1. The UI Designer's Dilemma

"Good question, because you are asking, you said human nature and you said UI, and where should I begin? Between the two, what should I prioritize is the question. Here is my take on that. A user interface designer who understands the human information processing designs better. Otherwise they are just visual designers who just throw around blocks of information here and there. It is just not a very directed thought process."

2. Human Information Processing in UI Design

"For example, let us say, I am just giving an example which happened many years ago. There is a search box, and next to the search box, there is a way to, let us say, organize by department. You would have seen that in Amazon, right? You might ask a question, okay, I already have a search. I can go ahead and say, hey, show me the engineering psychology book. Why should I go and select books and then type engineering psychology? Now, if you understand the human nature, you would be able to answer that question much more scientifically, rather than fumbling and saying, because I felt so, because that is easy, because it pops. These are all stupid answers that we give."

3. The Concept of Findability

"So instead, you have to say, findability is a way of, it is a pattern to seek information. And search is a type of findability. So you are finding something by asking for something. Now, when you are asking for a book, you have to specifically say a book, otherwise, it is going to search across 10,000 items, probably Amazon is 10, 100,000 items, right? But when you say books, then it is going to search only in probably, you know, a very small database. Why this is important is the speed with which it brings back accurate information."

4. Building Trust Through Design

"If you really look at human nature, we build trust based on these little, little, little things. When I search for engineering psychology, and when engineering psychology book comes as the first search results, what do I say, Amazon is awesome, right? But let us say I search for engineering psychology, and it throws me all sort of crap. And the book is in the in the 10th page, what do I think of Amazon? I think Amazon is bullshit, right? So that is what human nature understanding does to you, you will say, I'm going to use findability to give accurate information in such a way that I'm going to build trust for the human being."

5. Human Perception of Time and Certainty

"And the speed at which it is because you might think that, oh, I got the results in what three seconds, but anything more than two seconds feels like waiting for eternity. This is also human. So look at people who are waiting for trains, the train would be in one minute. But in that one minute, that guy would have seen his watch 700 times. But the minute you write one minute, he would stop and just not see anything because certainty is very important. Speed is very important. You're not going to catch anything in that one minute. But it's the uncertainty that bothers us. These are all things that comes from understanding human nature."

6. The Struggle of UI Designers

"And if you don't get it, you don't make better decisions in the UI. And this is where I see a lot of user interface designers struggling to put things on the UI. They know how to style things. They know how to add drop shadows. They know how to make, you know, corner radius smoother and smoother and smoother. But for what? Why are you doing? What are you doing? How are you doing? This is very important. And that's something which 90% of UI designers fail. If I ask them to explain why are you doing this, there is no answer... but instead if you can give a very detailed explanation of this is what the human brain wants... these are the savings that I am bringing out of this... awesome that's what we need those are the people who will move up the ladder."