February 25, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #496
This newsletter issue was sent out to 191,764 subscribers on Tuesday, February 25, 2025.
Editorial
Matching users’ mental models can be remarkably challenging. The expectations that we, as designers and engineers, are often confronted with surprising insights from usability testing. Some people get confused about cancel, X, and Done buttons. Disabled and read-only states can be confusing and frustrating as they don’t explain why.
In this newsletter, we look at how people think, what cognitive biases are common, and what are some of the helpful laws of UX we can use to better fit user’s mental model and avoid confusion down the road.
If you’re interested in exploring this topic more, join us in our upcoming Smart Interface Design Patterns Training (starts March 7!) where we’ll dive into real-life UX challenges on how to design and manage complex UIs. Get your ticket!
Love getting lost in ebooks? Ready to dive into a conference or online workshop this year? We have a steadily growing Membership family who loves good content, appreciates friendly discounts, and is an active part of our lovely web community — why don’t you join in? Become a Smashing Member until March 7, and you even get a free online conference ticket of your choice.
We absolutely can’t wait to see you again, in-person or online, or somewhere between emails and Slack conversations. So with that, let’s dive deep into good ol’ UX!
— Vitaly
1. The Psychology Of Design
Understanding the psychology behind why users act the way they do is key to improving your user experience. Dan Benoni and Louis-Xavier Lavallee created a wonderful guide to psychology in design that examines more than a hundred cognitive biases and design principles and how they affect a user’s behavior.
To help make better sense of them, the guide divides the biases and principles into four categories. They correspond to the natural decision cycle that users follow, even if not consciously, every time they interact with a product. From filtering the information to taking action and remembering what’s most important, the site not only explains the underlying principles in each of these steps but also highlights real-world examples of how products leverage them. (cm)
2. Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet
Cognitive biases can be unfair, self-serving, and sometimes counter-productive. However, they are the only tools we have to process the world around us and prevent us from drowning in information overload. So, as harmful as they can be, cognitive biases can also be useful tools.
To help us make sense of cognitive biases, how they are useful, and the trade-offs they bring along, Buster Benson tackled the mammoth task and boiled down Wikipedia’s massive list of biases into an organized, easy-to-reference cheat sheet. From the Availability Heuristic to the Halo Effect, from the Illusion of Control to the Peak-End Rule, it groups the different kinds of biases by the general mental problem they are trying to address. One for the bookmarks. (cm)
3. Behavioral Design System
Behavioral science helps us take the guesswork out of our design decisions and backs them up with scientific findings about how people act and react. If you plan to reference behavioral science in your design work, the Coglode Behavioral Design System is for you. It’s a fantastic tool to help you turn hunches into more objective, evidence-based decisions.
At the heart of the Figma library is a suite of over 50 “nugget badges.” Each nugget badge distills a behavioral science concept down into just a few words or, if you prefer, into an image you’ll easily recognize once you’ve become familiar with the concepts. To aid memory, the nuggets are color-coded by use, e.g., branding, product development, pricing, or conversion, and they link back to the Coglode Cookbook where you can find more data and takeaways on each concept. (cm)
4. Laws Of UX
Fitt’s Law, Miller’s Law, the Serial Position Effect. Do you know what’s behind these names? If not (or in case you need a little refresher), Laws Of UX will shed more light on their meaning.
Created by Jon Yablonski, this lovely website explains 30 psychological key principles that designers can consider to create more intuitive human-centered products and experiences. Highlighting takeaways, origin, examples, and further reading resources for each principle — this is a resource worth keeping close to. (cm)
5. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Deep Dive on Accessibility Testing Dev
with Manuel Matuzović. Feb 26 – March 13 - Building Modern HTML Emails dev
with Rémi Parmentier. Mar 3–11 - Figma Workflow Masterclass design
with Christina Vallaure. Mar 4–12 - Smart Interface Design Patterns — UX Training UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Mar 7 – Apr 7 - Design System Planning and Process workflow
with Nathan Curtis. Mar 20–28 - Cognitive Biases 101: How They Impact Users, Research, and Teams free
with Stéphanie Walter. Apr 10 - Theming Design Systems workflow
with Samantha Gordashko. Apr 8–23 - The Secrets of Web Performance dev
with Ryan Townsend. May 7–21 - User Metrics & Design KPIs ux
with Vitaly Friedman. Video course + live UX training - Jump to all workshops →
6. Deceptive Patterns
Whether it’s a messenger app that tricks users into uploading their address book or a delivery service warning that your food might get cold if you don’t tip, we’ve all encountered deceptive patterns in websites and apps that attempt to make us do things we didn’t mean to. To address the growing issue of manipulative, deceptive, and coercive design patterns in the digital world, Harry Brignull created Deceptive Patterns.
Since its start in 2010, Deceptive Patterns has grown into a resource that not only exposes manipulative patterns but also ties them together with the laws they break and the enforcement actions that have resulted from these laws. This makes it an invaluable resource for anyone who has a hard time arguing against deceptive patterns in front of their employer: Instead of only pointing out what deceptive patterns are, the site enables you to explain the specific laws and the fines that other companies had to pay when they violated them. (cm)
7. Behavioral Science Miro Boards
Behavioral science helps us better understand human behavior and, ultimately, the design problems we try to solve. After all, everything we design, whether it’s interfaces, interactions, or experiences, is designed for human behavior. Elina Halonen started an open-source repository of case studies and learning resources that gets us familiar with behavioral science and the opportunities it offers for organizations.
The repository features examples of how behavioral science can be applied in different domains, tips for demonstrating the value of behavioral science to stakeholders and clients, and ideas for career options and what skills might be useful. The repository lives on a Miro board. If you are unsure of how to use it, Elina wrote a blog post with everything you need to know.
Another great resource that makes strategic behavior design more practical and accessible comes from Robert Meza. On his Big Bias Miro board, he highlights 50 biases, with definitions, explanations of why they matter, examples, and the science to back them up. (cm)
8. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. Have you checked them out already?
- Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
- Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
- Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
- Check out all books →
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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