This week's lecture was taken by Ben Craven, one of our first-year tutors, and the focus was on some of the psychological elements that need to be considered within design. Ben started by saying that a good designer should only expect someone to do an effortless task, the user shouldn’t need to think too much about how to use the product as the design should make it thoughtless. I think that everyone can agree with that, and I think it is one of the most important principles of design especially now when most products are an improvement on something that already exists.
Leading on from this Ben demonstrated that there are some things we, as humans, do, but we just don’t know how we do it. A similar image to the one seen above was flashed briefly on the screen and we all instantly knew there were 5 dots, without the time to count. This was demonstrated with several different examples all with the same success until the number of items surpassed 7. Once passed 7 our subconscious ability to ‘just know’ was gone. The explanation is that the brain can only really handle 7 things at once, hence ‘the magic number 7±2’.
From a design perspective, this means you need to make sure your designs don’t cross that magic 7 marker and if you can’t avoid having more than 7 elements then you need to employ techniques to make it easier for the brain to process. I think this creates an interesting design tool, as you could utilise it oppositely and create confusion if, for example, you wanted to create a poster or piece of art that you would continually notice things you hadn’t seen before.
Another of the points Ben made was about visual organisation. Your brain will try to impart a visual organisation to things, so it is key to make sure that your designs are already organised in a way that is effortless to interpret, so the brain doesn’t do it in a way you don’t want.
It was really interesting to look on a detailed level at why some things look so poorly designed, and it caused me to see that products that are designed well have employed this rule. This was one of the most interesting lectures and discussions I have had, and since then I have been thinking and applying it to designs. I think that psychology has such an important role in design and its something I will definitely utilise in future projects.
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