Human Cognition and its effect on design
How can i do it? What am i supposed to do? Should i use this?
Almost done, wait a second. What if i do it this way?
What if this action causes a drop out?
Every designer has gone through these kind of situation and problem occurs every time when designers fail to understand their users behaviour and thought process. User’s nature and behaviour decide how the product should work. Whereas, the product’s interface and feedback is responsible for how users react to it. Before starting off, every interaction designer should understand how humans perceive any product.
Let’s try and understand how our users interact with products like websites, web application and mobile applications. It’s all about cognitive psychology.
Cognitive psychology
In simple words, cognitive psychology is the way users process information or the way users deal with product and it depends on their mental ability to think, perception, memory, learn, remember, reason and perceive.
These are the following factors which responsible for how users perceive and respond to a product -
Visual perception
The first impression of a product depends on the aesthetics of that product. It depend on the following:
Pattern:- How users look at product depending on design pattern and arrangement of elements. Visual pattern is also responsible for how users make relationship among different groups of element.
Colour:- Colour can easily stir emotions and evoke different mood in users.
Language & Typography
Language and Typography of a product influences reading and comprehension. Inappropriate Language and typography often misleads users.
Scanning
Usually users do not get involved deeply on every website. They do not even read all the content. They just scan the pages. It depends on the type of websites and design of the products, our users follow certain scanning pattern like Z-Pattern, Zig-Zag Pattern and F-Pattern to scan the pages.
Memory
It depends on user’s memory how they acquire knowledge, build concepts for new things, deal with information overload, and their working memory to accomplished task.
Problem solving and decision making
Users choose among different possibilities, build strategies, take decisions and solve the problems with help of their knowledge, previous experience and common sense.
Cognitive Processing
It is a known fact that emotions drive behaviour. Don Norman introduced the idea that, there are three different levels of cognitive and emotional processing which are -
Visceral
Visceral processing is that when users react immediately and make rapid decisions. Visceral emotions are the ones we are born with.
For instance, to see product’s aesthetics users assume the nature of product and react accordingly before any significant interaction.
Behavioural
Behavioural processing is the most common human activity. This level of processing we use in our everyday behaviour.
i.e. when we interact with product, the way we handle it, the emotion of gaining knowledge and understanding whether it feel good or bad.
Reflective
Reflective processing is the conscious way to processing. This is least immediate level of processing and mostly depends on our previous experience.
This level of cognitive processing is accessible only via memory not through direct interaction or perception.
Users have their own ability and limitations to understand and perceive the information, and a good interaction design always respect the limitation of human mind and body.
Sometimes design goes too complex to understand. User does not able to figure out something easily and needs to put extra effort it means cognitive load increases.
Cognitive Load
Cognitive load is the amount of energy used by brain while performing any task or the amount of mental resources that is required to operate the system.
There are two types of Cognitive load -
Intrinsic cognitive load
Whenever we interact with websites or application mental effort is required to figure out those new things and information which we don’t know. Intrinsic cognitive load is the effort of understanding new information. It is unavoidable and essential to perform any task.
Extraneous cognitive load
Extraneous cognitive load is also mental effort to deal with product but that is not necessarily help us to understand the product. It can be avoidable and manageable.
For example - irrelevant images, confused navigation.
Causes of Cognitive Load
There are many reasons which responsible for increasing Cognitive load, here are few of them-
- Irrelevant images or inappropriate typography increases cognitive load.
- If there is no clarity and user reaches goal after many unnecessary clicks.
- A long form which needs to be fill and most of the fields are mandatory.
- If there are multiple choices and need to chose one of them.
- When users do not get result as they anticipate.
Designers can not remove cognitive load completely but minimize it surely.
Here are some principle and laws which help to understand human psychology, minimize cognitive load and improve user experience.
Fitt’s Law
“It is easier and faster to hit larger target closer to you than smaller target further from you”
In interaction design size of an object and distance from where we want to interact with that object is matter a lot.
This law helps designers to understand how to categories task and how to give them priority with appropriate placing, because users always find approachable way to deal with products.
Gestalt laws
Gestalt laws are simple principle which tell us how different element are perceived when combining them in a certain way or order and numbers of different aspect of human thought and human vision.
They give us suggestions of how to draw attention to elements that are important or how to create an impression of balance and stability.
Here are basics laws of gestalt —
Law of Similarity
When individual objects which appear similar ( in terms of shape, size, colour or any other particular characteristics ) to each other, we perceive them as related.
Law of Continuation
This law explain that how our brain experience visual lines or continuation of elements. Naturally human eye follow the straight line or curved line and prefer to see connected and continuous figure to disconnected and disjointed ones.
Law of Closure
When object is incomplete or a space is not completely enclose but brain often ignore contradictory information and fill the gap.
Law of Proximity
The law of proximity indicates that elements which are close to each other tend to be perceived as a group or single unit.
Law of Figure & Ground
This law explain the relationship between an object and it’s surrounding area. It depends on the shape or size or colour and contrast of object that how human eye differentiate an object (figure) from it’s surrounding area (ground).
Hick’s Law
“Increasing the number of choices will increase decision time”
Often users get confused when they need to choose one option among many options and it takes extra time too.
Hick’s law helps designers to categorise choices, make easy navigation and accessible user flow. It saves users time and energy. And also improve decision making power.
Miller’s Law
“An average person can hold 7 (+/- 2) numbers of items in their working memory”
Simply it tells us that users remember information in chunks. Chunking is the process of grouping information together related by perceptual features.
It helps designer to breakdown content according to nature and keep clear visual hierarchies with most relevant information in group so that user can easily adopt information and remember important thing. It also improve user’s ability to comprehend.
Interaction between digital product are integral part of our life and it is very important that products are able to understand human behaviour. To understand Human Cognition and applying simple law of design into design process make big and positive changes in User Experience.
