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Reducing cognitive overload: designing for human cognition
Imagine dropping someone from the 1900s into our world. The daily grind looks different, but are our brains keeping up? That’s the core challenge of modern cognitive design: how to present this information explosion without frying people’s minds.
To navigate this information overload, we’ll delve into concepts like cognitive load, mental interaction cost, mental models, and calm technology. By understanding these fundamentals, we can create intuitive experiences that simplify the user experience and make interactions with technology more efficient, even in a chaotic information environment.
The spectrum of human cognition
Understanding human cognition requires a holistic approach, including perception, attention, memory, language, reasoning, emotions, and consciousness. These elements form the foundation of effective and intuitive design.
From stimulus to perception
Perception begins with a stimulus in a sensory organ, converted by the senses into neural activity processed by the brain. This initial activation, called sensation, leads to the creation of a mental image of the original stimulus.
For example, when people see a red light while driving, their eyes spot the red light (stimulus), their visual system processes it and sends signals to their brain (sensation), and then their brain figures out that the red light means they need to stop (perception). By understanding this process, user experience designers can create interfaces that fit how people naturally see and understand things, making them easier to use.
Bottom-up and Top-down processing
