Cognitive load: A fancy term to describe the amount of brain power (specifically of the working memory) required to complete a task.
Everything in life activates and affects the cognitive load of your working memory. Driving a car, singing along with a song on the radio, reading a news article, completing a survey, browsing Facebook, et cetera. So cognitive load is not a bad thing. It just means your brain is working. (Yay!) What you want to avoid on your website is cognitive overload — making your user’s brain work harder than it needs to.
Why? Because when the demand we place on our working memory exceeds the capacity of it, the brain becomes less efficient at processing. High cognitive load can hamper decision-making, rational thought, comprehension, and recall. The emotional and psychological effects this has on your users is that they become:
None of this sounds good, does it? All of this hurts your brand AND your bottom line.
Take heart! Cognitive overload doesn’t have to derail your marketing efforts. You have two primary weapons to defeat cognitive overload: simplicity and familiarity.
Your working memory — depending on who you ask — holds between three and nine pieces of new information at any given time, for less than 20 seconds. While this rule doesn’t apply to web design explicitly, it highlights the limitations that our brains have for actively processing information in any context. As the working memory tries to process more than it has capacity for, performance tends to suffer.
It’s also important to understand that you can’t control the cognitive load your users may be under independent of their interaction with your website. For examples, if they are browsing your website while in a distracting environment, listening to music, feeling stressed, or sleep deprived, the capacity of their working memory is lower than someone viewing your site in more optimal conditions.
Given these limitations, you want to lessen the demand on your user’s brain as much as you are able. Simplify the information you are requiring them process, in both number and complexity.
The average American reads at a 7th grade reading level. Even if your audience is highly literate, their experience improves when you present information at a lower reading level.
It’s the difference between:
“See Jane run.”
and
“Perceive with your eyes the manner in which the woman named Jane is locomoting posthaste.”
Perhaps a bit exaggerated… but the fact remains that the simpler sentence creates less cognitive load for your brain.
Go through your website to make sure you’re not creating unnecessary high cognitive load with your copy.
Every single thing you add to your webpage increases your user’s cognitive load. Consider the principle of simplicity whenever you are making decisions about your website’s design, interface, and content.
All of this is, of course, a balancing act. You don’t want to oversimplify to the point that your site becomes boring, ineffective, and undifferentiated. For larger sites, it may be impossible to avoid multiple navigation menus. And sometimes you need to include ads to monetize your blog, distracting as they may be. There is no blanket statement for what is right and wrong for all websites. Your goal is to simplify as much as possible while still retaining clarity, effectiveness, and personality.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger wanting to grow your subscribers, an e-commerce shop wanting to sell more products, or a consultant wanting to get more leads. Don’t make your users work too hard to do what they came to do (or what you want them to do!).
Identify the top reasons people will be on your site and then put yourself in their shoes. When they land on any page of your website, how easy is it for them to reach their goal?
Create things that are already familiar and you will decrease your users’ cognitive load. Why? Because they don’t have to spend the mental energy to learn something new.
Riding a bike is a great example of low cognitive load due to familiarity. When you’re first learning to ride a bike, cognitive load is high because there is a lot to think about simultaneously:
All of this relies on your working memory processing in real time what you need to do in order to ride to the end of the street and back without crashing. But the more you do it, the more familiar it becomes. After a while it’s a learned process that you don’t have to consciously think about. It now requires a low cognitive load. All the working memory has to do is refer to your long-term memory where you already have this learned action stored.
The same is true of your website. Stick to familiar layouts. Position elements in the places where your user expects to see them. When an interface is familiar, it allows our long-term memory to kick in and take the load off of our working memory.
It’s tempting to “get creative” with your website layout and navigation labels. Perhaps you don’t want to look exactly like your competitors’ websites. Perhaps you’re in a creative industry where deviating from the norm is welcomed. Perhaps you’re a bit of an Outlaw and don’t like conventions. There may be cases where this is appropriate for your brand.
But don’t spit in the face of convention when it can work in your favor. Don’t put your menu in the bottom right corner just to shake things up, when your user will be looking for it across the top or on the left side. Don’t hide your shopping cart link in a dropdown menu when all other e-commerce shops have it visible in the top right of the header. Don’t use icons instead of words in your menu simply because you think it’s clever and looks cool.
When Bucknell University redesigned their website in 2014, their unconventional website ultimately tested poorly in usability tests. The feedback given by one user seemed to reflect a general consensus: “It seems like it’s trying too hard to be different, and different is simply making me confused. It needs to be easier to navigate.” Ouch.
While there is value to being different (people will pay attention to things that stand out, so it can increase engagement and recall), it shouldn’t be done at the expense of usability. Again, it is a balancing act of utilizing familiar conventions while allowing your unique brand to shine through.
User experience is arguably the most important aspect of your website. If users can’t easily use your site, it’s useless, no matter how pretty it looks. There’s a web usability book by Steve Krug called Don’t Make Me Think. In it, he writes, “As a rule, people don’t like to puzzle over how to do things. The fact that people who built the site didn’t care enough to make things obvious — and easy— can erode our confidence in the site and its publishers.”
The last thing you want to do is erode your users’ trust in your brand simply because your website is frustrating to them or feels like work.
The best way to reduce cognitive load on your website is simply: don’t make your users think. Of course they can think, and they will think, but don’t force them to think about things that they shouldn’t have to think about. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?
What’s that your momma always said? “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” But ma! The flip side — “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”, right? No. That’s not even what that means. Listen to your mother and beware this common email scam.
Email signatures help to tell your contacts about your company and more importantly, how to stay in touch with you! When used correctly, they can be a very valuable marketing tool. When used the wrong way, they can have a negative impact on how people view your professional image.
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