The Psychologist’s View of UX Designis a useful article from Dr. Susan Weinschenk, author of Neuro Web Design: What makes them click?. It really applies to all design, not just UX. Most of it is pretty obvious, actually, but much of it gets forgotten.
I came across it on Johnny Holland who summarize it well:
- People Don’t Want to Work: they will do the least amount of work possible to get a task done;
- People Have Limitations: they can only look at so much information or read so much text on a screen without losing interest;
- People Make Mistakes: Assume people will make mistakes. Anticipate what they will be and try to prevent them;
- Human Memory Is Complicated: People reconstruct memories, which means they are always changing;
- People are Social: they will always try to use technology to be social. This has been true for thousands of years;
- Attention: Grabbing and holding onto attention, and not distracting someone when they are paying attention to something, are key concerns;
- People Crave Information: Learning is dopaminergic—we can’t help but want more information;
- Unconscious Processing: Most mental processing occurs unconsciously;
- People Create Mental Models: People always have a mental model in place about a certain object or task (paying my bills, reading a book, using a remote control);
- Use Visual Systems to help people.
The book is on Amazon here: book (Amazon affiliate link if you want to give me a kickback - non-affiliate link here). It gets mixed reviews, so your mileage may vary, but it may be a useful addition to your library if you need some arguments to persuade clients or colleagues of the value of what you are doing.