Siobahn Hotaling is a Senior UX Designer for GlobalPayments, responsible for overseeing user experience in the organization’sMerchant Portal. User Experience (UX) designrequires the ability to step into the world of the user and try to predict their motivations, behaviors, and emotions as they interact with a product.
To that end, it is helpful for UX specialists to have abackground in psychology. Siobahn Hotaling received her Master’s degree in Psychology from Harvard, and utilizesa great deal of the knowledge she obtained there in her UX role.
For example, Siobahn often reflects on the psychologicalphenomenon of cognitive load in designing her applications. Cognitive load is the amount of brainpowerthat is required to comprehend something. If a screen is filled with lots of text orinteractive features, the user needs to use a lot of their brainpower, creatingcognitive overload.
One of the principles Siobahn Hotaling uses in her designwork is to keep interfaces as minimal as possible, to ensure that the user canabsorb and interact with it without feeling overwhelmed. This means limiting the amount of text on apage, or giving a user only one or two buttons to interact with. Cognitive overload is one of the main reasons people have negative responses to an interface and therefore should be avoided if possible.
