Cognitive psychology in UX

Cognitive psychology involves the study of internal mental process – all of the things that go on inside your brain, including attention, thinking, perception, memory, language, problem-solving and learning. When the amount of information exceeds our ability to handle it, our performance declined. We may take longer to understand information, miss important details, or even get overhelmed and abandon the task.

There’s a ton of psychological principles that fall under the umbrella of cognition. Understand the following principles associated with these two area: Cognitive Barrier and Cognitive Load, will bring your UX design to the next level.

Avoid unnecessary steps. Eliminate all redundancies that could be cluttering up working memory. However, it’s also important to strike the right balance between number, length and difficulty of steps.

Sometimes it’s better to add steps with a low cognitive load rather than fewer steps that are more difficult. Understand that it’s equally important to know when to add steps as well as when to remove them.

Just like the number of steps, we can not adopt a blanket rule that shorter steps make better experiences when in some cases, getting a large portion of a task done upfront might provide a better experiences overall.

When we’re designing the length of the user journey, we need to put users’ expectations into consideration. The user might expect to spend a longer amount on a given task as oppossed to other ones.

The perceived difficulty of a step is subjective. Generally speaking, easy steps are better; however, users do tend to develop a greater sense of loyalty toward experiences they’ve invested time into as opossed to experiences that are seen as too easy.

Remember, users will be more likely to complete difficult steps if they understand why the step needs to be so difficult.