UX for Beginners

Chapter 14. Conscious vs Subconscious Experience

In real life, your mind only puts attention on a small amount of the world around you. Otherwise you would be overwhelmed. This lesson is a basic idea with huge consequences.

Conscious Experience

You might hear UXers discussing something called “delight.” Basically it is the art of designing something that makes a user say “wow!”

One thing must be true to create delight: the user must be aware of it, consciously. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning psychologist, says our conscious mind is like “a supporting character who believes herself to be the lead actor and often has little idea of what’s going on.”

Sounds like Kanye West with the Kardashians, no?

Your conscious experience may feel like the whole experience, but it is actually just a small part. However, it’s still significant. It is what makes people share, like, comment, download, and register. YouTube videos often explicitly tell you to subscribe at the end, because you may not consciously think of doing it otherwise.

Subconscious Experience

Subconscious experience seems like it “just is.” It’s how we decide what we trust, what we believe, and what is easy.

But there is never a moment when you “decided” to trust a website or an app. It just happened. And a user will only notice that your form design is easy if they expected it to be harder. Otherwise they might not even mention it. ...