What is Cognitive Overhead in Design and How to Reduce it?
Manual Testing • Miscellaneous •
8363 Views | 4 Min Read
Taking in more information than what we can process slows us down. Be it a computer or human, no
What is Cognitive Overhead in Design and How to Reduce it?
Manual Testing • Miscellaneous •
8363 Views | 4 Min Read
Taking in more information than what we can process slows us down. Be it a computer or human, no one can process beyond a specified level. If you open hundreds of apps in a computer, at same point of time it will stop working, slow down, or even crash. Same is with humans, every human has a defined cognitive load that the memory can process. Making anyone process more information than defined will result in cognitive overloading.
When it comes to designing a website or making your users stay on your website it has a major unnoticed role to play. Many times, we do everything in our control to make our website usable, accessible, and friendly to users, however we still get no success in figuring out what went wrong.
This one thing that we don’t take seriously is ‘Cognitive Overhead’. If your user is taking unnecessary actions to attain a specific goal in that case it will pose stress to users mind and user will not be able to handle this extra pressure and will ultimately go away.
Why need to take care of Cognitive Overhead?
To be specific, cognitive overhead means the number of logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to complete a goal or to understand the things that he is looking at. So, we need to minimize this cognitive overhead because:
If your working memory receives more information than it can handle, it might lead to frustration, lack of concentration, compromised decision making ability, and also user might take more time to understand even a simple thing. This will lead to user go away from your website if your website poses cognitive overloading.
Cognitive overhead directly affects the user’s experience on your website. So, if your users are facing it, they are more prone to going away!
What causes Cognitive Overhead?
If your users are asking these questions to themselves while navigating your website then there are possibilities of them facing cognitive overloading on your website.
- Where is the home button?
- Should I click on this? What would happen?
- How do I save this?
- Is this an advertisement or a genuine button?
- What should be done next?
- Will the data be gone if I refresh it?
And such questions like these. These questions put a load on user’s mind while using your website. If they are asking these questions then your website had a bad user experience as is not self explanatory. Users are not gonna like it.
What to do to Minimize Cognitive Overhead?
So, if that’s the case you need to take some important measures to reduce the cognitive overhead in your website.
Reduce Unnecessary Interactions
Don’t Overstimulate the User
Don’t Provide too Much Options to the User
Just like multiple actions, options too pose a cognitive load on the user and the user again lands up choosing nothing. When the user gets too many options, he will not be think of any one possible options and will increase the cognitive load.
Avoid Too Much Content
Non-User Friendly User Interface
When users come to your website they have a specific goal that is set in their mind. So, their memory is focused on attaining that goal without any distraction. So, if you are asking them to perform unnecessary actions, it will increase their cognitive load and they will not be focus on anything. Not even using your website the way they want to.
In order to make sure that you don’t have any unnecessary actions, you need to list down all the actions and be sure that you’re not asking your users to perform actions that might be avoided.
You can reduce interactions like click here, automatically move to text input, default fields, etc.
The greatest example of this that you might see is google’s search engine. When you open google.com in a new tab, it automatically selects the text input. You d