unbiased coverage We are always interested in your feedback or ideas for new titles Perhaps you’d even like to write a book yourself Whatever the case, reach out to us at editorial@apress.com and an editor will respond swiftly Incidentally, at the back of this book, you will find a list of useful related titles Please visit us at www.apress.com to sign up for newsletters and discounts on future purchases The Apress Business Team Prologue: Memetic Fitness In this series of essays, we seek a better understanding of why some digital innovations and experiences engage us deeply and spread widely, and why others not, drawing upon the lessons of 100 years of psychological science Our fundamental assertion is this: digital innovations must survive the psychological bottlenecks of attention, perception, memory, disposition, motivation, and social-influence if they are to proliferate Our receptivity to your inventions in this way determines whether we engage with them and recommend them to others—or not Who are we? We are your customers, your users, and your audience You are entrepreneurs, designers, developers, publishers, and advertisers This series is only worth reading if we can talk with you directly in a first-person plural voice But this is the usability feedback you always dreamed of, because we are also dedicated students of psychology Perhaps you were too busy coding in your dorm room or even dropping out to raise venture funding to fully digest this body of theory But if you read on, it’s because you now realize that our psychological receptivity to your offerings is the difference between success and failure For just as chemistry is the science behind good cooking, psychology is the science behind good design The key lesson of this piece is that our nervous systems are radically bottlenecked, and the retinae of our eyes are only the first of several constrictions Our capacity for memes is wide and deep, but it is filled through a tiny pipette, one at a time We are built this way for our protection We can’t afford to have our brains colonized by memes that take more than they give Offsetting the sheer number of memes in the information age is our supremely adapted ability to ignore things that, in our words, suck Our psychological bottlenecks are simultaneously the challenge you must overcome to succeed and our protection from exploitation Key Point Who are we? We are your customers, your users, and your audience You are entrepreneurs, designers, developers, publishers, and advertisers This series is only worth reading if we can talk with you directly in a first-person plural voice So let’s begin A meme , if we may define it properly for you, is an idea, an invention, a particle of culture ranging from the simplest to the most complex, whose diffusion through a population can be observed You are probably familiar with this word, but its original meaning went far beyond LOL cats and political gaffes to encompass almost everything you are involved in creating The term was born in this 1976 passage by sociobiologist Richard Dawkins, which is worth reading in detail: [A]ll life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet There may be others If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process… I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged… The new soup is the soup of human culture We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme … Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process that, in the broad sense, can be called imitation i Endowing the term meme with the weight that Dawkins intended (he went on to discuss the memes of entire religions), ii we will use it to refer to any invention or work product in whose proliferation you are invested This may be your app, your web site, your bot, your game, your blog, your design, your interface, your tweet, your newsletter, your movie, your book, your song All the ads, logos, charts, infographics, tools, reports, spreadsheets, and “solutions” you’ve ever made for your company or your clients Include too your digital identity, your posts, your pictures, your dating profile, and your résumé In the past, few of you could afford to spread your memes through the scarce and expensive communications channels like TV, radio, recording studios, and publishing houses The bottlenecks were in media then, but not anymore Because the internet iii reaches us all and launching memes through it is easy and inexpensive, it has not only devalued the old broadcast channels, but it has caused an explosion of content Look at just one platform, smartphone apps, where by 2015 there were 1.6 million apps on Google Play, 1.4 million in the Apple App Store, and by some estimates, over million apps and web sites on the Facebook Developer Platform iv This has pushed the bottlenecks out to us, the end users, whose nervous systems must play a much larger role in separating the meaning from the noise But history, even ancient history, has repeatedly witnessed such explosions of innovation, and scholars are quite familiar with what happens as they run their course Studying early multicellular life in ancient shale fossils, archaeologist Stephen Jay Gould described what he called the Cambrian explosion This was a brief period 570 million years ago when evolution burst forth with the most numerous, interesting, fancy, and bizarre animal phyla our planet has ever seen (Figure I ) “This was a time of unparalleled opportunity.” Gould wrote, “Nearly anything could find a place Life was radiating into empty space and could proliferate at logarithmic rates…in a world virtually free of competition.” v Figure An example of an early phyla in the Cambrian explosion that later went extinct But what happened shortly afterward? Most phyla promptly went extinct, except the few vertebrates and arthropods we know today Gould argued