Cognitive Psychology & IA : From Theory to Practice

August 22, 2003

Ever wonder where a best practice for designing navigation or structuring content for the web comes from? Many things like breadcrumb navigation, colors, etc., that we in the user experience field take for granted have their origins in cognitive psychology.

The challenge in developing usable and compelling user experiences is in understanding how each target user thinks about your product online. Ultimately this translates into a system that hopefully is intuitive enough to address that individual user needs. When you add in the different needs of these same users from an international perspective where language and cultural differences can get in the way, there is a need to customize the experience along multiple dimensions.

This recent article on Boxes and Arrows delves into the depths of how people think and the translation of this understanding into common best practices for global and country specific user experience design.