Cognitive Load

How do friction costs and Hick’s Law affect the adoption rates of product features, and how can product managers reduce a user’s cognitive load? A number of different elements compete for an online audience’s attention. Visitors immediately have to process the navigation, layout, forms, text and images all while learning how to use a digital Read more »

Behaviour design is, in a nutshell, a set of techniques and patterns you can use to change the way people behave and make decisions, or “design that draws on behavioural psychology”. In this ProductTank talk, Kat Matfield points out that we’re all almost certainly already using elements of behavioural design, but accidentally and without necessarily knowing Read more »

Kathy Sierra recently unleashed a blog post about the impact of cognitive load on people. Kathy goes into great detail and references the latest research on cognition. I was reminded of a situation in a previous incarnation as a satellite engineer that illustrates the problem that cognitive load creates: There were some satellites that were Read more »