How to Reduce the Cognitive Load In Your Design For Better User Experience?

In the design world, we all designers are overhyped by the word “CREATIVITY”. In order to apply our creativity in our design and make it very appealing, many of us often forget to keep the users' ease in mind. It happens not only in site mapping but also during the selection of color themes and alignments.

The app design navigation is the core element that leads users to the destination they want to reach to access particular information, which is often compromised with the burden of designing app UI/UX too creatively. This even happens when using too many color variations. If we sum up these mistakes, even if they are small, they can put users under significant cognitive stress.

And cognitive stress for users coming from your digital product is definitely not affordable. Hence, we curated this user-centric guide for designers like you to help you craft logically, navigationally, and visually appealing UI/UX design with less cognitive overload.

So, let’s dive into the world of the user-centric design approach!

Let’s First Understand This Cognitive Load in Design

Simply put, cognitive load is a psychological term referring to the amount of data our brain can hold and comprehend at a time. And things that require an over-processing of memory power to comprehend something we see, may lead to confusion, stress, and even irritation.

According to John Sweller, a well-known Australian psychologist, the content presentation plays a key-psychological role in viewers' understanding of it. And what comes ahead of designing something meaningful that adds value to the content?

We, UI/UX designers - as critical user-centric design thinkers, must understand this term in order to craft digital product experience design in such a way that puts users' minds at ease.

But before jumping to the solution, understanding the importance of cognitive load reduction is necessary.

Necessities to Reduce Cognitive Load in Design

Everything we see in the digital medium, or a thing we call the digital experience, starts with intent. For example, when we open Instagram, we scroll through, and if we like the content, we acknowledge it by reacting with “??”; when we want to search for something, we tap on the “??” button, and so on.

Be it Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter - from easily being able to find social media functions to understanding the meaning of buttons to finally using them, the designers of this app have crafted and put everything in the right place that eases users' functions with less cognitive load.

There are chances that the function that seems easy to you as a designer or user, might not seem the same for others.

In short, it is necessary to reduce cognitive load in design for users to simply understand and function through your app as designed. But how can this be achieved?

Of course, studying the users and their interactions with your interface and other similar kinds of software is the foremost step in UI/UX design.

When you create your app interface mockup, give it to the users to use, observe their patterns, and even talk to them to identify where they face cognitive load before making changes in your design flow. We also know this process as usability testing .

Some Basic Considerations for Appealing UI/UX Design

Here are the strategic approaches to make your app UI design appealing, easy to understand, and less stressful for users:

Clear highlighting

As designers, we are prone to try out a variety of types of content presentations to make users easily spot different forms of content. But we should also ensure to follow the presentation uniformly as much as possible. Because users may get overwhelmed by seeing too much information presented at focus on the same page. To make it simple, always focus on highlighting the only content that needs users’ attention.

Navigation through storytelling

Design an interface like telling a story that guides them to the destination you want to take and they might want to get.

Achieving such UX in design and content is the part where most UI/UX strategists often fail because of a poor storyline. But you can't, as you're reading this.

First, define the purpose of your digital product, sitemap them with interaction strategies, and be a guide through your design, content formation, and consistent narrative structure, all followed by definite meanings from the beginning to the end.

Employ effective design standards

Follow the UX/UI design best practices suggested by experts to reduce the cognitive load. Dig into the design good practices like UX strategy and UX design tips followed by User Interaction points .

Best Practices to Reduce the Cognitive Load in UX Design

The appearance of cognitive tension in your design cannot be just done fortuitously, as there are many influences.

Put every design element with purpose

UI/UX Design is not just limited to visuals or the use of multimedia; it also asks for animations and micro-interactions with the sound meaning of use. It has to be a way that communicates with users and guides them through a great experience.

Although Miller's Law for cognitive limitation states that our short-term memory is capable of containing seven pieces of information, that doesn't mean designers should stay limited to seven design elements. As logical designers, it's our responsibility to keep the base cognitive limitation in mind while crafting a UI/UX design to avoid cognitive load.

But the question is, "How to do it?"

You can review your design and apply critical thinking by being an honest judge of it; whether that color combination, placement, animation, interaction, and illustration serve its purpose or not.

Ex.

Just the way the team of designers and developers have brainstormed to create this amazing Simply Chocolate website.

The adoption of minimalism through information architecture

We all, as designers, know this simple fundamental of design, “Less is More.” It says the more elements you try to add to your design, the more chaotic it becomes, which means your eyes will spot many elements, creating great confusion about what to choose first.

So, how to make your website with a touch of minimalism ?

By creating a taxonomy, information architecture, and even content models that help you outline your design and content representation contextually.

Consistency is the key

Consistency in color use, visual design, navigation, and even design is what keeps your audience familiar and connected throughout the period they surf through your digital product.

For example, if your website follows a font style called Overpass Regular, your users expect to see the same font family in different style variations, such as bold, italic, medium, etc.

To maintain the seamless design standard across your product design, you can first make a design system to follow throughout your practice for this particular project.

If you see, this design system is no different from a design guideline that graphic designers use, but with a small addition of UI/UX toolkit, helping in the same.

Avoid adding unnecessary elements

Have you ever thought, “Why is the added element in your design necessary?” Or "why have you added that to your design?

As UI/UX designers, we have a duty to serve as logicians along with creative people. While making the design flow, we must ensure that no action planned to add to the design is meaningless or purposeless.

We must analyze, find, and remove those purposeless design elements just to secure extra space. It could be redundant information, clicks, CTAs, or extra fields.?

This analysis might ask for more user-centric thinking as a user like when the user wants to click on the button to place their inquiry, they find it right away.

See the below image for better reference, which has added two CTAs at the right place where the user might want to check the project the company has delivered and the technology stack they use and just below that, a button for hiring talent, when and where they finally make up their mind to hire this agency.

This gives users what they want and reduces their cognitive load to surf through the website.

Familiarity is the greatest strength

Being a creative designer doesn't mean you have to reinvent the entire design wheel every time. Sometimes using some familiar design elements or patterns can also help us make things more creative, visually appealing, and familiar to users, reducing the cognitive load.

Sometimes in design, some elements have become the standard and changing them might create a funny or irritating impact on users. So, you should refer to the product industry standards, competitors for their product navigation menus, search bar, etc.

Just like the image shown below:?

Simplicity at its best

Not every time fancy things work, sometimes simplicity in a design also makes the design look elegant. As designers, it's our responsibility to think simple and make the decision-making easier for users to get conversions. And what can do better than minimalism?

See the below-mentioned simple yet elegant:

This simplistic design is not only clear spot-on but also provides an eye-pleasing user experience, leading to less cognitive load.

Moral of the Story

When working on the user experience design, cognitive load is critical to consider. Design a digital product in such a way that it reduces the cognitive load for users with meaningful representations of content, visuals, and interactions that human minds can comprehend with a single glance.

At 300Mind, we, the designers, follow the strategic UI/UX design approach to design digital products that maximize our client's ROI.

Looking for creative UI/UX designers? Contact us with your requirements today!