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Design in almost every field needs careful consideration of human behavior in order to best fit to human needs. Likewise in the digital world design needs careful consideration of human psychology and behavior. Cognitive psychology forms a big part in the study of user experience design. It helps to know how the human mind works (perception, memory & learning) in order to design interfaces that do not hamper the natural human processes and instead help in making the digital interactions as easy as possible.
It is imperative to any digital interface to apply design principals and best practices based on usability research. As such QlikView applications also need careful design consideration for them to be seamless or else small usability issues can form big hurdles.
Take for instance the information icon shown below.
What would you gather from this icon? I would think that the icon is a button to get more information and is inactive because of its grey color and very little contrast between the background and text. In most scenarios something that is inactive or non-clickable is shown to be greyed out. But in reality, this icon is active and clickable. So there is a break in the mental model due to an action that is opposite of what the user expects. These are small things to consider but they make a huge impact on the user experience.
The document User-Experience-Guidelines for QlikView shows many such examples, guidelines and best practices to be considered with respect to usability based on principles from cognitive psychology, all of which can be applied to the design of QlikView applications.
In the QlikView world, showing data the right way and making the application usable is important but enhancing the whole experience is the key to a great product. In the words of usability expert Don Norman “It is not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and, yes, beauty to people’s lives”.