8 ms·

Cognitive Overhead, Or Why Your Product Isn’t As Simple As You Think

240 points by pg 13y ago

ricardobeat 13y ago
> There isn’t yet much written about cognitive overhead in our field Couldn't disagree more. Cognitive load is a major element of information architecture and even has an explicit representation in flow charts. Any book on information architecture or UX is half about it. Many if not most decisions in interface design and IA are based on estimating (and reducing) cognitive load - how many options/buttons to present, how deep navigation should go, how to group things, splitting up an action flow in order to reduce the memory/choices needed... The example given for QR codes is also wrong - "So it’s a barcode? No? ..." - it is a barcode and you need a barcode scanner/app, everyone knows how barcodes work. QR codes are not the best thing around, but IMO they didn't catch on for a lack of interest from manufacturers (no native support), not because it's overly complex.
- gingerlime 13y ago
  The argument about QR codes I didn't totally agree with either, and I think that at least in Europe it caught-on pretty well. One thing that could definitely be improved is if the built-in camera app on your phone automatically detected them and popped-up more info. When I first tried using a QR code, that's what I did, using the iphone camera app, and was disappointed to discover it didn't work this way. Eliminating the need for an extra app and could dramatically boost their appeal, but the core concept is there.
  - mrtksn 13y ago
    QR codes never became popular here in Turkey. I'm pretty tech savvy guy but I asked all the questions when I first tried a QR code. There was an android appstore that I can't find a download link, just a QR code, I didn't know how to download them and gave up. When I figured out that it holds information that must be interpreted by an app, I was amazed and fooled around to see how amazingly accurate it is at reading it. But still, I see why it never caught-on here. We are a nation used to transfer pirated audio/video files, crack games and just don't expect things to work like "take a photo and a website opens". There is a poster about a concert with a QR code? Just google the artists name with the city name and the first result is the website selling the tickets. Why bother to find out what is that funny barcode, download an app for that? Just google it, you will find what's going on...
  - hdctambien 13y ago
    My windows phone has QR reading capabilities built in (Bing Vision). Bing Vision can also apparently scan text you point the phone at, translate it to a different language, and the overlay the translation on the screen.
    - ricardobeat 13y ago
      Inspired by Google Goggles, which for some reason was never merged into Android's camera app.
- adrianhoward 13y ago
  Well - it depends what he defines as "our field". The author David Leib has an engineering and MBA background. This stuff is "duh" levels of old hat to folk with any kind of cog psych background. Anybody who is vaguely competent and IA/IxD should understand the term and have it in their toolbox. This stuff is, unfortunately, rarely talked about and even more rarely taught to engineers and business folk.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. -- Arthur Schopenhauer I am definitely guilty of this. It's why I try to walk around the intellectual block a bit, see the sights, then come back and realise I know nothing. Absolutely nothing. Heck, I even wrote a disclaimer: http://chester.id.au/standard-disclaimer/ http://chester.id.au/standard-disclaimer/
- as_if 13y ago
  Cognitive load comes from "Cognitive Load Theory" (by Sweller), which is a specific field in Psychology. Psychologist told me, "Multimedia Learning" (by Mayer) is taken more seriously by psychologist than "Cognitive Load Theory".
- ams6110 13y ago
  QR codes were the result of people who forgot about/never knew about the CueCat. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html TL;DR: They solve a problem that people don't have.
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    Only if you think of them as just encoded URLs; they do solve a myriad of real problems. "Just type the URL" doesn't hold when you want to add query parameters to it, use a different protocol or store data by itself. It's a barcode with more density, so it serves the same purpose as 2D barcodes; it is widely deployed in industry inventory control systems, shipping, access control, event ticketing, shopping.
  - donw 13y ago
    Depends on where you live; they're everywhere here in Japan (where they were invented). This is probably due to the evolution of Japanese phones, which have had a crude mobile internet and built-in cameras from about 2000 onwards. Given the limitations of the devices and networks, QR codes were the easiest way to move data between phones (because there was no way in hell NTT would allow you to run apps on one). These then got used for coupons, and with the shrinking economy and people wanting to save money, people quickly internalized how QR codes worked. Likewise, phones come with QR capability as a builtin -- it's not a separate app. I imagine you might see the same sort of use case in developing nations where computers and smartphones are too expensive, but that window is rapidly shrinking due to the low cost of Android devices.
- dreamfactory 13y ago
  The problem with QR codes is that they are 'mystery meat'.
pg 13y ago
I'd be interested to know when/where the term "cognitive load" first appeared, if anyone knows.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  The term comes from psychology, so probably a few decades back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load In relation to the web, a quick Google Scholar search brings up lots of papers from the 1990s: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22cognitive+overhead%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=1980&as_yhi=2000 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22cognitive+overhead%22...
