UX and Cognitive LoadCory M BurnettUX Design Manager - Oracle Primavera

1) What is Cognitive Load?2) A day in the life of Jocie Jasper3) Ways to reduce Cognitive Load4) Q & A

What is Cognitive Load?The total Cognitive Load, or amount of mental processing power needed to use your site, affects how easily users find content and complete tasks…

…the Cognitive Load imposed by a user interface is the amount of mental resources that is required to operate the system. Informally, you can think of mental resources as "brain power" — more formally, we're talking about slots in working memory.

Whitenton, Kathryn. "Minimize Cognitive Load to Maximize Usability." Nielsen Norman Group. 22nd December. 2013.<https://www.nngroup.com/articles/minimize-cognitive-load/>

Intrinsic; level of complexity inherent in a particular task

Extraneous; all the added fluff in a particular task - extra pictures,too many colors, lots of font sizes, over the top animations…

Germane; elements in a particular task that support the cognitive process

3 types of Cognitive Load:

Jocie JasperProduct Manager @ Techify

Lunch

Meeting 1

Meeting 2

Meeting 3

Meeting 4

8 am

9 am

10 am

11 am

Noon

1 pm

2 pm

3 pm

4 pm

5 pm

Catch up on Emails

Meeting 2

10 am

11 am

Shiny Things!

A co-worker, pops-by

Loading….Gathering her thoughts on what she has to do and how to do it

Complete task 1 of 10

Complete task 2 of 10

Complete task 3 of 10, but the flow between these two steps were not cohesive, so it took her a little longer to finish

Complete task 4 of 10, this task took 30% more time because there were a few extra clicks and it wasn’t clear to Jocie

Jocie, get’s stuck on task 5 of 10, because the alert was verbose and required her to read it several times to comprehend

Jocie get’s back on track for task 5 of 10, but it takes longer, because she needed to start from the beggining again

Jocie is feeling good, she’s got task 6 of 10 done

Jocie got task 8 of 10 done, but needs to head to her next meeting [sad face]

She’s got task 7 of 10 done

What we know…We know what Cognitive Load is and the 3 types:

• Intrinsic • Extraneous • Germane

We saw a snapshot of how easy our attention can get diverted and subsequently overloaded.

So how can we reduce Cognitive Load?

Know Thy User

Jocie Jasper • Product Manager @ Techify • Spends 50% of her day in meetings • On average, her attention is diverted every 1.5 hours • Accesses 3-5, variable sized data sets, at any given time, to complete tasks • Because she inputs a large amount of data during the day, she expects her tools to be quick and efficient

Relational Grouping

Spread the load across channels

Consistent Structure

• Lean on commonly used patterns • Keep the contexts efficient and appropriate • Remove extraneous elements; unnecessary imagery, words, styles • Provide safe defaults; out-of-the box, general workflow, to get the user started

Many other ways…