that those that survived made it through key ecological bottlenecks, whereas most did not Fast forward to the Facebook epoch, and Cameron Marlow, who pioneered Facebook’s data science team, referred to the same Cambrian explosion to describe the history of apps on the Facebook platform (Figure ) vi Mere months after this niche opened in 2007, developers launched hundreds of thousands of apps and games on it But almost as quickly as they were created, most “died” for lack of attention and use, and only a few proliferated and dominated Figure The explosion of apps on the Facebook platform Gould may have been looking at prehistoric sea bugs, but he saw a larger pattern when he noted that “rapid establishment and later decimation dominates all scales, and seems to have the generality of a fractal pattern.” vii Indeed, history has shown this metapattern to be true of the early World Wide Web (ultimately dominated by AOL, Yahoo!, and Lycos), social networking (Facebook), productivity suites (Microsoft Office), blog platforms (Wordpress), music streaming (iTunes), video streaming (YouTube), messaging apps (Skype, WeChat), and smartphone operating systems (Android, Apple) viii As such, there is every reason to expect that “rapid establishment and later decimation” will be repeated among the platforms that are just emerging: bots and chatbots on messaging and voice platforms, in-car infotainment systems, the internet of things, and augmented-reality content This is why you must understand your users, and the psychological bottlenecks we employ to ensure that we expend our time and energy only on useful memes The memes that are optimized for receptivity will go on to dominate, while those that are misaligned with human nature will be selected against and ultimately go extinct, suffering the silent, ignored death of most digital inventions Dawkins’ analogy, that memes are to culture as genes are to heredity, also helps to understand why you put so much effort into your inventions, and what your essential challenge is You likely already know what it means to strive for genetic fitness: spreading your genes through the population by amassing resources, attracting a mate, raising offspring, and caring for relatives Dawkins’ analogy suggests that you work just as hard to maximize your memetic fitness: spreading your inventions through the culture by attracting attention, retaining it, and encouraging your audience to pass the word You cultivate your fitness in two separate ecologies like a gambler playing at two tables In a digital age, fitness may be defined as much by fame as by family, and you make that choice with how you allocate every hour of your day But there is yet another, often overlooked, way by which Dawkins’ idea of memes helps to understand the diffusion of innovation His notion packetizes your inventions into parcels of energy and meaning, just the way genes packetized our understanding of heritable traits This helps enormously in tracing the transmission of your work, just as it helped to trace the transmission of genes from parent to offspring As such, in this piece we will conceptually follow your meme as it leaves a screen and hits the eye, penetrates a brain, is imbued with meaning, and is retained and used—or alternatively— overlooked, discarded, and abandoned We will explore the forces that determine whether your meme matches our dispositions and meets our needs and is ultimately recommended to others—or is irrelevant, a disappointment, and detracted from mercilessly in our online comments Ultimately, the survival of your meme through these bottlenecks is what determines your memetic fitness and whether your work will leap “from brain to brain” and across the globe Key Point Digital innovations must survive the psychological bottlenecks of attention, perception, memory, disposition, motivation, and social-influence if they are to proliferate Just as chemistry is the science behind good cooking, psychology is the science behind good design If the bottlenecked user is our fundamental assertion, then our fundamental assumption is that there exist many good memes worth spreading that fail due to avoidable misalignments with our nervous systems We are not talking about all the buggy apps and ranting blogs that we kill off quickly with “user-selection” before they can make further demands on our attention We’re talking about the myriad of fundamentally viable memes that, through some shortcoming or flaw in their design, fail to pass through the bottlenecks that we use to block out the noise If you are the author of a truly useful meme, by the end of this series you will learn many concrete ways to improve your work so that we are more receptive to it But we offer you our thoughts without altruism The memes that you build make up the digital tools and environments we use to our own life’s work, provide for ourselves and our loved ones, connect with our peers, and enjoy the creativity of others or express our own creativity Your memes undergird our mortal existence from birth to death Only when your business goals satisfy our life goals will success be assured and mutual If nothing else, we hope to evoke both innovative new directions in design and fruitful hypotheses for research Where we have permission, we will refer to actual research studies that we’ve participated in, sometimes commissioned by tech giants, other times by start-ups, but always on issues where the stakes were high And to other users like us, we point out that a meme carrier can instantly become a meme creator , so any of us who has ever tried to raise awareness for anything, from a college app to a killer app, stands to learn from this exercise as well http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11312/33051044-MIT sequence=2 viii de Sola Pool, I., & Kochen, M (1978) Contacts and influence