  - pg 13y ago
    I poked around myself and the earliest use of the term I can find is in an article from 1968: Pupil size and problem solving JL Bradshaw The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1968 Of course when I tried to read the text of the article, I got a message saying Sorry, you do not have access to this article. How to gain access: Recommend to your librarian that your institution purchase access to this publication.
    - staunch 13y ago
      Here's one from 1970 http://books.google.com/books?id=srxOAAAAYAAJ&q=%22cognitive+load%22&dq=%22cognitive+load%22 http://books.google.com/books?id=srxOAAAAYAAJ&q=%22cogni... If you search that book for "cognitive load is defined" you get the snippet: > "Cognitive load" is defined loosely as the amount of mental strain put on a person during the performance of some task, often at least partially due to the constraints placed on the performance of that task...
    - agilebyte 13y ago
      "Pupil size changes were monitored during the solution of various types of problems. A number of solution and response strategies were required of the subject. There was strong confirmation of the theory that this autonomic index can provide a sensitive measure of the fluctuating levels of attention and arousal, which are associated with the various aspects of information processing and response." PDF link (bad quality): http://www.filedropper.com/article http://www.filedropper.com/article
arocks 13y ago
I am not sure if every product benefits from reducing Cognitive Overhead. Some of the areas where it would work are novel technologies (like Shazam or Wii) or mass market products. How many of us would use a music player that just had start and stop buttons? Why would this seem as an inconvenience? If the product is already familiar, then it would be better to improve on the already familiar interface. When it is a completely new technology, you get an opportunity to make a fresh start. Similarly, many niche products have power users who would be unhappy if the interface is too "dumbed down". The classic case of an IDE and UNIX text editors come to mind. An IDE is quite obvious to use, but many would not find it as efficient. Cognitive overhead is a good guideline but we need to understand our target market first.
- quanticle 13y ago
  >How many of us would use a music player that just had start and stop buttons? Two words: iPod Shuffle. Or, if you want a slightly more complicated example, Pandora. Pandora literally started out with three buttons: "I like it", "I don't like it" and "Stop". Recently, they added a fourth, "Skip".
  - saurik 13y ago
    http://www.apple.com/support/ipodshuffle/reference/ http://www.apple.com/support/ipodshuffle/reference/
    - socillion 13y ago
      The 3rd generation shuffle has no controls apart from a switch between loop, shuffle, and off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle#Third_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle#Third_generation
      - saurik 13y ago
        No: if you double-click, triple-click, and (potentially in combination) hold that button you can do all of the normal things you can do with a media player. Go read the user manual. People who believe otherwise (and I've seen many) simply assume user interfaces don't exist if they aren't obvious.
dkrich 13y ago
I think there are some strong points in the article but overall it misses a major point. Whatever interface you are designing, the underlying service you are building the interface for has to be something people really, really want. The most cognitively recognizable interface won't get people using something if they don't care about the information coming from the other side. Conversely, if there is information that the end user needs, he will spend the time learning the interface. For example, if Shazam didn't exist and you heard a song you really liked at the bar, you might ask around, google some fragment of the lyrics you recognize, etc. to find out the same information. So if Shazam had an interface that was far less-intuitive, I have to believe it would still be very popular. That sounds simple, but I think the article puts the weight on the interface without much regard to the fact that all interfaces are merely a means to an end.
- vinceguidry 13y ago
  > Whatever interface you are designing, the underlying service you are building the interface for has to be something people really, really want. How do you target that? I'm not entirely sure you can. Is there a set of steps you can follow, a design process, that will get you to something people really, really want?
  - acgourley 13y ago
    That's generally what a lean startup process / mindset is supposed to help you find. The idea being it's not something you can get a read on without putting a prototype MVP into the world to test.
  - ucee054 13y ago
    http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
  - SergeyHack 13y ago
    Search for "Customer Development" for a lot of insight.
- jdrobins2000 13y ago
john_w_t_b 13y ago
My problem with startups is the cognitive overhead in linking their company name to their function. I cannot remember what trello does for example? Naming of services should be more obvious.
- emiliobumachar 13y ago
  Domain name squatting makes that much difficult.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    It certainly does. I've had occasions where I spent most of a day fossicking for a halfway decent domain name.
  - david_lieb 13y ago
