cognitive psychology and content design
TRANSCRIPT
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Chris Atherton Head of Design Dept for Business, Innovation & Skills
@finiteattention
Cognitive psychology and content design
All of this was true when I started writing this talk …
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1. attention 2. vision 3. working memory 4. cognitive load 5. words 6. stress 7. questions?
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1. attention
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two attentional systems:
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a) getting your attention quick, free, effortless
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Checking out some rusty old farm machinery in a park in Stockholm, as you do …
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O HAI, TWITTER LOGO
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Must … not … press … most obvious button … NNGGGGGGHHHH
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b) keeping your attention tends towards impossible
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(content) design = attention management
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2. vision
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Quinlan & Wilton, 1999
Visual perception seems to happen in a particular order:
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Quinlan & Wilton, 1999
first
Grouping by spatial layout (things that are near each other ‘belong’ together)
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Quinlan & Wilton, 1999
second
Then we start looking at more qualitative features, like colour …
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third?
… or features and local shape
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Visual object recognition progresses (broadly) from global to local
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So when we’re seeing a page on GOV.UK …
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It starts as a grey-scale layout of shapes
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… then colour and smaller features resolve
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… before text and (eventually) meaning
(I say ‘eventually’ — less than half a second)
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blocks of words are objects first
my point:
visual weight on the page acts like a magnet for attention long before meaning is involved
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3. working memory
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Long term memory
rehearsal
or meaning
Short term/ working memory
working memory is a very leaky bucket
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recall of words from a list presented sequentially
"Serial position" by Obli (talk) (Uploads) - Obli (talk) (Uploads). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serial_position.png#/media/File:Serial_position.png
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Rehearsed and/or lacks interference
Still in the leaky
bucket
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7 ± 2
Miller, 1956Miller, 1956
the leaky bucket can hold
this relates to new, unrelated words/digits/etc
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4 ± ?
Cowan, 2001Cowan, 2001
the leaky bucket can hold
much more recent evidence suggests …
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your screen
sidebar: it’s messed up that we mostly read in landscape but design documents for portrait.
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fuzzy OK OKgreat
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we should never ask people to hold stuff
in the leaky bucket
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4. cognitive load
Cognitive load as a thing is kind of unfalsifiable, but it’s a useful framework?
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intrinsic cognitive load
~ number of moving parts
a task can have …
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extraneous cognitive load
extra moving parts added by the delivery medium
…and …
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working memory has very limited capacity
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intrinsic
load
extraneous
load
transfer to LTM
low intrinsic load and extraneous load = more resources left for absorbing info
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extraneous
load
transfer to
LTM
intrinsic
load
a complex piece of information leaves you fewer resources for storing the information
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intrinsic
load
extraneous
load
transfer to
LTM
likewise, an overly burdensome way of presenting information makes it hard to grasp
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your mission: reduce extraneous
cognitive load
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reducing policy complexity (intrinsic load)
is the long game
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we can reduce extrinsic load right now
with better (content) design
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5. words
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Psycholinguistic determinants of question difficulty http://www.suristat.eu/document/documentArticle/Faass_et_al.pdf
Effects of survey question comprehensibility on response quality http://www.timolenzner.de/resources/Lenzner+2012.pdf
These are really interesting papers.
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infrequently-used words
— context vs. word dominance
The authors talk about …
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imprecise terminology
— vague pronouns (e.g. ‘it’)
The authors talk about …
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imprecise terminology
— ambiguous word parts
The authors talk about …
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complex syntax
— ‘garden path’ sentences
The authors talk about …
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complex syntax
— burying the lede
The authors talk about …
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many logical operators
— e.g. ’or’
The authors talk about …
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passive voice
The authors talk about …
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Nice.
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nominalisations
— ‘enforce a restriction’ vs. ‘restrict’
The authors talk about …
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bridging inferences
The authors talk about …
(making people do the hard work themselves rather than spelling it out is, well, mean.)
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how do we convince people of the value
of plain language?
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go play on scholar.google.com
as content designers, you are well equipped to make sense of this wordy stuff :)
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your primary evidence is always data
from user research
… your context matters, though. See the current psychology replicability crisis.
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6. stress
disclaimer: way out of my wheelhouse. See my former colleague @Drsurvival :)
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this is the ‘dunker’, where oil rig workers have to train to ditch out of a flying helicopter (!)
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Survival — Mind and Brain https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-24/edition-1/survival-%E2%80%93-mind-and-brain
super-accessible paper on the effects of acute stress on cognition. One to ponder.
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design for limited working memory
When we do this, we improve GOV.UK for everyone, not just those under great stress.
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don’t make people rely on the leaky bucket
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6. questions
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Susan Weinschenk: 100 things every designer needs to know about people https://www.amazon.co.uk/Things-Every-Designer-Needs-People/dp/0321767535
people always ask me what they can read. This is great:
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Thank you :)
@finiteattention