Answer by Paul King, Computational Neuroscientist, Software Entrepreneur, on Quora,
The best advice from neuroscience to UI/UX designers is to think of everything from the perspective of dynamic attention and reinforcement feedback.
While we appear to take in the whole visual field as a single complete experience, neuroscience and cognitive science shows that it doesn't work that way. What we actually process is a narrow region that moves around, and these regions are processed in sequence through visual exploration. So thinking about this narrow window of attention, how it moves, and how the user will interpret and organize information sequentially can help to design more intuitive and effective UIs.
On the interaction side, all skills are honed via reinforcement feedback. That includes microskills such as clicking a button or link, interacting with a UI element, or finding a path through an interactive application. The more visual feedback and positive reinforcement that is provided along the way, the more automatically the brain will learn motor interaction patterns that support automatic interface operation skills.
Incidentally, color is a fairly superficial feature from the brain's perspective. It is fundamental to visual region categorization but is not used for microscale visual parsing. As a result, for example, the flat UIs of the new iphone with its saturated colors are actually more effort to parse visually because they lack luminance contrast. On the other hand, the reduced contrast does allow panes to be treated as layered sheets with less visual interference.
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