    If your product is a mobile app primarily, domain names are far less important. (We don't own bump dot com, and while it's hard to prove the absence of a thing, we don't think it hurts us at all).
- jakobe 13y ago
  Naming things is so hard. Descriptive names might be great at telling users immediately what your service does. But there are only so many plays on "To Do List" that work for product names. As soon as you start actually using a product, it's really nice if it has a simple, pronouncible name. It's much easier to say: "Did you see this on Trello?" to a coworker than "Did you see this on FogCreek To Do List Pro?" Another simple product with a great name is Doodle. Of course you could have a more obvious name, like "Cooperative Schedule Maker 3.0". But that just makes it so much harder to talk about! Trello is a good name.
  - martingoodson 13y ago
    I made http://www.nomipede.com http://www.nomipede.com to solve this exact problem.
holri 13y ago
I make better photos with my old manual Hasselblad from the 1970ies. Because the interface has massive cognitive overhead. No automatic at all, all manual, clunky, complicated. It forces me to think slowly. Therefore it gives my head and heart the time and deep concentration about the picture I want to make. This leads to much better photos.
- jwilliams 13y ago
  I found the same when I started using prime lenses. Not only was the quality there, but it forced me to think about composition, where I was standing and the geometry of the shot.
  - dreamfactory 13y ago
    The interface of a prime is much simpler though as a whole dimension of control is removed.
- rogerbinns 13y ago
  I'll play devil's advocate to that. Nowadays you can use high resolution cameras with automatic everything and take lots of pictures. High resolution means cropping still yields a useful picture and taking lots means you are far more likely to have a useful picture. You are certainly far less likely to miss something. (Manual focussing is also not available to short sighted people like me since glasses/contacts don't result in perfect correction.) If we extrapolated your approach to development then we shouldn't allow highlighting editors, debuggers (Linus has argued this), and similar modern tools. Heck you should have to wait hours/days for program output like they did in the punch card days. I suspect that skilled people can make good use of the tools available, be they completely manual or with lots of automation. It is quite possible the automation doesn't help them that much. But the vast majority of people are closer to average.
  - holri 13y ago
    A interface that makes things easy is comfortable and probably profitable, since most people are lazy. But convenience does not correlate with quality.
jwilliams 13y ago
I was all primed to disagree with this article, but it's a pretty well placed piece. I think an interesting pivot occurs when your start hitting the limits of working memory. Posting a photo is usually pretty immediate and doesn't max out your working memory. Many years ago, I worked on a project to convert a Loan Application system from a VT100 "green screen" terminal to a Web Interface. The Web Interface was actually pretty good, but it required too much navigation and too much working memory. We tried to reduce the number of clicks, but then the pages themselves became too slow and confusing. Finally I got to see someone using the old VT100 app. It was blistering fast, and they supplemented it with codes written on a piece of paper. Crude and it required training, but it was far superior. The main thing was navigation. The codes on the paper were enough of a picture to offload that bit of cognitive processing... With the web interface, as soon as you clicked and had to pause or search - you'd lose the thread. Unfortunately too late for that project, but a good lesson for me.
- monkeyspaw 13y ago
  Knowing what you now know, what tricks would you use to make the web interface more like the VT100? My guess would be keyboard navigation, and entering numbers as codes instead of clicking radio buttons. It's important to remember that discoverability in an interface doesn't matter as much when you can train the workers. Not everything has to be intuitive, especially when you control training (and you can trade eventual speed for immediate understanding). This is the basis for all the VI/Emacs users who claim to be more productive than in a visual editor/IDE.
  - jwilliams 13y ago
    I did come up with a prototype, but it went a bit of a different direction. My theory was the biggest issue was the UI enforced a workflow. Most likely the banker is given a big pile of documents, then they work through it. One confirms your address, the next your income, the other is some other piece of evidence. I particularly noticed they would be sitting there shuffling back and forth between the paper & then shuffling back and forth on the interface. It caused a lot of rework, and required you to remember where you were at with both. The Web Interface was waaay to rigid. Want to add a party - you need to enter their name and work details. So you'd have to track down that information. Even if it wasn't 100% required to get a provisional. You could enter whatever value you wanted for the income at this stage, so why force the banker to enter work address and work phone? They can do that at final docs when you're required to provide a payslip (for example!). Paper & terminal worked because you could move quickly between disconnected parts. Enter the person's name and DOB. Then jump to income. Back to their home address. Over to some kind of KYC information, etc, etc. So I came up with something that was a bit more of a mind-map. Each node indicated if it (and it's subnodes) were complete or not. You could jump around and enter data in whichever order you liked & not have to think too much about what we left to do. Then the nav was about quickly moving up & down the tree (keyboard being a big factor). It focused on making the data capture piece much more organic & goal-based. You only needed to enter discrete information to get a provisional, so use flags to tell the user what's needed. Then they can populate the space in any order they like. Was waaaaaaaaay to weird for a conservative bank to consider :-) So I never really got to try it out. Would have been interesting to see if it made any difference.
