cognitive psychology and content design
TRANSCRIPT
Chris Atherton Head of Design Dept for Business, Innovation & Skills
@finiteattention
Cognitive psychology and content design
All of this was true when I started writing this talk …
1. attention 2. vision 3. working memory 4. cognitive load 5. words 6. stress 7. questions?
1. attention
two attentional systems:
a) getting your attention quick, free, effortless
Checking out some rusty old farm machinery in a park in Stockholm, as you do …
O HAI, TWITTER LOGO
Must … not … press … most obvious button … NNGGGGGGHHHH
b) keeping your attention tends towards impossible
(content) design = attention management
2. vision
Quinlan & Wilton, 1999
Visual perception seems to happen in a particular order:
Quinlan & Wilton, 1999
first
Grouping by spatial layout (things that are near each other ‘belong’ together)
Quinlan & Wilton, 1999
second
Then we start looking at more qualitative features, like colour …
third?
… or features and local shape
Visual object recognition progresses (broadly) from global to local
So when we’re seeing a page on GOV.UK …
It starts as a grey-scale layout of shapes
… then colour and smaller features resolve
… before text and (eventually) meaning
(I say ‘eventually’ — less than half a second)
blocks of words are objects first
my point:
visual weight on the page acts like a magnet for attention long before meaning is involved
3. working memory
Long term memory
rehearsal
or meaning
Short term/ working memory
working memory is a very leaky bucket
recall of words from a list presented sequentially
"Serial position" by Obli (talk) (Uploads) - Obli (talk) (Uploads). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serial_position.png#/media/File:Serial_position.png
Rehearsed and/or lacks interference
Still in the leaky
bucket
7 ± 2
Miller, 1956Miller, 1956
the leaky bucket can hold
this relates to new, unrelated words/digits/etc
4 ± ?
Cowan, 2001Cowan, 2001
the leaky bucket can hold
much more recent evidence suggests …
your screen
sidebar: it’s messed up that we mostly read in landscape but design documents for portrait.
fuzzy OK OKgreat
we should never ask people to hold stuff
in the leaky bucket
4. cognitive load
Cognitive load as a thing is kind of unfalsifiable, but it’s a useful framework?
intrinsic cognitive load
~ number of moving parts
a task can have …
extraneous cognitive load
extra moving parts added by the delivery medium
…and …
working memory has very limited capacity
intrinsic
load
extraneous
load
transfer to LTM
low intrinsic load and extraneous load = more resources left for absorbing info
extraneous
load
transfer to
LTM
intrinsic
load
a complex piece of information leaves you fewer resources for storing the information
intrinsic
load
extraneous
load
transfer to
LTM
likewise, an overly burdensome way of presenting information makes it hard to grasp
your mission: reduce extraneous
cognitive load
reducing policy complexity (intrinsic load)
is the long game
we can reduce extrinsic load right now
with better (content) design
5. words
Psycholinguistic determinants of question difficulty http://www.suristat.eu/document/documentArticle/Faass_et_al.pdf
Effects of survey question comprehensibility on response quality http://www.timolenzner.de/resources/Lenzner+2012.pdf
These are really interesting papers.
infrequently-used words
— context vs. word dominance
The authors talk about …
imprecise terminology
— vague pronouns (e.g. ‘it’)
The authors talk about …
imprecise terminology
— ambiguous word parts
The authors talk about …
complex syntax
— ‘garden path’ sentences
The authors talk about …
complex syntax
— burying the lede
The authors talk about …
many logical operators
— e.g. ’or’
The authors talk about …
passive voice
The authors talk about …
Nice.
nominalisations
— ‘enforce a restriction’ vs. ‘restrict’
The authors talk about …
bridging inferences
The authors talk about …
(making people do the hard work themselves rather than spelling it out is, well, mean.)
how do we convince people of the value
of plain language?
go play on scholar.google.com
as content designers, you are well equipped to make sense of this wordy stuff :)
your primary evidence is always data
from user research
… your context matters, though. See the current psychology replicability crisis.
6. stress
disclaimer: way out of my wheelhouse. See my former colleague @Drsurvival :)
this is the ‘dunker’, where oil rig workers have to train to ditch out of a flying helicopter (!)
Survival — Mind and Brain https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-24/edition-1/survival-%E2%80%93-mind-and-brain
super-accessible paper on the effects of acute stress on cognition. One to ponder.
design for limited working memory
When we do this, we improve GOV.UK for everyone, not just those under great stress.
don’t make people rely on the leaky bucket
6. questions
Susan Weinschenk: 100 things every designer needs to know about people https://www.amazon.co.uk/Things-Every-Designer-Needs-People/dp/0321767535
people always ask me what they can read. This is great:
Thank you :)
@finiteattention