Social Networks, 1(1), 5–51 ix Milgram, S., Mann, L., & Harter, S (1965) The lost-letter technique: A tool of social research Opinion Quarterly, 29(3), 437 x Travers, J., & Milgram, S (1969) An experimental study of the small world problem Sociometr 443 xi Watts, D J., & Strogatz, S H (1998) Collective dynamics of ’small-world’ networks nature, 39 440–442 xii Connected: The Power of Six Degrees (2008) TV movie Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rzxAyY7D7k xiii Granovetter, M S (1973) The Strength of Weak Ties1 American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1380 xiv Dodds, P S., Muhamad, R., & Watts, D J (2003) An experimental study of search in global soc networks Science, 301(5634), 827–829 xv Leskovec, J., & Horvitz, E (2007) Worldwide buzz: Planetary-scale views on an instant-messag network (Vol 60) Technical report, Microsoft Research Retrieved from http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/msn-paper q=network-buzz xvi Backstrom, L (2011, November 21) Anatomy of Facebook Facebook Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/anatomy-offacebook/10150388519243859/ See also Ugander, J., Karrer, B., Backstrom, L., & Ma (2011, November 18) The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph Facebook Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4503 See also Backstrom, L., Boldi, P., Rosa, M., Ugan Vigna S (2011, November 19) Four Degrees of Separation Facebook Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4570 xvii Bhagat, S., Diuk, C., Filiz, I.O., & Edunov, S (2016, February 4) Three and a half degrees of sep Facebook Research Retrieved from https://research.fb.com/three-and-a-half degrees-of-separation/ Note: Facebook found their network shrink from 4.74 degrees separation in 2011 to 4.57 in 2016 To wit, Facebook users in 2014 had an average of 338 connec over twice as many as is invited to the average wedding, and far higher than the 140 that evolutio psychologists like Robin Dunbar have argued our cerebral cortex has the capacity to track in a me way See also Dunbar, R I (1992) Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates Jou Human Evolution, 22(6), 469–493 Epilogue You see now that it is our receptivity to your life’s work that matters greatly if you want your meme to be one of the few that enjoys a global viral cascade With that established, you now see the true nature of our counsel in this book What raises our receptivity? In our view, the answer is how well it aligns with the psychological bottlenecks of attention, perception, memory, disposition, motivation, and social influence As Richard Dawkins, the sociobiologist who invented the word meme (see the Prologue) put it, “The survival value of [a] meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal.” Our thesis began with the notion that many good memes fail that are worth spreading In network terms, this implies your signal is strong enough, but it could still fail to meet our receptivity threshold unless it survives the bottlenecks that we have discussed at length You took the time to read this book not just to learn how to make a better meme, but also how to make us more receptive to memes that were already great Memetic engineering is the professional practice of improving memes to increase the likelihood that they will survive the bottlenecks of user psychology It’s taking action on the ideas in this book It’s usability engineering and product design with theory It’s a good day’s work and a very real way to make an impact How you become a memetic engineer ? If you are currently working as an analyst in user-, usability-, design-, or market-research, begin by producing a memetic fitness analysis These should consist of just four slides with equal parts images and text: The current state of the meme —be it the interface, market positioning, or advertising message The psychological bottleneck at play —a short summary, with images and citations, of the relevant psychological process influencing users’ receptivity to the meme Many passages of this book were written specifically so that you could copy and paste them into a presentation Your recommendation for change —how the meme could be changed to increase its memetic fitness A predicted business outcome and a way to test it —a means of measuring the increased fitness you are predicting, ideally involving an experimental analysis of behavior If you successfully present just one such report, and it is acted upon, then you are a memetic engineer You may then confidently list this as a skill on your résumé or LinkedIn profile Don’t stop there, move on to the next meme What if you are not yet employed in such a capacity, but you want to be? Simple Create the same four-slide presentation about a meme whose company you want to work for, upload it to SlideShare, and post a link in the Bottlenecks group on LinkedIn or our other community sites We who are already memetic engineers will approve it for publication, and you may now interview as a memetic engineer Depending on which psychological process interests you most, you will be needed at different places in the tech world To help you steer your career to the right technologies, the list in Table indicates where the action lies for each psychological process Table Areas of Technology and Business Most Related to Each Psychological Process Psychological Process Foveal acuity Relevant Technology Connected cars, automobile on-board systems Task orientation Publisher web sites, aggregator apps Attentional focus Online advertising, push notifications Gestalt perception Web sites, infographics, data visualization Motion perception Game animation, motion pictures, virtual reality Working memory Connected cars, omnichannel advertising Signal detection theory Email, social media feeds Long-term memory Authentication systems, password