jdrobins2000 13y ago
Great article, and totally agree. I am working on a product where that is a critical design principle. An interesting related question I am wrestling with: can a product be successful by reducing overall cognitive load for a user, but carrying a larger cognitive load than the average app? That is, it reduces complexity for users, but since it deals with higher complexity concepts, it still nets out to being more complex. If so, how much additional cognitive load does this make tolerable/enjoyable? My guess is a little, but not much (in the mass market, of course).
swatkat 13y ago
Off topic: what's up with the url ;)
- jordn 13y ago
  You're right, what extra information is this URL sending? I haven't seen it any other techcrunch linked article. http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/20/cognitive-overhead/?icid=wym3&grcc2=870a9d585d2156a619b69a6861141a34~1366515093871~fca4fa8af1286d8a77f26033fdeed202~507a1debf7b9102c09107d1e3b60a173~1366514940000~0~13~0~0~0~0~0~0~7~13~26~H4sIAAAAAAAAAIVQy2rDMBD8lfoDFEtaaSUHSik99RxyLhtpVQv8CLackIu-vU5_ICzMwM7AzmxfyvXYtoVDH5ZtCv0hzGOrpYJWmp3bkZYgaIoL87ryJErP4j4vQ9xx2_HCYtxCv3MpvIicxJ1FT1FYKcZ5YbHmIYd5EjcaBn6sbUWpjJGoDVqnrVbou9q_ihHm3ymXfGMx33jpmWL7kUOO7_fHCFX5WmXVtqZAJpGnpLTH6Mm5pFECpMgctdSvDV13gaBsBAWJIlqGJJ9u4yUCIdW65sLf8ShQopPeemtBo3POW_wJNF4p_05P3SIoB_sZ0ymAzqHSe8jnnE_NeW_D8e1UqPDaGOmb0zZNj_1J3HjpGnAHQO-lbYTS-iAB4X_ffH1WfTGA6QKWWBmfPCZWBFpjUtaBS_UP0H6PptUBAAA
- fbpcm 13y ago
  Looks like an email campaign tracking url
michaelochurch 13y ago
The "test on the young, old, and drunk" concept got me thinking: this might be why the winter travelers among us are so much better at design. I always thought my design skill and difficulties were separate issues, perhaps connected at some neurological level, but I think the wide variations of intellectual ability (+/- 15 IQ swings that normal people don't experience) are why we develop such creativity and design sense. I have a week or two every year when I'm basically incapable of doing most of the stuff that's normally easy, but during that time I learn how to design for that person. How do you get the person whose cognitive resources are strained (fatigue, not stupidity) to see the value right away, rather than fear and uncertainty and chaos? We have to be careful, though. It's not that the rest of the world is stupid. The cognitive-load problem isn't about stupidity. It's about the fact that there are a million things competing for peoples' attentions and unless we can prove right away that our wares are cool (by demonstrating value in a simple, low-cognitive-load way) we fade into the noise.
- irremediable 13y ago
  What is a "winter traveler"? On searching for the term, I only saw websites about travelling during the winter. Is it a sufferer of seasonal affective disorder?
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    Person with mild mental illness that results in clearer perception, e.g. depressive realism, and often better character. (When your biology is difficult, you don't get to fuck around the way most people do.) Traveling through the forest during summer is much more comfortable, but you can't get as sharp a feel of the landscape because the trees are leaved out.
thefsb 13y ago
This is hilarious: "Web 2.0 took over, yielding big buttons, less text, more images, and happier users." See also: http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler
npsimons 13y ago
Much as I like having options, I have come to realize this applies to code as well. On my current project, I keep telling my partner that we need to keep the cognitive load down, because eventually we will have to bring on other people. Being that it's written in C++ (please don't flame me; it's what we have to work with), I'd love to use things like template metaprogamming and multiple inheritance. Since we are already working in a domain that doesn't always follow common sense (RF/E&M), and we are also using some design patterns that take a little getting used to in C++, we've had to eschew a few features of the C++ language. It's probably for the best anyways.
dcw303 13y ago
Products that have low cognitive overhead: - Original iPod - Fender Stratocaster - Roland TB-303 - Casio F91W - Unix (Ok, it's not a simple product, but "everything is a file" goes a long way.)
jamesrcole 13y ago
Cognitive overhead doesn't just apply to products we'd think of as simple. Vim is an example. One of the key benefits of Vim's editing style is that it reduces (one kind of) cognitive overhead. It really does. You want to delete the current sentence? Just type 'das'. Want to change the text within the quotes? Just type 'ci"'. It allows you to more directly express your editing operations, rather than having to translate them into a number of steps. That reduces the cognitive overhead of that action. It's also a case where you need a certain amount of training before you can perform the actions that reduce the cognitive overhead. Nothing says that the reduction in cognitive overhead has to be there from the get-go. I'm not saying that Vim's operation reduces cognitive overhead in all ways, but that it does in one specific respect.

