Sometimes I forget that not everyone sees technology and design the way that I do. I forget that not everyone has been raised around a certain standard of performance and usability (not to say that some standards are better then others - just to say that some standards differ in very fundamental ways.)

So this makes me a bit biased in the way I design user interfaces and plan the workings of a site or system. But I realized today that in this instance, following the crowd and adhering to the norm isn’t such a bad thing after all.

I mean, if ui creators didn’t stick to a certain way of doing things, we wouldn’t have a way of recognizing how these interfaces worked in the first place.
Pretty circular logic isn’t it?

One of the reasons I’ve always been so fascinated by ui design and development is that little bit of psychology behind it - ok, there’s a lot of psychology behind it. And when you really delve into it you start to get a few more clues as to the fundamentals of human nature.

We are really a cumulation of how we interact with other elements in our world. Our ancestors lived because they learned that fire burned and water drowned, that an arrow indicated a direction and that the colour red usually meant caution. These and many others have been almost encoded into our brains and ui design takes full advantage of these evolutionary quirks of ours.

The next time you’re using a program or manipulating an object with a function, think about how that function is indicated. What portions of it is instinctual in nature and what portion is a learned reaction?

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