Design psychology—6 UX design principles every creative should know

You’ve probably heard of color psychology—how different hues can evoke certain emotions—but design psychology takes this concept to a whole new level.

Design psychology unlocks the secret to how we naturally interact with visuals, shaping intuitive and impactful experiences. By tapping into the design principles that influence human behavior, you can craft user experiences that don’t just look good but inspire action and emotion.

And the best part? You don’t need a psychology degree to master it!

In this article, we’ll explore six design principles UX designers can use to captivate, engage, and delight their audience. Let’s get started!

Design psychology aims to understand the psychological patterns that drive decision-making and emotional responses. Specifically, it considers how we resonate with certain types of navigational flows, visuals, aesthetics, and cognitive loads. 

Through this understanding, UX designers can inform and enhance designs to create websites, apps, and SaaS products that visually and functionally connect with customers. 

When UX designers understand the psychological principles that govern human behavior and emotions, they can apply these insights to drive two key benefits: superior product development and customer satisfaction.

Design principles can be leveraged to proactively develop a product that’s geared towards customers — what captivates them, holds their attention, and provides them value. This enables you to enter the market with a product that’s immediately capable of resonating with your target audience. Plus, it helps you avoid implementing common design faux pas. 

The more you understand human psychological preferences, the more effectively you can cater to people’s needs in a way that feels authentic. 

For example, simplicity, intuitiveness, and accessibility are all design features that connect with customers on a psychological level. Why? Because they make engagement effortless, accelerating the value they get from interactions. In turn, customers experience greater satisfaction.

Want to your designs to make an impact? Here are six principles of design psychology that you can start implementing today.

Your website or app’s design needs to do more than visually appeal to your audience. It needs to captivate and engage them enough to maintain their attention effortlessly, with minimal distractions and obstacles. 

Here are some strategies to consider:

Simplicity

Complex, convoluted designs are overwhelming and frustrating. Worst case scenario, they trigger the well-known attention span killer — cognitive overload — which occurs when your brain is trying to process too much information at once. So, it’s essential that your interface is clean, organized, and free of unnecessary elements.

Functionality

An engaging design empowers users to effortlessly achieve their goals, whether that be searching for information on your website or using your product to complete a task. So, your design needs to serve its purpose by including and clearly signposting the features, tools, and info that users will need to use your application to its full potential. 

Asana’s work management platform, for example, has a simple drag-and-drop design and clean, intuitive interface to enhance functionality.

Motivation

Motivation is the driving force of engagement. Enriching your app with enjoyable, interactive elements that effortlessly escort users toward their goals can prevent boredom and churn. 

For example, personalization attracts users toward the content and features they’re interested in, accelerating value. There are a variety of SaaS examples that you could use to help you collect relevant customer data, such as CRM systems and data analytics platforms.

Other motivational design elements include:

Visual salience describes a perceptual quality in visuals that makes them stand out and grab our attention. You can use visual elements, such as color, size, contrast, and positioning to create a clear visual hierarchy. 

In other words, you can strategically guide the user’s attention toward the information you want them to engage with.

Color and contrast: Color and contrast are often used in conjunction to highlight key information, such as call-to-actions. In the example below, you can see how the website uses green buttons and capital letters to create a contrast between the white space and black, lowercase text, drawing the eye toward the CTA. Other examples include using type contrast, such as bold, italics, and font variances.

Size: Larger elements stand out from smaller elements, creating a visual hierarchy. Headings tend to be in larger font sizes, followed by sub-headings and then the bulk of the content. This enforces visual salience, guiding attention and streamlining experiences.

Positioning: By placing the most important elements in prominent positions — such as at the top, center, or “green zones” of the screen — you guide the eye toward these elements first. 

Cognitive harmony, or cognitive consistency, describes a psychological phenomenon in which humans subconsciously favor familiar and consistent processes and aesthetics. In UX, this involves developing a design in which all of the elements of your website or product look or behave in a similar way or follow a familiar pattern.

There are two main types of consistency that drive cognitive harmony: visual and functional.

Visual consistency

Inconsistent visual elements, such as proportions, fonts, colors, and arrangements, create a chaotic and confusing UX. Visual consistency harmonizes these elements, making it easier for users to grow familiar with and use your application. 

Take color, for example. Using too many loud, contrasting colors makes your design product look messy and overwhelming. Sticking to a color palette of complementary colors balances balance and harmony. Envato has visual collections for every color to help you achieve visual consistency.

Functional consistency

Elements of your product should function the same to reduce friction and confusion. Borrow familiar mobile and user interface patterns and utilize them throughout your design to enhance predictability and usability. 

Complex designs complicate the decision-making process, whereas clean, simple ones reduce cognitive load and streamline decision-making. Remember, you want users to recognize and enact the value of your offering as quickly and smoothly as possible. So, prioritize smooth, user-friendly navigation and functionality to advance success. 

Here are some top tips for decision simplification: 

Cut unnecessary clutter: Remove design elements that aren’t directly relevant to minimize complexity and improve clarity.

Clearly signpost options: Use bold, capitalization, colors, or fonts to spotlight specific actions and options to make it easier for users to make quick decisions. 

Create visual hierarchy: Position important elements in the center or top of the screen to guide users towards decisions.

Use filtering and sorting: Implement filtering and sorting options to enable users to remove unwanted elements and information from their experience.

Designing to elicit positive emotions in users—and, as a result, foster emotional connections—is a design principle that recognizes the power of subconscious emotional responses. Because, when we engage with digital products, the emotional response they evoke can make us fall in love with them, or completely reject them.

So, how do you elicit positive emotions like excitement, satisfaction, joy, and inspiration?

In psychology, contextual priming refers to a phenomenon in which a person’s perception, attention, and behavior are influenced by context. Designers use priming to create contextual cues that speed up information processing, influence user behavior, and enhance the relevancy of the experience. 

Let’s say you’re selling events management software. Once corporate customers arrive at your website via your B2B SEO strategy, you have just a couple of seconds to make an impression. Contextual clues, such as images of professionals and corporate events, let B2B customers immediately infer that your business offers what they seek. 

This will hold their attention and influence them to continue down your journey. EventsAir does this cleverly on their websites, using images that offer the right contextual clues. 

Arrows, buttons, and other types of symbols can also be used to prime users into taking an action.

Whether customers have a positive or negative user experience is deeply rooted in psychology. Your product’s design can have a profound psychological impact, which, when armed with the design principles you’ve discovered in this article, can be leveraged to positively influence customer perceptions, interactions, and sentiments. 

Which design principles should you implement? The six principles we discussed above are all core to design psychology. So, they’re a great place to start.