240 points by pg 13y ago

> There isn’t yet much written about cognitive overhead in our field Couldn't disagree more. Cognitive load is a major element of information architecture and even has an explicit representation in flow charts. Any book on information architecture or UX is half about it. Many if not most decisions in interface design and IA are based on estimating (and reducing) cognitive load - how many options/buttons to present, how deep navigation should go, how to group things, splitting up an action flow in order to reduce the memory/choices needed... The example given for QR codes is also wrong - "So it’s a barcode? No? ..." - it is a barcode and you need a barcode scanner/app, everyone knows how barcodes work. QR codes are not the best thing around, but IMO they didn't catch on for a lack of interest from manufacturers (no native support), not because it's overly complex.

gingerlime 13y ago
The argument about QR codes I didn't totally agree with either, and I think that at least in Europe it caught-on pretty well. One thing that could definitely be improved is if the built-in camera app on your phone automatically detected them and popped-up more info. When I first tried using a QR code, that's what I did, using the iphone camera app, and was disappointed to discover it didn't work this way. Eliminating the need for an extra app and could dramatically boost their appeal, but the core concept is there.
- mrtksn 13y ago
  QR codes never became popular here in Turkey. I'm pretty tech savvy guy but I asked all the questions when I first tried a QR code. There was an android appstore that I can't find a download link, just a QR code, I didn't know how to download them and gave up. When I figured out that it holds information that must be interpreted by an app, I was amazed and fooled around to see how amazingly accurate it is at reading it. But still, I see why it never caught-on here. We are a nation used to transfer pirated audio/video files, crack games and just don't expect things to work like "take a photo and a website opens". There is a poster about a concert with a QR code? Just google the artists name with the city name and the first result is the website selling the tickets. Why bother to find out what is that funny barcode, download an app for that? Just google it, you will find what's going on...
- hdctambien 13y ago
  My windows phone has QR reading capabilities built in (Bing Vision). Bing Vision can also apparently scan text you point the phone at, translate it to a different language, and the overlay the translation on the screen.
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    Inspired by Google Goggles, which for some reason was never merged into Android's camera app.
adrianhoward 13y ago
Well - it depends what he defines as "our field". The author David Leib has an engineering and MBA background. This stuff is "duh" levels of old hat to folk with any kind of cog psych background. Anybody who is vaguely competent and IA/IxD should understand the term and have it in their toolbox. This stuff is, unfortunately, rarely talked about and even more rarely taught to engineers and business folk.
jacques_chester 13y ago
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. -- Arthur Schopenhauer I am definitely guilty of this. It's why I try to walk around the intellectual block a bit, see the sights, then come back and realise I know nothing. Absolutely nothing. Heck, I even wrote a disclaimer: http://chester.id.au/standard-disclaimer/ http://chester.id.au/standard-disclaimer/
as_if 13y ago
Cognitive load comes from "Cognitive Load Theory" (by Sweller), which is a specific field in Psychology. Psychologist told me, "Multimedia Learning" (by Mayer) is taken more seriously by psychologist than "Cognitive Load Theory".
ams6110 13y ago
QR codes were the result of people who forgot about/never knew about the CueCat. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html TL;DR: They solve a problem that people don't have.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  Only if you think of them as just encoded URLs; they do solve a myriad of real problems. "Just type the URL" doesn't hold when you want to add query parameters to it, use a different protocol or store data by itself. It's a barcode with more density, so it serves the same purpose as 2D barcodes; it is widely deployed in industry inventory control systems, shipping, access control, event ticketing, shopping.
- donw 13y ago
  Depends on where you live; they're everywhere here in Japan (where they were invented). This is probably due to the evolution of Japanese phones, which have had a crude mobile internet and built-in cameras from about 2000 onwards. Given the limitations of the devices and networks, QR codes were the easiest way to move data between phones (because there was no way in hell NTT would allow you to run apps on one). These then got used for coupons, and with the shrinking economy and people wanting to save money, people quickly internalized how QR codes worked. Likewise, phones come with QR capability as a builtin -- it's not a separate app. I imagine you might see the same sort of use case in developing nations where computers and smartphones are too expensive, but that window is rapidly shrinking due to the low cost of Android devices.
dreamfactory 13y ago
The problem with QR codes is that they are 'mystery meat'.

pg 13y ago

I'd be interested to know when/where the term "cognitive load" first appeared, if anyone knows.

