Applying Cognitive Psychology to User Interfaces

This paper explores some key aspects of cognitive psychology that may be mapped onto user interfaces. Major focus in existing user interface guidelines is on consistency, simplicity, feedback, system messages, display issues, navigation, colors, graphics, visibility and error prevention [8, 9, 10]. These guidelines are effective indesigning user interfaces. However, these guidelines do not handle the issues that may arise due to the innate structure of human brain and human limitations. For example, where to place graphics on the screen so that user can easily process them and what kind of background should be given on the screen according to the limitation of human motor system. In this paper we have collected some available guidelines from the area of cognitive psychology [1, 5, 7]. In addition, we have extracted few guidelines from theories and studies of cognitive psychology [3, 11] which may be mapped to user interfaces.