Streamlining Mental Effort on Mobile Devices
In the realm of user interface (UI) design, avoiding cognitive friction is paramount to creating an intuitive and seamless user experience. Cognitive friction, a term coined by Alan Cooper, refers to a user interacting with an interface or affordance that appears intuitive but delivers unexpected results, causing frustration and potentially damaging the user experience.
To combat cognitive friction, a multi-step process is employed.
Understanding User Mental Models
The first step involves understanding users' mental models and biases. Designers delve into how users think, decide, and navigate interfaces. This includes recognising cognitive biases like confirmation bias and anchoring bias, which can affect user behavior and interpretation of content. Understanding spatial cognition—how users form mental maps and rely on spatial cues like consistent layout, landmarks, and grouping—helps maintain predictable and easy-to-navigate interfaces.
Applying Cognitive Principles to Design
Designers then apply cognitive principles to their work. They employ laws such as Cognitive Load Theory by simplifying interfaces, breaking tasks into manageable steps, and removing distractions. Use of hierarchy, spacing, and continuity enables fluid user journeys and reduces mental effort. Consistency in layout and design elements strengthens users' mental maps, preventing confusion and frustration.
Design Evaluation Using Cognitive Dimensions
Frameworks like the cognitive dimensions vocabulary help assess design qualities like consistency, error-proneness, and mental workload. Designers apply design maneuvers to mitigate difficult mental operations or premature commitments that contribute to cognitive friction.
Iterative User Testing to Reveal Real Behaviors
To avoid confirmation bias, testing is conducted with diverse user groups and unbiased prompts to see how users actually behave rather than how designers expect them to behave. Testing methods include A/B testing combined with personalization and predictive models to experiment with tailored experiences and optimize for different user segments, reducing cognitive overload and improving decision-making speed.
Continuous Optimization Through Feedback
Data-driven insights from user testing and personalization algorithms that learn from behavior over time are used to keep the UI aligned with user needs as they evolve.
In mobile user experience design, additional challenges arise due to the variety of ways to interact with a device, such as gesture controls, eye movement controls, motion controls, touch screens, camera inputs, etc. It takes great care and thought to create intuitive interactions that avoid cognitive friction in mobile design, as there are often no established standards for these interactions.
Considering inclusivity in user experiences and researching current best practices is essential to make the best decisions for your products and avoid friction. Designing for accessibility means designing for all users, resulting in much better experiences. People with physical or intellectual disabilities should also be considered within the target audience when designing for accessibility.
An example of cognitive friction in a digital product is a button labeled "Sign Up" that takes the user to a different website instead of a signup screen. Offering only two gender options to users can cause inclusion friction because it leaves out many other genders. Inclusion friction can be caused by not considering the diversity within the target audience, including members of minority groups.
The process for avoiding cognitive friction in UI design involves a cycle of user research grounded in cognitive psychology, application of UX principles that reduce complexity and enhance clarity, and iterative testing methods that validate and adapt designs to real user behavior, ensuring an intuitive and effortless experience.
The book "Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity" provides further information on this topic. The user experience design team, interaction design team, and UI design team work together to avoid cognitive friction.
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