ricardobeat 13y ago
The term comes from psychology, so probably a few decades back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load In relation to the web, a quick Google Scholar search brings up lots of papers from the 1990s: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22cognitive+overhead%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=1980&as_yhi=2000 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22cognitive+overhead%22...
- pg 13y ago
  I poked around myself and the earliest use of the term I can find is in an article from 1968: Pupil size and problem solving JL Bradshaw The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1968 Of course when I tried to read the text of the article, I got a message saying Sorry, you do not have access to this article. How to gain access: Recommend to your librarian that your institution purchase access to this publication.
  - staunch 13y ago
    Here's one from 1970 http://books.google.com/books?id=srxOAAAAYAAJ&q=%22cognitive+load%22&dq=%22cognitive+load%22 http://books.google.com/books?id=srxOAAAAYAAJ&q=%22cogni... If you search that book for "cognitive load is defined" you get the snippet: > "Cognitive load" is defined loosely as the amount of mental strain put on a person during the performance of some task, often at least partially due to the constraints placed on the performance of that task...
  - agilebyte 13y ago
    "Pupil size changes were monitored during the solution of various types of problems. A number of solution and response strategies were required of the subject. There was strong confirmation of the theory that this autonomic index can provide a sensitive measure of the fluctuating levels of attention and arousal, which are associated with the various aspects of information processing and response." PDF link (bad quality): http://www.filedropper.com/article http://www.filedropper.com/article

arocks 13y ago

I am not sure if every product benefits from reducing Cognitive Overhead. Some of the areas where it would work are novel technologies (like Shazam or Wii) or mass market products. How many of us would use a music player that just had start and stop buttons? Why would this seem as an inconvenience? If the product is already familiar, then it would be better to improve on the already familiar interface. When it is a completely new technology, you get an opportunity to make a fresh start. Similarly, many niche products have power users who would be unhappy if the interface is too "dumbed down". The classic case of an IDE and UNIX text editors come to mind. An IDE is quite obvious to use, but many would not find it as efficient. Cognitive overhead is a good guideline but we need to understand our target market first.

quanticle 13y ago
>How many of us would use a music player that just had start and stop buttons? Two words: iPod Shuffle. Or, if you want a slightly more complicated example, Pandora. Pandora literally started out with three buttons: "I like it", "I don't like it" and "Stop". Recently, they added a fourth, "Skip".
- saurik 13y ago
  http://www.apple.com/support/ipodshuffle/reference/ http://www.apple.com/support/ipodshuffle/reference/
  - socillion 13y ago
    The 3rd generation shuffle has no controls apart from a switch between loop, shuffle, and off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle#Third_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle#Third_generation
    - saurik 13y ago
      No: if you double-click, triple-click, and (potentially in combination) hold that button you can do all of the normal things you can do with a media player. Go read the user manual. People who believe otherwise (and I've seen many) simply assume user interfaces don't exist if they aren't obvious.

dkrich 13y ago

I think there are some strong points in the article but overall it misses a major point. Whatever interface you are designing, the underlying service you are building the interface for has to be something people really, really want. The most cognitively recognizable interface won't get people using something if they don't care about the information coming from the other side. Conversely, if there is information that the end user needs, he will spend the time learning the interface. For example, if Shazam didn't exist and you heard a song you really liked at the bar, you might ask around, google some fragment of the lyrics you recognize, etc. to find out the same information. So if Shazam had an interface that was far less-intuitive, I have to believe it would still be very popular. That sounds simple, but I think the article puts the weight on the interface without much regard to the fact that all interfaces are merely a means to an end.

vinceguidry 13y ago
> Whatever interface you are designing, the underlying service you are building the interface for has to be something people really, really want. How do you target that? I'm not entirely sure you can. Is there a set of steps you can follow, a design process, that will get you to something people really, really want?
- acgourley 13y ago
  That's generally what a lean startup process / mindset is supposed to help you find. The idea being it's not something you can get a read on without putting a prototype MVP into the world to test.
- ucee054 13y ago
  http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
- SergeyHack 13y ago
  Search for "Customer Development" for a lot of insight.
jdrobins2000 13y ago

john_w_t_b 13y ago

My problem with startups is the cognitive overhead in linking their company name to their function. I cannot remember what trello does for example? Naming of services should be more obvious.

emiliobumachar 13y ago
Domain name squatting makes that much difficult.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  It certainly does. I've had occasions where I spent most of a day fossicking for a halfway decent domain name.
- david_lieb 13y ago
  If your product is a mobile app primarily, domain names are far less important. (We don't own bump dot com, and while it's hard to prove the absence of a thing, we don't think it hurts us at all).
jakobe 13y ago
Naming things is so hard. Descriptive names might be great at telling users immediately what your service does. But there are only so many plays on "To Do List" that work for product names. As soon as you start actually using a product, it's really nice if it has a simple, pronouncible name. It's much easier to say: "Did you see this on Trello?" to a coworker than "Did you see this on FogCreek To Do List Pro?" Another simple product with a great name is Doodle. Of course you could have a more obvious name, like "Cooperative Schedule Maker 3.0". But that just makes it so much harder to talk about! Trello is a good name.
- martingoodson 13y ago
  I made http://www.nomipede.com http://www.nomipede.com to solve this exact problem.

