Behavioral Science or UX Psychology?

The field of behavioral science is increasingly gaining awareness in experience design. With an economic background, the focus of this field is to better understand the (ir)rationality of people in an economic setting (e.g. online shop, sales negotiations). For a long time, it was assumed that people act in a logical way, that optimizes their own benefits. Now we know that this is not the case, people behave anything else but logically.

UX Psychology takes a broader view. It introduces all relevant aspects of being human into the design for experience. The most relevant psychological disciplines that come to be applied in UX work are cognitive-, behavioral-, social- and neuropsychology. These encompass vast empirical knowledge about human perception, cognition, performance and failure, attention, memory, emotion, subjective experiences, motivation, and individual or group behaviors. It thereby includes conscious and subconscious phenomena.

The implications of cognitive biases (focused on by behavioral science) as well as the understanding of context-dependent behavior variability are also highly relevant for UX Psychologists.

UX Psychology is therefore a recognized asset in numerous contexts for numerous systems and problem settings, such as e.g.:

• e-commerce (e.g. online shops, b2b solutions)
• (Digital) system and service design (e.g. mobile phone plans, insurance handling)
• Work productivity (e.g. plant dashboards)
• Change and transformation processes in organizations (e.g. UX maturity strategies)
• Organizational processes (e.g. digital onboarding)
• Safety critical areas (e.g. heavy industries, medicine, air traffic management)