What happened? It was all planned and laid out. We had a script for the user to follow and the obvious way to use the product was just… sidestepped. Instead the user spent minutes figuring out the correct path to the end of the task and he seemed exhausted by the end of the session.

Have you ever been running between lectures a full day and then by the end of the day you realize that you are just completely drained. Your head has been attacked by a constant flow of information and it is hard for a brain to process this much information.

I love my field of work and when I teach, I teach with a passion and I tell my students to stop me when they need a break, because I can easily talk about this stuff for 10 hour straight. I might forget that they were supposed to have lunch an hour ago. Going back to studies myself last year, I realize now how fried they must have been having me there…

A four hour exam can do the same thing. It can completely drain you because you are constantly thinking, analyzing, building the best sentences and worrying. Thinking is a very exhausting thing to do over time.

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I was lucky enough to get a job interview at Pixar Animation Studios in 2009. I was in for about 7 hours, discussing my showreel and skills with 16 different people. By the end of that day, I just collapsed. Not literally, but my brain was so fried I just went straight to bed.

Humans think all the time. When did thinking become something exhausting. Well, you have to consider cognition. The human brain is a fantastic device. It is the most complex piece of bio on the planet, but it can only take a certain load. First, we need to dive into what cognition actually is and why it is important to us.

When you do a task, you want to finish it in the easiest way possible. If you are asked to move object A to location B, you want to move it in a straight line. You don’t want to go by C or around D on the way. We want the path of least resistance. We’re like electrons in that sense.

I would like to note that these are my observations studying cognition in design and by no means a blueprint to all cognitive processes and the only way to deal with these in the design world. I would love to discuss this with like minded or people who want to learn more about the subject.

Cognition:

Back to the hero of the article, cognition. The term comes from psychology.

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Cognitive processes define how the human brain processes input/information. The processing of this information will lead to thinking, reasoning, learning and remembering. Every act we do when we process information, is cognition. This makes us superior and it is also a weakness we have.

You see, humans are limited. We like to think that we are the kings of the world, but when it comes down to data management, we have limitations.

I would like to talk more about the following and then link them up to why they are relevant for designers:

Cognitive Load

Attention

Learnability

Memorability

Perception

Cognitive Load

As you probably guessed already, cognitive processes can either be quick and easy or they can tear on your brain. As a designer you want to make sure the user does not suffer from cognitive overload.

Every cognitive process that used resources to be handled will add to the cognitive load. There are many things that will impact this and the first one I would like to talk about is attention.

Attention:

If you read this far, that means you have a longer attention span than most people. I remember a TV analyst told me that you lose the audience after roughly eight seconds. If you haven’t caught their attention before 8 seconds, you’re out…

Humans are great at attention. There is a phenomenon called “The Cocktail Effect” which revolves around how a person can pin their attention at a cocktail party. You can be in a room full of people with noise everywhere, but your attention can be on the conversation you are having and thereby block everything else out. It’s quite fascinating.

If you realize you find another conversation interesting you can tune into that conversation in the distance instead of the one right in front of you. You hear them talking to you or in your group, but you are listening to another conversation across the room.

I’d like to share two videos for you to watch and then continue reading the article. It’s a fun exercise:

Selective Attention

Color Changing Card Trick

How did it go?

You see, if we are focused on one thing, that thing can just override everything else. It is likely to be a factor of our long survival skills. It can also make you miss a sucker punch, but we’ve made it so far.

Larson and Loschky did research on central vs. peripheral vision and wrote a research article on the subject. They found that the peripheral vision helps establish the full scene. You would be able to identify the broad setting. The central vision was good for focusing directly on one thing and doing it well.

Steve Krug touches on this in his book “Don’t Make Me Think” where flashy banners and other disturbances in the peripheral field will steal focus and ruin the experience for the user. I guess we have all visited awful websites with blinking adds down the sides.

You don’t want to lose the user’s attention.

Learnability

How easy is it to learn your design? If it is intuitive and placement of CTA (Call To Action) is well thought out it will lessen the cognitive load. As you will see throughout this article, cognitive load is one key element.