holri 13y ago

I make better photos with my old manual Hasselblad from the 1970ies. Because the interface has massive cognitive overhead. No automatic at all, all manual, clunky, complicated. It forces me to think slowly. Therefore it gives my head and heart the time and deep concentration about the picture I want to make. This leads to much better photos.

jwilliams 13y ago
I found the same when I started using prime lenses. Not only was the quality there, but it forced me to think about composition, where I was standing and the geometry of the shot.
- dreamfactory 13y ago
  The interface of a prime is much simpler though as a whole dimension of control is removed.
rogerbinns 13y ago
I'll play devil's advocate to that. Nowadays you can use high resolution cameras with automatic everything and take lots of pictures. High resolution means cropping still yields a useful picture and taking lots means you are far more likely to have a useful picture. You are certainly far less likely to miss something. (Manual focussing is also not available to short sighted people like me since glasses/contacts don't result in perfect correction.) If we extrapolated your approach to development then we shouldn't allow highlighting editors, debuggers (Linus has argued this), and similar modern tools. Heck you should have to wait hours/days for program output like they did in the punch card days. I suspect that skilled people can make good use of the tools available, be they completely manual or with lots of automation. It is quite possible the automation doesn't help them that much. But the vast majority of people are closer to average.
- holri 13y ago
  A interface that makes things easy is comfortable and probably profitable, since most people are lazy. But convenience does not correlate with quality.

jwilliams 13y ago

I was all primed to disagree with this article, but it's a pretty well placed piece. I think an interesting pivot occurs when your start hitting the limits of working memory. Posting a photo is usually pretty immediate and doesn't max out your working memory. Many years ago, I worked on a project to convert a Loan Application system from a VT100 "green screen" terminal to a Web Interface. The Web Interface was actually pretty good, but it required too much navigation and too much working memory. We tried to reduce the number of clicks, but then the pages themselves became too slow and confusing. Finally I got to see someone using the old VT100 app. It was blistering fast, and they supplemented it with codes written on a piece of paper. Crude and it required training, but it was far superior. The main thing was navigation. The codes on the paper were enough of a picture to offload that bit of cognitive processing... With the web interface, as soon as you clicked and had to pause or search - you'd lose the thread. Unfortunately too late for that project, but a good lesson for me.

monkeyspaw 13y ago
Knowing what you now know, what tricks would you use to make the web interface more like the VT100? My guess would be keyboard navigation, and entering numbers as codes instead of clicking radio buttons. It's important to remember that discoverability in an interface doesn't matter as much when you can train the workers. Not everything has to be intuitive, especially when you control training (and you can trade eventual speed for immediate understanding). This is the basis for all the VI/Emacs users who claim to be more productive than in a visual editor/IDE.
- jwilliams 13y ago
  I did come up with a prototype, but it went a bit of a different direction. My theory was the biggest issue was the UI enforced a workflow. Most likely the banker is given a big pile of documents, then they work through it. One confirms your address, the next your income, the other is some other piece of evidence. I particularly noticed they would be sitting there shuffling back and forth between the paper & then shuffling back and forth on the interface. It caused a lot of rework, and required you to remember where you were at with both. The Web Interface was waaay to rigid. Want to add a party - you need to enter their name and work details. So you'd have to track down that information. Even if it wasn't 100% required to get a provisional. You could enter whatever value you wanted for the income at this stage, so why force the banker to enter work address and work phone? They can do that at final docs when you're required to provide a payslip (for example!). Paper & terminal worked because you could move quickly between disconnected parts. Enter the person's name and DOB. Then jump to income. Back to their home address. Over to some kind of KYC information, etc, etc. So I came up with something that was a bit more of a mind-map. Each node indicated if it (and it's subnodes) were complete or not. You could jump around and enter data in whichever order you liked & not have to think too much about what we left to do. Then the nav was about quickly moving up & down the tree (keyboard being a big factor). It focused on making the data capture piece much more organic & goal-based. You only needed to enter discrete information to get a provisional, so use flags to tell the user what's needed. Then they can populate the space in any order they like. Was waaaaaaaaay to weird for a conservative bank to consider :-) So I never really got to try it out. Would have been interesting to see if it made any difference.

