Written by Fang, 2021 Cohort
Have you ever felt overwhelmed when your English teacher tried to introduce the passive to you in high-school, by explaining all its uses in one class? Actually, you were experiencing cognitive overload due to the large amount of information, making it hard for you to process and absorb the knowledge.
In terms of User Experience design, “cognitive load” refers to the strain a user experiences when s/he has to think too much in order to get something done. Anything that interrupts users and makes them think hard about what to do next is cognitive load. When your apps/websites require users to do too much thinking, you are confusing them and pushing them to the edge of abandoning you. There are several common types of cognitive load in user interfaces in the book “About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design”, written by Alan Cooper et. al.
The first type of cognitive load comes from navigation, which may extend among multiple screens, views, or pages. If there are too many windows on a screen, users will lose their sense of direction. This load can also be produced when there is too much information on a page. In this situation, scrolling is necessary, but it should be reduced as much as possible, and we need to consider finding a balance between paging and scrolling for formation.
The second form of cognitive load is from modal windows. According to Wikipedia, a modal window creates a mode that disables the main window but keeps it visible, with the modal window as a child window in front of it. Users must interact with the modal window before they can return to the parent application. Unessential modal windows seriously interrupt users’ workflow, forcing people to think and resulting in unpleasant user experience.
There are some other forms of cognitive loads such as overuse and misuse of skeuomorphism and exaggerated visual styles that sacrifice usability. Cognitive overload is an inevitable problem in this digital age of information explosion. Therefore, every product designer should pay attention to various forms of cognitive loads and try every effort to eliminate them.
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