Cognitive Load

This MFW has been very welcome. I'm in week 6 of 15 for the Fall semester, and I have three classes spaced evenly throughout the whole week, so on the one hand there is at least a day break between every class, but on the other hand, there is no down-time at all. Literally, it's been six weeks without a day in which I was scheduled to be at school or at work. And excepting Thanksgiving, there are nine more to go.

I've used the extra band-width in my brain to tackle the odd house project (this week it was painting windows and messing around with hardware), and to nibble away at my exhaustion from staying up all night working on an assignment last weekend (no, Virginia, two hours of sleep are not enough to program in SQL at work).

One of the by-products of media-deprivation is that you tend to remember a lot more of what you see of it. Last month during MFW I absent-mindedly read the involuntary 1-article weekend newspaper product's one article (syndicated no-doubt), which was a human interest story about a psychotherapist who broke down preparing to euthanize a three-legged cat, and now uses the cat (happily rehabilitated) as the pseudo-author of a self-help (psychotherapy) newspaper column.

I have been working on web publishing skills in one class, and reading about human-centric interface design in another. One of the things I have realized as I have been trounced over and over by my classmates who know how to design for the web, is that usability and design at times conflict with one another. This apparently has it's origins in human cognition, where any design element which doesn't explicitly contribute to the message of the text contributes to the cognitive load on the reader.

This cognitive load creates a kind of friction which tends to repel or slow readers and send them to other sites, or to otherwise frustrate them. Naturally, this affects low-literacy, English as a second language, non-expert readers more.

Meanwhile as I s l o w l y gain an eye for good web design, I see many things that comprise a web design that indicate that you cared enough to make the effort to make a nice page (and which are thus expected) which contribute to the cognitive load of the user.

I am talking about things like styling with color which do not directly enhance readability. And, font changes which likewise add "flavor" but don't directly make the site more readable. And, I am talking about fancy menus which although delightful and perhaps internally useful, depart from lowest-common-denominator design choices for readability (left justified, left nav, standard color links).

I feel like I'm a little over-stimulated right now as a web user focusing on interface design for human users. It reminds me of doing restaurant service and finding it difficult to sit idly in a restaurant letting someone else serve me.

To bring this back around, MFW is about filtering out as much of the cognitive load encumbering noise that is coming at you so you can rest your mind, and especially so by interrupting it, that in it's absence you can perceive it's magnitude (like seeing the halo of sun flares around a solar eclipse). Like the web designer who can't decide how much [over-]stimulation is too much, I'm not sure that we as consumers can easily tell what media sources offer the best balance of information and (let's admit it) entertainment.

It's an interesting tension in the media-space I think, between information and entertainment -- in which to seek whatever it is that we really want. On the one side the vendors entice us to spend our scarce resources to decode their messages and otherwise buy[-into] their stuff (i.e. their brand).

On the consumer's side we want it all -- distract me from the factory I live in, drown out the noise from the street, let me forget about my debt-load and how fat I am. And yet also we variously want to explore our civil liberties, contemplate crime-prevention, learn the perils and opportunities of reverse-mortgages and to consider the futility of trans-fat laden baubles laid before us by the "captains of """consciousness"""" [extra quotes added].

I wonder where we can go now in the post-media-free-week world we live in. Trust is one of the biggest factors in brand success, particularly when we seek information. Really, MFW starts with the assumption that the media are a channel through which an obscene torrent flows which should -- at least sometimes -- be stopped. I guess as a designer/creator I think the take-away lesson is to earn trust by providing useful information and eschewing design choices which contribute to cognitive load. But is there more? Is there a moral or qualitative dimension beyond "information quality" that can be imposed on entertainment?

Good design is widely described as a paring down activity where eventually nothing which remains can be taken away. The best information products are pretty light. As for the entertainment thing, well that's not actually my forte. I am going to have to give that some thought -- maybe next month after I consult the three-legged cat, start eating candy again, and get a little "me-time" with my computer.