management Encoding, retrieval Crowdsource campaigns, brand advertising, streaming media Personality matching Online advertisement, game mechanics Developmental stages Advertising campaigns, product marketing and positioning, streaming media, feature films Needs Food publishers, segmentation Fun Game design Schedules of reinforcement Social media, casual games, content publishers Escalating commitment Conversion optimization, registration, freemium models, ecommerce Approach avoidance Ecommerce, checkout Routes to persuasion Video advertising Social capital App platforms & ratings, review sites, word-of-mouth advertising Group polarization Comment systems, news publishing, review sites, algorithm accountability Receptivity Social networks, social media Balance theory Social networks, multiplayer gaming Attributional discounting Social media Finally, you may decide that your contribution lies with memetic science , that is, continued academic research on the psychology and network diffusion of digital innovations There is great work happening, and indeed there is much yet to be done If this is your path, we recommend adding a fifth slide to your memetic fitness analyses : Any modifications or caveats for the theory —whether and how the theory should be modified as revealed by the application to a specific digital environment Often, applying theory to a new arena lays bare the assumptions of the basic science, showing that while there may be internal validity to the processes proposed, it lacks external or ecological validity by failing to match the real world These discrepancies are also perfect grist for conversation in our Bottlenecks communities Are we able to multitask while driving? Is there in fact demand to rewatch movies? Does personality add to the accuracy of ad targeting? Does copy to dispel concerns increase conversion rates? There are also more profound questions that only the most dedicated memetic scientists will be able answer Are the memes on smartphones addictive, and if so, what is the most effective intervention? What population-wide changes in memory and retrieval can be expected with increased access to facts and knowledge via search? Does the uninhibited expression of polarized opinions contribute to a political and social coarsening of our culture? What effect will big data algorithms of behavior and their use have on our sense of self and our sense of privacy? How will aging populations attribute their challenges with digital memes, to their own impairments or to developers’ biases? We, as users of digital media, have a keen interest in answers to all of these questions We really need to see better alignment between technology and human nature Thus in this piece, we took as our purpose to show specific instances where foundational theory could improve our experience, and in turn, the fitness of the memes But this is no less true for the most intimate, immersive experiences (privacy, autonomy, independence, and fulfillment of the key goals of our life stage) as it is for granular experiences (a checkout flow on a web, or a relevant advertisement) For this reason, the application of memetic science to real-world scenarios will both make your work important and also animate it Social issues have breathed life into psychology almost since it began: Freud gained acceptance when he showed he could use talk-therapy to treat “shell shock” suffered by WW I soldiers (now called post-traumatic stress disorder) Memory and cognition were animated by industrial engineering Social psychology sprung into life to explain Nazi Germany, and after that, to verify the assumptions of the Civil Rights movement (that separate could not be equal) and understand the resistance against it As of this writing, half of the humans on earth have internet access, and a third are connecting to others via social media For us, it is already true that there is no digital life, there is just life Technology needs psychology to be successful, but psychology also needs technology The continued survival of the memes of psychological theory, a great body of knowledge and a profound epistemological tradition, is no less susceptible to memetic extinction than anything else The digitization of human intelligence and social life is the defining social issue of our time Thus the memetic fitness of psychology itself will be increased only if students and scholars acknowledge and extend its relevance in technological innovation This will not be the first time in earth’s evolution that a symbiosis is required for mutual survival We thank you so very much for your investment of attention; we look forward to your next invention Index A AB testing Abuse Action potentials Active goggles Acuity Allrecipes.com navigational preferences task-negative users task orientation task-positive users Amazon AMBER Alerts American Automobile Association (AAA) Foundation Anonymity Apple Store Approach avoidance Allrecipes.com approach mindset conversion flow omega strategy of persuasion subvocal concerns Windows 10 App Store AJAX Atmospheric perspective Attentional inventory Attention channels Attention economy Attributional discounting Automatic processes B Balance theory Basking in reflected glory Behaviorism Belongingness Big Five model categories of personality traits level of extraversion personality domains personality variables regression/Baysian modeling Bridge (or maven) nodes Brute force software C CAP approach CAPS LOCK Car apps Catch-up saccades Central routes to persuasion Chain-Links Change blindness Classmates.com Cluster analysis Cognitive misers Common fate Conditioned response Conditioned stimuli Cone-shaped cells Conformity Context dependent Conversion flows Cortex Counterarguing Cyber-bullying D Decay Deindividuation Demonstrative reliability Dendrites Dependency Detractors Developmental stages