jdrobins2000 13y ago

Great article, and totally agree. I am working on a product where that is a critical design principle. An interesting related question I am wrestling with: can a product be successful by reducing overall cognitive load for a user, but carrying a larger cognitive load than the average app? That is, it reduces complexity for users, but since it deals with higher complexity concepts, it still nets out to being more complex. If so, how much additional cognitive load does this make tolerable/enjoyable? My guess is a little, but not much (in the mass market, of course).

swatkat 13y ago

Off topic: what's up with the url ;)

jordn 13y ago
You're right, what extra information is this URL sending? I haven't seen it any other techcrunch linked article. http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/20/cognitive-overhead/?icid=wym3&grcc2=870a9d585d2156a619b69a6861141a34~1366515093871~fca4fa8af1286d8a77f26033fdeed202~507a1debf7b9102c09107d1e3b60a173~1366514940000~0~13~0~0~0~0~0~0~7~13~26~H4sIAAAAAAAAAIVQy2rDMBD8lfoDFEtaaSUHSik99RxyLhtpVQv8CLackIu-vU5_ICzMwM7AzmxfyvXYtoVDH5ZtCv0hzGOrpYJWmp3bkZYgaIoL87ryJErP4j4vQ9xx2_HCYtxCv3MpvIicxJ1FT1FYKcZ5YbHmIYd5EjcaBn6sbUWpjJGoDVqnrVbou9q_ihHm3ymXfGMx33jpmWL7kUOO7_fHCFX5WmXVtqZAJpGnpLTH6Mm5pFECpMgctdSvDV13gaBsBAWJIlqGJJ9u4yUCIdW65sLf8ShQopPeemtBo3POW_wJNF4p_05P3SIoB_sZ0ymAzqHSe8jnnE_NeW_D8e1UqPDaGOmb0zZNj_1J3HjpGnAHQO-lbYTS-iAB4X_ffH1WfTGA6QKWWBmfPCZWBFpjUtaBS_UP0H6PptUBAAA
fbpcm 13y ago
Looks like an email campaign tracking url

michaelochurch 13y ago

The "test on the young, old, and drunk" concept got me thinking: this might be why the winter travelers among us are so much better at design. I always thought my design skill and difficulties were separate issues, perhaps connected at some neurological level, but I think the wide variations of intellectual ability (+/- 15 IQ swings that normal people don't experience) are why we develop such creativity and design sense. I have a week or two every year when I'm basically incapable of doing most of the stuff that's normally easy, but during that time I learn how to design for that person. How do you get the person whose cognitive resources are strained (fatigue, not stupidity) to see the value right away, rather than fear and uncertainty and chaos? We have to be careful, though. It's not that the rest of the world is stupid. The cognitive-load problem isn't about stupidity. It's about the fact that there are a million things competing for peoples' attentions and unless we can prove right away that our wares are cool (by demonstrating value in a simple, low-cognitive-load way) we fade into the noise.

irremediable 13y ago
What is a "winter traveler"? On searching for the term, I only saw websites about travelling during the winter. Is it a sufferer of seasonal affective disorder?
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  Person with mild mental illness that results in clearer perception, e.g. depressive realism, and often better character. (When your biology is difficult, you don't get to fuck around the way most people do.) Traveling through the forest during summer is much more comfortable, but you can't get as sharp a feel of the landscape because the trees are leaved out.

thefsb 13y ago

This is hilarious: "Web 2.0 took over, yielding big buttons, less text, more images, and happier users." See also: http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler

npsimons 13y ago

Much as I like having options, I have come to realize this applies to code as well. On my current project, I keep telling my partner that we need to keep the cognitive load down, because eventually we will have to bring on other people. Being that it's written in C++ (please don't flame me; it's what we have to work with), I'd love to use things like template metaprogamming and multiple inheritance. Since we are already working in a domain that doesn't always follow common sense (RF/E&M), and we are also using some design patterns that take a little getting used to in C++, we've had to eschew a few features of the C++ language. It's probably for the best anyways.

dcw303 13y ago

Products that have low cognitive overhead: - Original iPod - Fender Stratocaster - Roland TB-303 - Casio F91W - Unix (Ok, it's not a simple product, but "everything is a file" goes a long way.)

jamesrcole 13y ago

Cognitive overhead doesn't just apply to products we'd think of as simple. Vim is an example. One of the key benefits of Vim's editing style is that it reduces (one kind of) cognitive overhead. It really does. You want to delete the current sentence? Just type 'das'. Want to change the text within the quotes? Just type 'ci"'. It allows you to more directly express your editing operations, rather than having to translate them into a number of steps. That reduces the cognitive overhead of that action. It's also a case where you need a certain amount of training before you can perform the actions that reduce the cognitive overhead. Nothing says that the reduction in cognitive overhead has to be there from the get-go. I'm not saying that Vim's operation reduces cognitive overhead in all ways, but that it does in one specific respect.