User experience design is often relegated to the cosmetic, and while developing an aesthetically pleasing interface in which users will wish to interact is certainly within the demesne of user experience design, it is not by any means the full extent of what a user experience designer does, which falls into the realm of psychology (specifically the cognitive and behavioral branches).
It doesn't surprise me that non-practitioners fail to consider this, but it does surprise me that many practitioners do not seem to consider it, or to give it adequate attention. It's entirely possible to develop a successful interaction without intimate knowledge of the basic principles, merely by doing things that seem to work without really understanding the reasons. But pausing to consider the basic principles - and better yet study them intently with an eye toward their application - enables a designer to make better choices, and to understand the reasons that one tactic is more likely to succeed than another.
With that in mind, consider the following outline of some of the areas in which understanding the principles of psychology can improve a designer's skills. It is by no means comprehensive nor exhaustive, but a good starting point for anyone who's not considered the way in which design derives from psychology.
Perception
Studies of perception seek to determine how people become aware of specific things. In a basic sense, it means filtering through all of the sensory information that bombards a person in every waking moment to notice and give attention to what is most important. Much of this happens unconsciously, and the mechanisms by which an individual becomes aware and gives attention to only a few specific things are learned or conditioned abilities that are only partially selective.
Perception is critical to design because you must understand how people notice things in order to design an interface that enables a user to accomplish a task easily. If the user doesn't perceive some element of a interface or doesn't give it adequate attention, he will be unable to interact with it in order to accomplish a task. Knowledge of the principles of perception can help a designer ensure that users "see" what is important.
Identification
Identification follows perception, in that merely noticing something is not sufficient to provoke an individual into taking an action. They must identify it, realize what it is and what it does, in order to know what to do with it. This may happen by virtue of recognition (matching something new to a memory of something similar) or intuition (figuring out what something is or does by a process of reason).
The importance of identification to design is clear: if a user is unable to identify the function of an element, they will be unable to interact with it, so the designer must leverage visual cues that enable the user to realize at a glance how they may interact. In essence, you cannot claim that your design is "intuitive" if you do not fully understand what "intuition" means or how it operates.
Assessment
Once a person can interact with something, they will then assess whether they should want to interact with it. The first step in doing so is a process of assessment, in which an individual not only recognizes that something can be acted upon, but that there is some consequence to acting upon it - that is, they should expect that something is going to happen as a result of taking action.
When a user remarks that he noticed something in a layout but didn't think that it would "do anything" if he interacted with it, then the designer has failed to provide sufficient visual cues to support the users' process of assessment. The net result is failure, no better than if the user hadn't seen the element at all. Understanding the principles of assessment can help to avoid such problems.
Motivation
Motivation considers a person's desire to take a given action. That is, once he has noticed something and recognized that something can be accomplished by interacting with it, he must then affirm that the consequences of taking the interaction deliver a benefit that is worth the effort to interact. In essence, a person must be motivated to do something, or they will opt not to do it.
The core of design is in motivating users to behave in certain ways, and to interact with our designs (which is, in effect, to interact with our companies) in a way that will bring about a mutual benefit. This is also the area in which many designs fail terribly: it is clear to the user what they must do when they encounter an interface, but they simply do not want to do it, and so they choose not to. A better understanding of motivation is essential to designing an interface that accomplishes its goals.
Encouragement
Encouragement is slightly different to motivation: whereas motivation involves giving a person incentive to begin a task, encouragement helps them to maintain the momentum to see it through to the end. Meanwhile discouragement, which is the evil twin of encouragement, saps a user's motivation and leads them to abandon a task without completing it, as the difficulty the encounter after the initial decision to act has been made leads them to question whether the factors that caused them to be motivated still hold true.
Failure to provide encouragement is another major area in which many designers fail: the task-flows they design provide a path to success that becomes increasingly difficult with each step, such that users quit the journey, abandon the shopping cart, and leave the site. Understanding the factors that maintain encouragement and avoid discouragement is necessary to keeping the user on task until the task is done.
Evaluation
Evaluation occurs after a task is completed, at which time the individual reconsiders whether the effort they undertook is worth the benefit they ultimately received. If the evaluation is positive, they will be more inclined to be motivated and sustain motivation when they encounter a need or opportunity to perform the same task in the future.
This is a sorely neglected area of user experience design, and customer experience in general: once the company has made the first sale, they count on the customer to return to purchase again, neglecting to consider that if the evaluation is negative, the customer will be less likely rather than more to continue doing business with them. Much of evaluation depends on the functional consequences, but design can enhance or detract from the positive sentiment of a customer, making the critical difference between whether they are a one-time customer or become a loyal and regular patron.
Much More to Be Said
While this "quick" overview has merely skimmed the surface of the way in which experience design can be more effective if it is based on the principles of psychology, I hope it is at least sufficient to drive home the point that the two are not only related, but one and the same. There's a great deal more to be learned, and learning it has a great deal of benefit to the user experience designer.
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