e-sports scholarship tendencies and existential foci Diameter Depth perception atmospheric perspective interposition light source vectors linear perspective motion parallax relative size texture gradients Disposition matching Dispositions 3D Monster Maze 3D programming E Ecological validity Effortful processes Elaborative encoding email attention channels camouflage Gmail offers overview spam End User License Agreement Eriksonian questions Escalating commitment Classmates.com conversion flow e-sports scholarship Extinction Extinguish F Facebook Face-to-face Factor analysis Fast-moving objects Fear of missing out (FOMO) Fixed intervals Fluid motion perception Foodnetwork.com Fovea Foveal acuity Free F-shaped pattern Functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) Funology G Gamification Gangnam Style Gaze dwell Gestalt perception digital media Facebook Microsoft Office 2007 music play-along games TV remote controls Type error Type error web sites windshield-wiper controls Gmail Good To Go! Google Google Now Google search Group polarization Guitar Hero H Habituation Hierarchical networks Hierarchy of needs Hobbit Horizontal carousel Hub nodes I Iconic memory Immediacy Influentials Innovation Internal validity Interposition Inventory J Journalism K Elaborative encoding association priming imagery processing locus processing phonemic/auditory processing procedural processing repetition reworking self-processing semantic processing structural/visual processing L Lattice networks bridges small world connections Light source vectors Linear perspective LinkedIn Links Long-term memory Lost letter technique M Maslow’s hierarchy Massive multiplayer games Meatball Memetic engineering Memetic fitness Memetic science Memory architecture context dependent iconic long-term memory overview recalling short-term memory spreading activation transactive working MemoryLane.com Metapatterning Microsoft Edge Microsoft Office Microsoft Office 2007 download dialog box file menu redesigned download dialog box Microsoft Office 2010 MLB.com Monocular depth cues Monotasking with rapid alternation Monster.com Motion parallax Movies consist of 10 dots iconic memory Netflix recall shutter Star Wars Multitasking N Navigation app Needs Negative review Neglecting or postponing activities Netflix Net Promoter Score (NPS) calculation detractors passives promoters scoring method trademark-holders Network effect Networks Network science Neurons The New York Times Nike Nodes O Oldie but a goodie effect Omega strategy One-sided Online comments P, Q Pardus game Passive goggles 3D feature polarized lenses Passives Password crack defined Good To Go! long Pavlovian association Peripheral retina Peripheral routes to persuasion Peripheral vision Personality domains Personality matching Personality scores Persuasion central routes peripheral routes Pew Research Center Phonological loop Polarization Pop-up ad Predisposition Prepotency Primary punishers Primary reinforcers Promoters Psychographic segmentation Psychological process R Radius Recall Receptivity Recognize Regression/Baysian modeling Relative size Restaurant Yelp Retinae Retinal disparity Retrieval element optimization (REO) Retweets Rewarding content Rock Band Rod-shaped cells S Saccades Scale-free networks Schedules of reinforcement Search engine optimization (SEO) Secondary punishers Secondary reinforcer Second screening Self-actualization Self-driving cars Self-processing Short-term memory Shutter Signal detection theory basic principle Google overview social media Signals SixDegrees.com Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Six degrees of recommendation Six degrees of separation Sketchpad Skype in-call window Slack app Small world problem Smartphone Social capital Social graph Social influence theory Social media Social network Spam Spontaneous recovery of an extinguished response Spreading activation Star Wars Stereopsis Stereoscopes The strength of weak ties Strogatz, S Strong links Strong signals Structuredness Successive motion perception Switching costs Synapses T Tales of Alethrion Task-negative network Task-positive network TED talks Texture gradients Theory of attribution Three peers Threshold nodes (low) Tip of the tongue T-Mobile Tolerance Top-2 Box score Transactive memory TV advertisements TV remote control Twitter Two-sided two-step flow theory U The Ultimate Question Unconditioned response Unconditioned stimuli Unemployment site Unencoded University of Washington Master of Communications in Digital Media (MCDM) program University of Washington’s Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) program U.S House of Representatives U.S National Transportation Safety Board U.S presidential election of 2016 V Variable-interval reinforcement schedule Variable-ratio reinforcement schedule Video calling Video games 3D Monster Maze Hobbit motion perception Virtual reality headset Visual vector analysis Volkswagen W, X Washington State unemployment statistics site F-shape home page re-design unemployment site Watts, D Web sites Wedding curve WhatsApp Windows Windows 10 Windows Messenger Windshields Windshield-wiper controls Wired magazine Withdrawal Working memory Amazon’s interface CAPS LOCK in-car apps displacement challenges example MLB.com overview sketchpad TED talks TV ads Y, Z Yahoo! Yelp ...David C Evans Bottlenecks Aligning UX Design with User Psychology David C Evans Kenmore, Washington, USA Any source code or other... determines whether we engage with them and recommend them to others—or not Who are we? We are your customers, your users, and your audience You are entrepreneurs, designers, developers, publishers,... proliferate Just as chemistry is the science behind good cooking, psychology is the science behind good design If the bottlenecked user is our fundamental assertion, then our fundamental assumption