To help make sure your solution is easy to learn you can use the design principle of consistency, both internal and external. You want to make sure you don’t switch up interaction elements. You also want to make sure you stick to consistency in known layouts, icons and placements or elements.

A funny example of consistency and not consistency at the same time is how Apple’s OSX and Windows have an underscore for minimize, a square for maximize and an X for closing a window. That is consistent, right? They are on opposite sides of the User Interface thought, that is not consistent. You can say it is consistent and not consistent at the same time. The opera browser on OSX even allows you to have them vertically on the side.

Opera on Mac OSX

Several of these tiny differences would make you would need a bit of time to adjust to any of these two systems when doing a switch.

Both Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen have consistency as one of their design principles and heuristics.

#4: Consistency and standards.

Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions — Jakob Nielsen

Memorability

If you are developing a system where the users might just use it once a year, is it easy to remember? Say you are doing your taxes. If you have to spend an hour to relearn the system each year it is a very unnecessary cognitive load.

Humans have different types of memories. You have “short term memory” and you have “long term memory”. The short term memory allows you to quickly grab data, while the long term memory can hold a lot of information, but it takes you longer to “bring it back”.

Miller’s Law from 1956 states that you can only keep 7+- 2 items in your working memory. This means that if you are dealing with numbers or items longer than this, the user will start having a hard time remembering them. Some even claim the human capacity is as low as 4.

You have probably noticed this already. Your bank account number or your phone number is most likely split into parts so it is easier to remember.

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For example, a Norwegian phone number is normally split with the format 3–2–3 or 2–2–2–2 : (915 15 666) or (94 44 35 11). A bank account number is split with the format 4–2–5 , 1955. 22.35621. You have probably noticed this in your country as well.

Jakob Nielsen’s heuristic #6 suggest that you should design for Recognition rather than Recall.

This makes sense. It takes you less than a second to recognize something and know what the element you are interacting with does. If you have to use your memory to remember items from another part of the interaction it will cause a higher cognitive load.

This can also be seen together with Norman’s principles of Visibility and Mapping.

Perception

This is a big one. Perception is how we perceive things. (duh…) This means that you will interpret or understand something though your senses.

People will have different perceptions of the same thing. The number 9 will be a 6 if you are looking at it upside down. (We actually had to do something about that so you will often see a dot after the number 6.) Have you seen the duck/rabbit t-shirt print?

It is not easy to design for everyone’s perception. It is probably impossible. Designers try to get as close as possible to the user’s mental model of the system.

You would probably be able to navigate your home in the dark. Your perception of the layout is very good.

If you visit someone and they ask you to go get a kitchen knife, your perception of where to find it is most likely in the kitchen drawer. Is this something that is a good thing to carry over to design? I think so. People’s perception of how things are.

Jeff Johnson claims that perception is always biased. If you went to that drawer to get that knife. Would you remember all the other things in that drawer? Probably not, your perception was driven by the goal, which is one of the bias factors. Grownups often exclude non-vital information to get to the goal. Much like we already talked about in attention.

If you ask a child what was in that drawer, they would most likely be able to answer better because even though they had the same goal, they don’t exclude info the same way.

Types of Cognition

Cognition is pretty important in design! It might seem that the great human mind can need all the help it can get. There are a few types of cognition which can help out.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Embodied Cognition, often referred to as muscle memory

If you expose a user to the same things over and over again, a pattern recognition happens. The user will start to develop embodied cognition. How many times have you postponed a software update? Do you even look at the message anymore or just find the button to postpone it?

How about installing software? “next” , “next” ,“next” , “done”. (Then pray you didn’t install a bunch of malware)

External Cognition, a helping hand

A user can get cognitive support. You probably use this all the time without thinking about it. A post it note on your computer is even external cognition. You can actually help yourself that way. How about a calendar? There is a lot of information stored in a calendar to help you out.

Calculators are also a daily tool which uses external cognition.

Distributed Cognition, two (or more) can play this game!

If several users share the same goal they will help each other achieve it. Imagine what goes on just to land a plane. You have the aircraft controlled by a pilot and a co pilot. On the ground you have the air traffic control making sure the runway is clear.