Cognitive Overload
The beauty of taking away instead of adding
Have you ever been in a situation where you have been given too much information and too many tasks to process at once? Did it make you stressed, overwhelmed or filled with anxiety? Perhaps your judgement was clouded and you couldn’t complete the task you wanted to. When this happens it is called cognitive overload.
We can experience cognitive load in many different ways. From stressfully picking a dish from a menu that has excessive options to even our phones having cognitive difficulties and working slower because so many apps are running at once.
When I was learning to ride my bike as a child, my parents added stabilisers to help me stay balanced without falling off. However, what if the solution was taking away something from the bike instead of adding something? Balance bikes are becoming extremely popular. The pedals have been removed meaning your child can build up the muscles needed to balance effectively. It’s becoming known that children using pushbikes instead of stabilisers learn to ride their new bike quicker and are much more confident! How does this narrative apply to UX?
There are three types of cognitive overload
Intrinsic cognitive load is the amount of effort needed to understand information.
Extraneous cognitive load is the way information is presented to a user. It’s anything included that’s not related to the end goal. For example, reading an essay with multicoloured text and lots of different font sizes would cause an extraneous cognitive overload. As UX designers it should be basic practice to overcome a problem such as this.
Germane cognitive load is the work put into transferring learning to long-term memory. If we overload the brain it’s more difficult for information to go into our long term memory.
Perhaps less is more
As a UX designer, it’s important to look at cognitive load as the amount of mental processing power needed to use a product. Your job is to make the users’ experience and effort to complete tasks as simple as possible or else you could cause a stumbling block, requiring the user to alter their path or learn something new.
It’s understandable how quickly and easy cognitive load can become a problem. As a business, you want to sell yourself to the user as quickly as possible. Flashy text, animations and popups may seem like the best approach to get a users’ attention on your website but adding these techniques actually causes clutter and becomes irritating, drawing a user away from a website rather than drawing them to it whilst also attaching negative feelings to your brand. Instead, including less and identifying the main purpose of your site, then having a clear call to action for this purpose would be the best approach.
Millers law
Miller’s law states that we are able to hold up to 7 pieces of information in our short term memory. This does not mean when designing that you can’t surpass over 7 elements or that you need to have less, but it’s good to keep in mind. When displaying multiple pieces of information, Millar’s law suggests organising content into small chunks. This helps users process, understand and memorize the information easily, making it less overwhelming and easier to scan.
This also helps to reduce split attention among users. Have you ever been talking to a friend whilst they are searching for something that they’ve lost or whilst they are preoccupied with another task? If it’s anything like my experience, your frustration will start to build up inside of you as your friend stops talking and is preoccupied with their other task. Your friend could become irritable and overwhelmed whilst having multiple tasks to do at once. In UX design, having a flashy animation close to text could cause a distraction for the user that splits attention and makes the text more difficult to read.
Design tips to avoid cognitive overload
Be predictable — It’s important to understand how users scan pages and navigate around sites so we can provide what they expect. For example, many users read from left to right. In this instance, it’s important that the most attractive content falls on the left side of the page as this is where the user will be looking most. The hierarchical structure of a design also needs to indicate important parts of your copy. For example, the main headings of a page must have a large font, bold text or colour. Other predictable elements you may see on a site are things like the search always being located at the top right and a brand’s logo always being on the top left.
Be clear — Only display as much as you need to. Don’t overstimulate your user with irrelevant information that will not be of use to them. What you are designing should have a purpose. Key content that you want your user to interact with should be placed with the most prominence and the rest can fall beneath.
Make it easy — You should want your user to have as straightforward an experience as possible. To do this you sometimes need to reduce your cognitive load and create redundancies to get users to where they need to be quickest. For example, having auto-fill for form fields.
I hope you found this article helpful and of use. Thank you for taking the time to read it. I am currently interning at Puppet as a UX Designer whilst in my third year of university studying Interaction Design at Ulster University. Your feedback is super valuable to me and will be greatly appreciated. If you have any feedback or enquiries I would love to hear from you through Twitter, Instagram or Email: hello@emmacorbett.design Thank you!
