Cognitive Load is one of the most important things to take into consideration when designing an application or any interface. Be it a physical interface or a digital one, Cognitive Load has the ability to determine the success or failure of the product that you are designing. In this article, we will discuss what Cognitive Load actually is. why should it be reduced? and how can we reduce it.
How to Reduce Cognitive Load?
What is Cognitive Load?
Cognitive Load is the brain power required to complete an action or a task in an application, website or any other interface be it physical or digital.
When an application gives us information, we take the information, process it, and make decisions based on it. Cognitive Load is the relative intensity of the processing power our brain requires to make a decision on the information provided by an application or a website.
Why should Cognitive Load be reduced?
- It Reduces the Usability: When designing a new tool or application it’s critical to take into account the Cognitive Load that will be required to complete the task. When the amount of information needing to be processed exceeds what our brain is able to do, the Usability of the application or the website critically suffers as well as the overall performance.
- Reduces the Effectiveness: Human brains just like Computers have a limited amount of processing power. Because of the increased Cognitive Load, the information coming to us exceeds our brain’s ability to handle it. This reduces the effectiveness of the user interface to a large extend. It takes more attention of the user to understand what’s happening in the interface.
- Mission out on important Information: When people are trying to think about too many things at once, they make mistakes and overlook important information. This might lead to a serious decrement in User experience as well as it may cause misinformation
- More Confusion: Increase in Cognitive load increases the confusion in mind of the user about the aim of the application, about its uses, about its functionality and about the information that is being provided. More Confusion often lead to people simple shutting down the application or finding some other alternative
- Cluttered UI: Cognitive Load is directly proportional to the mess and clutter in the interface. Due to more Cognitive load, the website appears to be cluttered which makes the User Interface as well as the User experience suffer. This leads to lesser user retention and not many users visiting the website or the application again.
How to minimize Cognitive Load
- Build on Patterns: One great way to reduce the Cognitive Load is by creating a standardization for your buttons, CTAs etc. For Example, most of the e-commerce platforms uses a shopping cart to make you take a look at your cart. Anything else would be essentially unnecessary confusion added to your website or application. this becomes really important in the creative field where in general, a lot of creatives find it necessary to be totally original in their designs.
- Remove irrelevant information: Since we discussed earlier that when people try to think about too many things at once, they make mistakes and overlook important information. The best way to deal with this is to structure our application or website in such a way that only the relevant information is provided to the user until they are for a more detailed explaination.
- Offload Tasks: Offloading of tasks basically means designing by removing large blocks of text and replacing them with things like icons or images that help illustrate ideas of how to use the feature without covering too much space or making it cluttered. For example, anyone would prefer having a Thumbs up icon rather than a text that says “Likes in your post”. It reduces the Cognitive load by making the user visualize rather than read.
- Use Symbols rather than text where possible: Rather than having a text saying “Cart” in any application, we can simply add a cart symbol. In this example where we use a shopping cart or a shopping basket to show the items that we have selected to purchase by taking this real world item and translating it into a digital space, we have significantly reduced the Cognitive Load by giving the user a symbol/button that they are clicking to see what’s in there. Note that you can’t add symbols for every text you have in your application, you must be careful while replacing text with symbols.
- Avoid Visual Clutter: As we talked about this in the previous section that more Cognitive load means that the website appears to be cluttered which makes the User Interface as well as the User experience suffer. We can fix this issue by simply removing all the visual clutter be it images, text or any other from of content. A simpler application or website is one wilt less cognitive load.
Conclusion
Cognitive Load is the brain power required to complete an action or a task in an application, website or any other interface be it physical or digital. Cognitive Load is one of the biggest things you’ll need to take into consideration when designing your interface and can really be a maker break point of your product.
Make sure to remember the points we discussed in this article when designing your next application, website or any other physical or digital product.