Human Cognition
Hickās Law: Making the choice easier for users
Delivering a good user experience requires that first you find out the functionalities that will answer their needs; second, you need to guide them to the specific functions they need most. If users end up stuck in the decision-making process of āwhat next?ā, they may become confused, frustrated, or leave your website. Hickās Law is a simple idea that says that the more choices you present your users with, the longer it will take them to reach a decision. Itās common sense, but often neglected in the rush to cram too much functionality into a site or application. As a designer, you will use Hickās Law to examine how many functions you should offer at any part of your website and how this will affect your usersā overall approach to decision making.
A Usable Guide to Cognitive Dimensions
There are multiple ways to evaluate interfaces and identify areas of improvement, one being usability heuristics, or design principles. Nielsen Normanās 10 Usability Heuristics (published in 1995) are by far the most popular set and are widely used. However, there are alternatives, albeit much less known. One of them covers Cognitive Dimensions: they were created more than 20 years ago and have a special focus in programming languages, but are incredibly relevant to design today: its principles (as youāll see below) can still be applied to all digital products that we interact with, and help to create better, more usable interfaces. The Cognitive Dimensions Framework was first introduced by Thomas Green (University of Leeds) in 1989/1991. A few years later in 1996, Thomas Green and Marian Petre developed a lengthier analysis of programming languages using the Cognitive Dimensions, which explored in more depth how each Dimension worked and should be used.
Human, AI and UX
Designing Anticipated User Experiences
Anticipatory Design is an upcoming design pattern within the field of predictive user experiences (UX). The premise behind this pattern is to reduce cognitive load of users by making decisions on behalf of them. Despite its promise, little research has been done towards possible implications that may come with Anticipatory Design and predictive user experiences. Ethical challenges like data, privacy and experience bubbles could inhibit the development of predictive UX. Anticipated user experiences are a promising development that releases us from our decision fatigue. With the approximately 20.000 decisions we make on daily average, most of us are suffering from it.
Neuroscience & UX
Learning takes brain acrobatics - When neural areas more easily switch communication partners, learning improves
Peer inside the brain of someone learning. You might be lucky enough to spy a synapse pop into existence. That physical bridge between two nerve cells seals new knowledge into the brain. As new information arrives, synapses form and strengthen, while others weaken, making way for new connections. You might see more subtle changes, too, like fluctuations in the levels of signaling molecules, or even slight boosts in nerve cell activity. Over the last few decades, scientists have zoomed in on these microscopic changes that happen as the brain learns. And while that detailed scrutiny has revealed a lot about the synapses that wire our brains, it isnāt enough. Neuroscientists still lack a complete picture of how the brain learns. They may have been looking too closely. When it comes to the neuroscience of learning, zeroing in on synapse action misses the forest for the trees.
Video
Cognitive Science and Design - Google I/O
This session will provide an in-depth look at human perception and cognition, and its implications for interactive and visual design. The human brain is purely treated as an information processing machine, and we will teach the audience its attributes, its advantages, its limitations, and generally how to hack it. While the content will provide a deep review of recent cognitive science research, everything presented will also be grounded in example design work taken from a range of Google applications and platforms. Specific topics will include: edge detection, gestalt laws of grouping, peripheral vision, geons and object recognition, facial recognition, color deficiencies, change blindness, flow, attention, cognitive load balancing, and the perception of time.