Target IMPACT: Understand user psychology

In today’s attention-centred economy, it is more important than ever to engage your users, ensuring your audience can easily access your digital products and services. But with so many elements of a user’s experience to measure, it can be hard to know where to start, or what matters for delivering impact and customer value.

In this course you’ll uncover the psychological factors that lead people to buy, share and enjoy digital experiences. You’ll come away knowing which aspects of an experience you should be optimising and measuring, for impact.

If your company develops, produces, markets or offers any digital products or services (websites, apps, games, video, audio, digital signage, connected retail, immersive experiences), and it’s a part of your job to support their success, this evening course is ideal for you.

While gut feeling, design innovation and years of experience might inform you to make the right choices – this course will ensure you understand how to engage your users, through an understanding of user psychology and how this relates to user experience practice.

Drawing on our 25 years of research we will work with you to build your understanding of what is psychologically impactful for users. You’ll come away with a robust and design and evaluation canvas, which you can adapt to your company’s needs, and which you can use to work with your designers to optimise existing or create compelling new digital user experiences. This approach and our design tool have been used by some of the UK’s leading creative and technology companies. The method has been published by Springer and promoted at the Human Computer Interaction International Conference in 2022.

Through the course our expert team will guide you through key components psychological theory and principles in user experience, such as:

• The impact of digital technologies on the human attention system, on habit building and processing emotion

• Prioritising human values within the design process

• The benefits and costs of technology design to the user from a psychology perspective

• UX frameworks for uncovering problems, successes and for prioritising which elements of an experience to measure

• The implications of psychology and UX for designing and compelling digital propositions

• Examples of good and bad practice in UX

Why study this course?

• Learn how to focus, in-depth, on your users

• Bring psychological insights and theory and frameworks to your work

• Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your design choices using our IMPACT framework

• Resolve creative blocks and take a user-centred systematic approach to ideation

• Learn from our experienced course hosts and your fellow course attendees

• Take part in an interactive remote or in-person session, with plenty of time to ask questions, relate the course to your area of work and get to know your fellow attendees.

• We purposely keep this course small in size to make sure you get time with the hosts and your cohort

• This course offers approx. 50% theory via a lecture and 50% practical via an interactive workshop session where you will be working together with the rest of your cohort.

Please note that whilst you don’t need a product/service/experience to relate this course to, it can help when we come to the ideation session to have an example in mind. If you’re not personally working on a particular product/service or experience, we provide you with use cases and examples so you can practice using the models and frameworks we present.

The format, in-person:

We keep these sessions fairly small in size . We know that previous attendees have enjoyed our courses because they get the chance to ask us questions, hear real-world examples and meet other attendees. We tend to keep things informal and aim to make this course personally relevant to you. This in-person session will be hosted at Goldsmiths University of London.

The course structure:

This is a 4-hour session designed to be fast paced and interactive. You will gain the skills you need to use our IMPACT framework and gain understanding of the core psychological theory underpinning it. Please note this is not a taster session.

1. Lecture of approximately 1 hour, followed by a Q & A

2. Interactive workshop session . Activities will help you practice and embed the learning. We offer these as small group sessions facilitated by Professor Jonathan Freeman and Leah Kurta, the course hosts.

3. Reading List and resources. To supplement the theory and insights covered in the course we provide a comprehensive reading list to further expand your knowledge. The readings are a mix of key academic texts, industry articles and blogs. We provide you with the course materials, from the templates and frameworks that we reference and use in the activities to the course slides. This means you can refer to the content at any time and use our templates and models in your own work.

Learning outcomes:

• Be able to articulate the six psychological attributes which are important for optimising digital products, services and experiences
• Grounding in core psychological theory supporting impactful design
• Understanding of user experience frameworks and practice
• Be able to ideate and evaluate using human-centred design techniques

Previous attendees who have valued the course greatly include:

• Market Researchers

• Business Analysts

• QA Specialists

• Web Designers

• User Experience Designers / researchers

• Product Designers

• Project Strategists

• Producers (creative, strategic and technical)

• Innovation specialists

About the trainers:

Jonny Freeman: Managing Director of i2 media research limited, Professor of Psychology and Academic Lead for Knowledge Exchange at Goldsmiths University of London, and member of the Department for Culture Media and Sports College of Experts.

Jonny specialises in media psychology, applying academic and commercial lenses to his research focused on understanding consumer behaviour. Jonny is an interdisciplinary expert in Psychology, Design, the Creative Industries, and Immersive Technology. Extensively networked in the collaborative R&D and innovation space, he has an externally funded research track of over 25 years. Jonny applies behavioural science research and insights to help companies optimise their digital products/platforms and services. Over his 20+ years in research and innovation Jonny has led transformational projects for arts and culture, health and wellbeing, financial, transport and retail industries.

Leah Kurta, Innovation Lead, and PhD student in user experience of immersive technology

Leah is a digital consumer psychologist researching users’ experience of digital entertainment. Leah has worked on a range of technology projects for clients such as, Royal Shakespeare Company, Barclays, Punchdrunk, Hitachi, RNIB and LEGO. She applies psychological and design research methods and theory to develop more ethical and optimal technology platforms, products and experiences. Leah’s PhD is focussed on user experience of immersive technologies where she develops user-centred design-thinking tools for creatives and technologists to use during development cycles. Her paper, Targeting IMPACT – a new psychological model of user experience, was published by Springer in 2022.

Previous attendees have said…

“I’m a Product Trial Manager, meaning I test software to see whether it’s working and whether there are any usability issues. I chose the course because of the excellent reputation Goldsmiths has and the wealth of experience i2 media has in applied research. I was looking to build a broad skill set, gain a scientific understanding of why people use the products that they do and understand the psychology of consumer choices. The course content was really interesting, and it was brought to life through case studies and activities. I loved the fact that there was a small group of us and that everyone was from different industries. I found that really beneficial as it helped me see how widely applicable this learning is, to multiple industries and multiple roles. All in all, I came away with a lot more than I anticipated and this course has made me want to try other short courses at Goldsmiths.”

Nima, Product Trial Manager at YouView, course attendant January 2020

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Goldsmiths, University of London, 8 Lewisham Way, London, United Kingdom