Neuroscience applied to experience design
Same
Brain
Technology changes exponentially. The human brain does not. Learn the 38 laws, heuristics and biases of UX that turn that gap into a tool.
Only by knowing the neural mechanisms can we build experiences that respect and amplify what makes each user singular, even under fast technological change.
The technology you build with
changes generation every few years
The brain of the person using it
practically unchanged for 300,000 years
The top one runs; the bottom one takes minutes to cover what the top one covers in seconds. The real difference is larger than the screen can show, and you are designing for both at once.
The argument
The tool changes every week.
The person using it does not.
UX grew out of a method borrowed from science: observe behavior, form a hypothesis, prototype, test, adjust. Everything most valuable in the profession comes from there.
The last few decades brought interface kits, component libraries, low-code and now models that generate a whole screen in seconds. Along with them came the rush to fill roles, and short courses organized around checklists. We gained speed — and drifted away from the investigative root that gave decisions their ground.
Meanwhile the person on the other side of the screen still has the same apparatus of attention, memory and emotion as thousands of years ago. It is the one element of the project that never ships an update.
The apparatus is the same; the person is not. She is somewhere, in some year, with a history behind her and an account that runs thin in some months more than others — and that changes what the same apparatus gives back. Learning the mechanism is not enough. You still have to ask who it was measured on.
None of this is against tooling. What I want is to recover knowledge about the person, so that “it looks better this way” can become “it works this way, for this reason, and here is how to measure it”.
The engine
You design against these four limits
They are not user preference and they are not a market trend: they are properties of the apparatus the person on the other side perceives, decides and remembers with.
~4
things at a time. That is what working memory holds while someone fills in your form.
30%
of the cortex is visual territory. And the energy budget only lets fewer than 1% of cortical neurons be active at once.
400 ms
is where response becomes waiting. Below it the action feels like the person’s; above it, it feels like waiting on the machine.
~70%
of a meaningless list is gone in 24 h. Ebbinghaus measured it on himself, with syllables; material with meaning holds up better, and still fades.
All these numbers have a limit, and the most important one is who they were measured on. It is written here. Where the evidence stops →