100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People - Review

"100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People" is a guide styled book by Dr. Susan Weinschenk.

Weinschenk has a PhD in Psychology and 30+ years of experience as a behavioural psychologist. She specialises in research to better understand and explain what motivates people and their behaviours.

In this book, Weinschenk is specifically writing about psychology around how people use websites and apps. Super cool! She discusses how we assume people perceive things, then reveals how they really perceive things and how to adjust our designs to better suit the users.

I chose to read this book when I first became interested in UX Design. My favourite part about UX is how it considers psychology. Particularly, I'm interested in the psychology behind interaction. I wanted to make sure I wasn't designing just based on visual value. There are so many styles of design, it's so easy to go down rabbit holes of what you might think is important to a website or app. Instead I thought if I informed myself, I could have some general ground rules to go by. This would hopefully ensure the user is supported before focusing on aesthetic or UI. Design is a competitive industry. If I worked on considering how people think, hopefully this is the key to create easy user flows, and lead to conversions.

Published in 2011, a 2nd edition will become available in the Summer of 2020. Modernising the book would be one of the critiques I would have for it so that sorts that out!