Presented by Cory Burnett With the increasing load of information passing through our senses, we need to be mindful in minimizing the cognitive load of our audience when communicating with them. In this talk, we’ll explore what cognitive load is, what it means to our audience and how we can be mindful in minimizing it in our communications.

1. UX and Cognitive Load
Cory M Burnett
UX Design Manager - Oracle Primavera

2. 1) What is Cognitive Load?
2) A day in the life of Jocie Jasper
3) Ways to reduce Cognitive Load
4) Q & A

3. What is Cognitive Load?
The total Cognitive Load, or amount of mental processing power
needed to use your site, affects how easily users find content and
complete tasks…
…the Cognitive Load imposed by a user interface is the amount of
mental resources that is required to operate the system. Informally,
you can think of mental resources as "brain power" — more
formally, we're talking about slots in working memory.
Whitenton, Kathryn. "Minimize Cognitive Load to Maximize Usability." Nielsen Norman Group. 22nd December. 2013.
<https://www.nngroup.com/articles/minimize-cognitive-load/>

4. Intrinsic; level of complexity inherent in a particular task
Extraneous; all the added fluff in a particular task - extra pictures,
too many colors, lots of font sizes, over the top animations…
Germane; elements in a particular task that support the cognitive
process
3 types of Cognitive Load:

5. Jocie Jasper
Product Manager @ Techify
Lunch
Meeting 1
Meeting 2
Meeting 3
Meeting 4
8 am
9 am
10 am
11 am
Noon
1 pm
2 pm
3 pm
4 pm
5 pm
Catch up on Emails

6. Meeting 2
10 am
11 am
Shiny Things!
A co-worker, pops-by
Loading….
Gathering her thoughts on what she has to do and how to do it
Complete task 1 of 10
Complete task 2 of 10
Complete task 3 of 10, but the flow between these two steps were not cohesive, so it took her a little longer to finish
Complete task 4 of 10, this task took 30% more time because there were a few extra clicks and it wasn’t clear to Jocie
Jocie, get’s stuck on task 5 of 10, because the alert was verbose and required her to read it several times to comprehend
Jocie get’s back on track for task 5 of 10, but it takes longer, because she needed to start from the beggining again
Jocie is feeling good, she’s got task 6 of 10 done
Jocie got task 8 of 10 done, but needs to head to her next meeting [sad face]
She’s got task 7 of 10 done

7. What we know…
We know what Cognitive Load is and the 3 types:
• Intrinsic
• Extraneous
• Germane
We saw a snapshot of how easy our attention can get diverted and
subsequently overloaded.
So how can we reduce Cognitive Load?

8. Know Thy User
Jocie Jasper
• Product Manager @ Techify
• Spends 50% of her day in meetings
• On average, her attention is diverted every 1.5 hours
• Accesses 3-5, variable sized data sets, at any given
time, to complete tasks
• Because she inputs a large amount of data during
the day, she expects her tools to be quick and efficient

9. Relational Grouping

10. Spread the load across channels

11. Consistent Structure

12. • Lean on commonly used patterns
• Keep the contexts efficient and appropriate
• Remove extraneous elements; unnecessary imagery,
words, styles
• Provide safe defaults; out-of-the box, general workflow, to get
the user started
Many other ways…