How to minimize Cognitive Load
- Build on Patterns: One great way to reduce the Cognitive Load is by creating a standardization for your buttons, CTAs etc. For Example, most of the e-commerce platforms uses a shopping cart to make you take a look at your cart. Anything else would be essentially unnecessary confusion added to your website or application. this becomes really important in the creative field where in general, a lot of creatives find it necessary to be totally original in their designs.
- Remove irrelevant information: Since we discussed earlier that when people try to think about too many things at once, they make mistakes and overlook important information. The best way to deal with this is to structure our application or website in such a way that only the relevant information is provided to the user until they are for a more detailed explaination.
- Offload Tasks: Offloading of tasks basically means designing by removing large blocks of text and replacing them with things like icons or images that help illustrate ideas of how to use the feature without covering too much space or making it cluttered. For example, anyone would prefer having a Thumbs up icon rather than a text that says “Likes in your post”. It reduces the Cognitive load by making the user visualize rather than read.
- Use Symbols rather than text where possible: Rather than having a text saying “Cart” in any application, we can simply add a cart symbol. In this example where we use a shopping cart or a shopping basket to show the items that we have selected to purchase by taking this real world item and translating it into a digital space, we have significantly reduced the Cognitive Load by giving the user a symbol/button that they are clicking to see what’s in there. Note that you can’t add symbols for every text you have in your application, you must be careful while replacing text with symbols.
- Avoid Visual Clutter: As we talked about this in the previous section that more Cognitive load means that the website appears to be cluttered which makes the User Interface as well as the User experience suffer. We can fix this issue by simply removing all the visual clutter be it images, text or any other from of content. A simpler application or website is one wilt less cognitive load.
How to Reduce Cognitive Load for a Better UI/UX Design?
Cognitive Load is one of the most important things to take into consideration when designing an application or any interface. Be it a physical interface or a digital one, Cognitive Load has the ability to determine the success or failure of the product that you are designing. In this article, we will discuss what Cognitive Load actually is. why should it be reduced? and how can we reduce it.